An Increase in Candid Confessions May Indicate an Ideological Regime Is Losing Support

 To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

In some countries,  there may be fewer ideological regimes: three, two, or rarely a single one. Looking at medieval or ancient history, we can probably find some cases in which religious beliefs were thoroughly entangled with political and economic beliefs, and in such countries there may have existed as few as only one ideological regime. 

An ideological regime consists of  both a system of belief and a social structure that supports such a system, making sure that it preserves its ascendancy, along with rules, traditions, customs or laws that help propagate the ideological regime. An ideological regime almost invariably has authorities that profess its belief doctrines. In some ideological regimes, such authorities may exist in a hierarchical order. In the Catholic Church there is a pope ruling over cardinals ruling over bishops ruling over priests.  In the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, there is not a very formal hierarchical structure of authorities. But informally there is such a hierarchy, consisting of four levels:

(1) Nobel Prize laureates at the top of the hierarchy;

(2) professors from the most prestigious universities on the second level;

(3) professors from less prestigious colleges or universities at the third level;

(4) mere PhD holders who are not yet professors at the lowest level of authority. 

The dogmas of an ideological regime are the debatable beliefs that the regime perpetuates. Under some ideological regimes, particularly openly religious ones, there may be a frank admission that articles of faith are being taught by the regime, and that an act of faith is required to accept such doctrines.  Under other ideological regimes,  there may be claims or pretentions that the dogmas of the regime are facts that any reasonable and well-educated person should accept. 

For example, under the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, various unproven claims about human origins or human brains may be sold as "facts of science," such as the dogma that the human mind is a product of the brain.  Under the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism, various unproven dogmas about communism and class struggle were not described as dogmas or tenets, but were instead described as "facts of history" or "facts of economic science" that required belief from any reasonable scholar.  Under the ideological regime of money-centered consumerist capitalism, various assumptions may simply be taken for granted as rather obvious truths, such as the assumption that working 50 or 60 hour weeks at a job you don't like is well worth it if this allows you to buy some larger-than-you-need house that will cause your friends to be envious.  

The maintenance and preservation of an ideological regime requires the participation of many agents acting to perpetuate the regime.  The existence of esteemed regime authorities is not sufficient to achieve such an end. There usually must be various less prestigious  individuals who act to promulgate the teachings of the ideological regime, and possibly help punish and diminish any who dare to oppose its teachings. In the Catholic Church an example of such regime enforcers are nuns, deacons and Sunday school teachers, who lack the authority of priests, but do a great deal of the low-level indoctrination that helps to enforce the ideological regime. 

In the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, skeptics act as regime enforcers. The skeptics act to defame and disparage any of the very many people who report observations contrary to the reigning dogmas of Darwinist materialism, such as those who report inexplicable psychic experiences or apparition sightings or extrasensory perception.  In this regime other low-level regime enforcers or regime enablers are people such as high school biology teachers, who make sure that children are indoctrinated in the belief tenets of the ideological regime, and science journalists.

In the modern landscape of Darwinist materialism, science journalists tend to uncritically parrot whatever claims or speculations come down from professors in support of their belief dogmas, even when they are far-fetched claims such as monkeys rafting across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago.  Such journalists are also careful to write articles that restate the belief doctrines of the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism, and are careful to write little or nothing about observations in conflict with the teachings of such an ideological regime.  In the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism, there were innumerable low-level enforcers, such as censors, local informers who snitched on dissident thinkers, and the gulag guards who helped to keep dissidents locked up in prison camps.  In the ideological regime of money-centered consumerist capitalism,  regime enablers include a host of pitchmen and social media sources that try to make you feel unworthy or second-class if you are are not consuming and purchasing as expensively as more high-spending people of a similar age. 

For an ideological regime to persist in a dominant manner, it is very important that information be carefully controlled. There are various techniques used to insure control. One technique is the publication of impressive-looking volumes or sets of volumes teaching no viewpoint other than the ideology and belief traditions of the ideological regime. For example, the ideological regime of Catholicism published the 15-volume Catholic Encyclopedia which was followed many years later by the 15-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia; and the ideological regime of Marxist-Leninism published an equally impressive-looking 65-volume set called the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. For decades the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism was promoted by the many volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Book encyclopedia, which would describe many unproven claims as if they were facts. Nowadays wikipedia.org has largely replaced such encyclopedias, and serves as the chief party organ of Darwinist materialism.  Similar to such encyclopedias are subject textbooks and journals in which you are indoctrinated in strict accordance to some ideological regime.  

In such encyclopedias and textbooks and journals there is almost always a rigorous filtration and control of information, so that the reader gets no information that might disturb his faith in the ideological regime served by the encyclopedia or textbook or journal.  So, for example, you will read nothing in the Catholic Encyclopedia that might shake your faith in Catholicism, and there was nothing in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that would shake your faith in Marxism-Leninism.  And on wikipedia.org, you will almost never read anything that shakes your faith in the belief doctrines of Darwinist materialism.  When such information sources discuss phenomena or viewpoints that conflict with the ideological regime they serve, any discussion will be carefully controlled so that mainly  negative information will be served up about the opposing viewpoint or the inconvenient phenomena.  

                                An indoctrination center of an ideological regime

When either a political regime or an ideological regime has complete information control, you will see it asserting its claims with the most dogmatic certainty. There will be no confessions of any major problems. For example, let us imagine an incompetent political regime led by a dictator, one in which 5% of the people are starving. If the regime has a perfect control over information, the newspapers may read something like this:

"Our glorious leader's success is shown in the wonderful happiness of our citizens.  All of them are so happy to be living in the paradise of prosperity that has resulted from the wise decisions of our brilliant leader."  

But if the regime has something less than perfect control over information, you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving:

"Our glorious leader is doing a wonderful job of preserving the health of our citizens.  You may have heard rumors that some people are starving. Do not believe such lies! They are spread by scoundrels trying to disrupt society."  

But if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"It has become apparent that due to some temporary problem, many people are starving. But there is good news!  Our glorious leader is working hard on solving this problem. Because he is such a brilliant genius, no doubt the hunger problem will soon be solved."

And if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"It has become apparent that many people in our country are starving.  Our leader is working hard on solving this problem. It is hoped that he will be very successful in fixing this very bad problem."

And if the stranglehold of the regime starts to weaken even further,  you might read something like this in the newspapers of the country in which 5% of the people are starving: 

"Everyone is lamenting that so many people in our country are starving.  Our leader is working hard to try to solve this problem. Some are hopeful he will succeed. But others seem to be pessimistic about the actions he is attempting."

Once the newspapers of the regime start running stories as candid as the one above, the regime may be close to collapse. The examples above illustrate the idea that the more confessions we get in the press about the failures of a regime (whether political or ideological), and the more candid such confessions are, the closer such a regime may be to collapse or decline. 

In the early stages of the decline of an ideological regime, it will still be too dangerous in public discourse to flatly state that the regime is misguided or on the wrong track. But it may become permissible to make partial confessions that inform about some way in which the regime has failed. The weaker that the regime becomes, the more such confessions will appear, and the more candid such confessions will be. 

The ideological regime of Darwinist materialism still exerts a pernicious stranglehold over discussions of matters such as human minds and human origins. But there are signs such a stranglehold may be weakening. We are starting to see more and more confessions by scientists about explanatory failures of such an ideological regime. Such confessions are typically partial confessions in which someone will not say something very broad such as "we scientists are on the wrong track" or "some of our basic assumptions are false," but instead say some limited confession about some type of explanatory failure. Below are some examples:

• "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
• "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link). 
• “To sum up, it can be said that when it comes to answering the question of how information is carried forward in time in the brain we remain largely clueless.” --  Cognitive scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory" (link). 
• " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link). 
• "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link). 
• "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen. 
• "Computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not — never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" -- Senior research psychologist Robert Epstein.
• "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich,  "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
• "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
• "The central dogma of Neuormania is that persons are their brains....Basic features of human experience...elude neural explanation. Indeed, they are at odds with the materialist framework presupposed in Neuromania. Many other assumptions of Neuromania -- such as that the mind-brain is a computer -- wilt on close inspection. All of this notwithstanding, the mantra 'You are your brain' is endlessly repeated. This is not justified by what little we know of the brain, or more importantly, of the relationship between our brains and ourselves as conscious agents."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Aping Mankind," page xii (link). 
• "And so we are forced to a conclusion opposite to the one drawn earlier: that consciousness cannot be due to activity in the brain and that cerebral activity is an inadequate explanation of mental activity."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Brains and Minds: A Brief History of Neuromythology" (link). 
• "My own view of a secular universe, devoid of consciousness and intelligence 'beyond the brain' (Grof 1985) gave way little by little over several decades and now seems quite absurd." -- John Mack MD, Harvard professor of psychology (link). 
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."  -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).
• "Many who work within the SMC [standard model of consciousness] assume that a nervous system is necessary and sufficient for an existential consciousness. While this is a common stance...we have yet to see a coherent defense of this proposition or a well-developed biomolecular argument for it. For most, it is simply a proclamation. Moreover, we have not seen any effort to identify what features of neural mechanisms 'create' consciousness while non-neural ones cannot. This too is simply a pronouncement." -- Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).
• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 
• Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  
• The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "The past three decades have shown that psychiatry’s medical vision is neither scientifically credible nor morally sound." -- Justin Garson, professor of philosophy at Hunter College (link).
•  "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 

The quotes above are from the very large collection of similar quotes I have in my long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" you can read here. Many such confessions have been made, and they may be increasing in number and intensity.  The more such confessions appear, and the more severe the confessions are, the more we should tend to suspect that the stranglehold of Darwinist materialism is weakening, and that this ideological regime is "on the ropes." 

Writing About Brains, Egnor Gets Things Halfway Right

Michael Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics whose writings often appear at the Evolution News site. Egnor has written some good posts at that site, often presenting the kind of evidence I discuss on this site.  But in one post this year on that site, Egnor seems to indicate that he is still clinging to some of the moldy old dogmas of neuroscientists, including some dogmas I regard as untenable. 

It is not that Egnor is afraid to believe in a human soul. In the post he says "we have spiritual souls and physical bodies." In fact, Egnor is the author of a new book entitled The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul. The problem is that the soul Egnor believes in seems to be only half of what we need to postulate to have a credible theory of human minds.  Egnor seems to believe that you have a soul responsible for your selfhood and consciousness and thinking, but that such a soul does not involve human memory.  He apparently thinks that memory is a product of the brain. Teaching an unfounded triumphal legend, he states, "The pioneering neuroscientists of the 20th and 21st centuries — Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry, Justine Sergent, Yair Pinto, Benjamin Libet, and many others — have shown that the brain is the source of five of these kinds of activities—physiological control (of heartbeat, breathing, etc.), locomotion, perception, memory, and emotion." 

No, such neuroscientists sure did not show that the brain is the source of perception or locomotion or memory or emotion.  There are brain chemicals that can influence emotions such as fear and anger; and brains help you achieve visual perception through the eyes and locomotion through your legs. But no one has ever shown any neural basis for the more elevated human emotions such as romantic love or parental love or wonder or awe. No one has an explanation for how a brain could produce a locomotion decision such as when you decide to get up and go for a walk. There is no neuroscience basis for claiming that the brain is the source of instant human recall, which occurs despite the nonexistence in the brain of the things that make instant information retrieval possible in products humans manufacture (things such as addressing, indexing and sorting). And there are the strongest reasons for thinking that the brain cannot be the storage place of human memories, things such as the fact that human memories can last 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of brain proteins. 

In that quote by Egnor, he has a link to other posts, one link for each of the people he mentions. Let me discuss those links.

The Wilder Penfield Link

The link Egnor gives regarding Penfield is a link to a post he wrote about Wilder Penfield. The post is guilty of propagating one of the "old wives' tales" of neuroscience lore, the claim that Wilder Penfield produced memory recall by zapping people's brains with electricity. Penfield did no such thing. He merely noted that sometimes people would recall things when their brain was being electrically zapped. Since memory recall occurs almost all the time, memory recall during brain zapping does nothing to show that brains store memories. Penfield failed to document any effect by which one particular memory would always be evoked when some particular brain region was zapped. 

Strangely Egnor quotes Penfield as saying "none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge." Such a claim contradicts the idea that he did anything to produce recall by zapping a brain, because memory recall is certainly one "of the actions we attribute to the mind." 

At www.archive.org I was able to find and borrow a 1967 book by Wilder Penfield, the book "The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man." In that book Penfield discusses his research electrically stimulating parts of human brains. He makes no claim that a specific memory could be reproduced multiple times by stimulating a particular part of the brain. Instead on page 23 he merely refers to "experiential hallucinations" being produced by such brain stimulation. 

In a future post discussing pages 23 to 32 of this book, I will document cases of how Penfield described imprecise statements from electrically stimulated patients (statements lacking the precision of exact recollections of real events), and how Penfield jumped to conclusions by making unwarranted characterizations of such statements, claiming that they were based on things the patients had experienced, without ever verifying that this was the case, while at the same time calling such statements descriptions of "hallucinations." 

A review of 80 years of experiments on electrical stimulation of the brain uses the word “reminiscences” for accounts that may or may not be memory retrievals. The review tells us, “This remains a rare phenomenon with from 0.3% to 0.59% EBS [electrical brain stimulation] inducing reminiscences.” The review states the following:

"We observed a surprisingly large variety of reminiscences covering all aspects of declarative memory. However, most were poorly detailed and only a few were episodic. This result does not support theories of a highly stable and detailed memory, as initially postulated, and still widely believed as true by the general public....Overall, only one patient reported what appeared to be a clearly detailed episodic memory for which he spontaneously specified that he had never thought about it....Overall, these results do not support Penfield's idea of a highly stable memory that can be replayed randomly by EBS. Hence, results of EBS should not, at this stage, be taken as evidence for long-term episodic memories that can sometimes be retrieved."

So Egnor is wrong about Penfield. He did not do anything to show memories are stored in brains.  In particular, he made no attempt to determine whether accounts he collected from people being brain-stimulated matched actual things they had experienced.  We don't even know whether such accounts were actual memories. 

In another post Egnor continues to suggest incorrect ideas about the research of Penfield. He claims that some reader said that 5 percent of Penfield's stimulation produced memories. As his only link to back up this claim, he gives a link to the paper quoted above, which does not support any such claim, but instead tells us that "This remains a rare phenomenon with from 0.3% to 0.59% EBS [electrical brain stimulation] inducing reminiscences.”  So the actual rate is that when you stimulate someone's brain, maybe 1 out of 200 times they will remember something. This does nothing to show that memories are stored in brains, and you could probably get a similar rate of memory recollection by scratching someone's elbow, simply because normal speech is rich in memory recollection. 

The Roger Sperry Link

The link Egnor gives when referring to Roger Sperry is a link to the post here. The post discusses patients that underwent a cutting of the fibers connecting their two hemispheres. Such patients retained a single unified self. Such evidence is important in establishing that the brain is not the source of the mind, as they showed people with essentially two severed brain halves retain a single self. But split-brain operations do nothing to substantiate Egnor's mostly incorrect claim that "The pioneering neuroscientists of the 20th and 21st centuries — Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry, Justine Sergent, Yair Pinto, Benjamin Libet, and many others — have shown that the brain is the source of five of these kinds of activities—physiological control (of heartbeat, breathing, etc.), locomotion, perception, memory, and emotion."

The Justine Sergent Link

The link Egnor gives is to the post here, which also discusses split brain operations, and mentions how neuroscientist Justine Sergent did some work following up on the "split brain" research of Roger Sperry, showing that two disconnected halves of a split-brain patient do not form connections reconnecting them.  The discussion does nothing to substantiate Egnor's mostly untrue claim that "The pioneering neuroscientists of the 20th and 21st centuries — Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry, Justine Sergent, Yair Pinto, Benjamin Libet, and many others — have shown that the brain is the source of five of these kinds of activities—physiological control (of heartbeat, breathing, etc.), locomotion, perception, memory, and emotion."

The Yair Pinto Link

The link Egnor gives is to the post here, entitled "Split-Brain Research Confirms Unity of the Human Mind."  We read about how neuroscientist Yair Pinto did research further showing that split-brain patients retain a single unified mind. The discussion does nothing to substantiate Egnor's mostly untrue claim that "The pioneering neuroscientists of the 20th and 21st centuries — Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry, Justine Sergent, Yair Pinto, Benjamin Libet, and many others — have shown that the brain is the source of five of these kinds of activities—physiological control (of heartbeat, breathing, etc.), locomotion, perception, memory, and emotion."

The Benjamin Libet Link

The link Egnor gives is to the page here, which does nothing to back up the mostly untrue claim quoted above. 

Egnor's Other Attempts to Show Brains Handle Memory

Egnor makes two other attempts to suggest brains handle memory.  He mentions Alzheimer's patients, saying "Alzheimer’s patients are quite conscious; what they lack is memory." Under the more severe understanding of the word "lack," this is a very bad misstatement. Alzheimer's patients are properly described as people with memory problems. The average Alzheimer's patient does have memory of various types, but performs more poorly than average in recalling and remembering (see the end of this post where I describe how by one measure they perform about 80% as well on average as normal people). Alzheimer’s patients do not show that memory is a brain process, because of the low correlation between brain damage and dementia. As I discuss in my post here, there is no convincing evidence that the brains of Alzheimer’s patients are more damaged or shrunken than the brains of people with  normal memory performance. And the brain plaques called a hallmark of Alzheimer’s are found abundantly in many millions of people with normal memory performance. 

Here is a quote from a book on dementia (you can find the quote using the link here and going to page 35):

In  the paper here entitled "A Population-Based Clinicopathological Study in the Oldest-Old: The 90+ Study." we read this:

"Half of all non-demented participants (49%) and just over half of demented participants (57%) met pathological criteria for AD [Alzheimer's Disease], ... The pathologies examined to date failed to explain all dementia in this cohort, as almost one quarter (22%) of all demented participants did not have significant AD or any other pathology to explain their cognitive loss."

We see below a diagram from that paper showing the low link between dementia and brain pathology:

Egnor also makes this claim: "Similarly, bilateral hippocampal destruction by injury to the temporal lobes causes a catastrophic loss of ability to form new memories, but such patients are fully conscious." The claim is a myth of neuroscientists.  The neuroscience literature documents no case of a person  with "bilateral hippocampal destruction" by either surgery by injury who had a "catastrophic loss of ability to form new memories."  Claims that patient H.M. had such an inability to form new memories are untrue, as I document in my post here, where I cite quite a few cases of that patient learning new things after his injury and surgery. In that post I cite much research showing that damage to the hippocampus has little effect on the ability to form new memories.  One of the examples I quote in that post is that while the claim was made in the 1950's that patient H.M. could form no new memories, when patient H.M. was shown a Kennedy half-dollar in 1968, he stated that the man shown on it was President Kennedy, and that he had been assassinated (referring to the death of Kennedy that occurred in 1963). This is only one of many similar examples given in the paper here. 

Karl Lashley spent years doing experiments testing the cognitive effects of removing parts of the brains of animals, and was unable to find any "magic spot" crucial to memory. The screen shot below is from this page of a book on Lashley's research. We see a table comparing test performance on animals with different degrees of hippocampus damage. The animals with the most hippocampus damage (having "deep bilateral damage") performed as well as the animals with the least hippocampus damage. 

Why "Brains Do Memory" Is Untenable

 In the post I have quoted Egnor seems to claim that memory is handled by the brain. There are many reasons why that cannot be correct. 

• As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" thinkers, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain, and is not a storage place of human memories. 

• Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks or less. The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days).  Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, which have short lifetimes. A 2018 paper has a graph showing a 5-day "survival fraction" of only about 30% for dendritic spines in the cortex.  A 2014 paper found that only 3% of new spines in the cortex persist for more than 22 days. Speaking of dendritic spines, a 2007 paper says, "Most spines that appear in adult animals are transient, and the addition of stable spines and synapses is rare." A 2016 paper found a dendritic spine turnover rate in the neocortex of 4% every 2 days. A 2018 paper found only about 30% of new and existing dendritic spines in the cortex remaining after 16 days (Figure 4 in the paper). 

• It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.

• If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.

• If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.

• We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 

• As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.

• Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.

• There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with blazing-fast calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption and the "brains store memories" assumption. 

• For decades microscopes have been powerful enough to detect memories in brains, if memories existed in brains. Very much brain tissue has been studied by the most powerful microscopes: both brain tissue extracting from living patients, and brain tissue extracted from someone very soon after he died. Very many thousands of brains have been examined soon after death.  Microscopes now allow us to see very clearly what is in the tiniest brain structures such as dendritic spines and synapse heads. But microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to reveal any trace whatsoever of learned information in a brain.  No one has found a single letter of the alphabet stored in a brain; no has found a single number stored in a brain; and no one has ever found even a single pixel of something someone saw a day or more before.  If memories were stored in human brains, microscopes would have revealed decisive evidence of such a thing decades ago.  But no such evidence has appeared. 

• There is nothing in the brain that looks like learned information stored according to some systematic format that humans understand or do not understand. Even when scientists cannot figure out a code used to store information, they often can detect hallmarks of encoded information. For example, long before Europeans were able to decipher how hieroglyphics worked, they were able to see a repetition of symbolic tokens that persuaded them that some type of coding system was being used. Nothing like that can be seen in the brain. We see zero signs that synapses or dendritic spines are any such things as encoded information. 
• Many humans can remember with perfect accuracy very long bodies of text, such as hundreds of pages; but synapses in the brain do not reliably transmit information. An individual chemical synapse transmits an action potential with a reliability of only 50% or less, as little as 10%. A recall of long bodies of text would require a traversal of very many chemical synapses. A scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." Moreover, the brain lacks any physical structure consistent with an ability to store very long sequences of information, as I discuss here.
• Humans often form vivid new memories while humans are having near-death experiences taking place during cardiac arrest, when the brain has shut down, showing only flatlines of electrical activity. That brain state is called asystole, and it occurs within about 10 to 20 seconds after the heart stops.  If memories are created by the brain, the formation of new memories should be impossible while the brain is electrically inactive. But we know that very vivid and detailed memories can form during such states of brain electrical inactivity. That would not be possible if memory formation is a brain activity. Moreover, during near-death experiences occurring asystole, people do not find themselves as minds without memories. They find themselves as the same selves with the same memories. There are endless accounts along the lines of this: "Suddenly I was floating outside of my body, and could see it beneath me. Later I saw my deceased mother." No such experiences would occur if a soul lacking memory powers were to persist after the heart stopped and brain waves stopped.  In that case there would be no memory recall, and no memory formation. 

Oddly in a 2024 post Egnor had sounded like someone on the verge of ditching the claim that memories are stored in the brain. But in the post I have quoted above he sounds more like someone who can't ditch the old "brains form memories" doctrine. He should read some of the posts on this blog to learn more about why the old "brains form memories" doctrine fails all over the place. Looking through a series of many posts Egnor has published on the Evolution News site, I find a thinker who has many intelligent things to say about minds and brains, but someone who apparently has not given the topic of memory the extremely thorough study and analysis that someone should give  before lecturing us on its source. 

Below we have an old newspaper account of a person named John Bly, whose "retention of memory was remarkable" even though he had almost no brain because of a five-inch brain abscess filled with pus. Along with the case of the French civil servant with almost no brain but apparently good memory, this case shows the untruth of claims that a hippocampus is necessary for memory. See the post here to find the original source. 

Michael Egnor has made some notable progress in moving away from some of the brain dogmas he was indoctrinated in while studying for his qualifications. To make further progress, he should study and ponder the topic of memory much more carefully and deeply, paying particular attention to the very important topic of brain physical shortfalls (discussed here), the very important topic of particular people with vastly above average memory abilities (discussed in the post here and the series of posts here), and the topic of the preservation of memory after very bad brain damage (discussed in posts such as the one here).  Brain physical shortfalls (the physical shortcomings of all human brains) tell us just as strongly that brains do not handle memory storage and retrieval as they tell us that brains are not the source of our selves and thinking.  

The MMSE test seems to be the main test used for dementia or cognitive impairment. You can get a score between 0 and 30 on the test, and any score of 25 or higher is considered "normal." It must be remembered that every single time a person answers one of the questions on the test correctly, that is a demonstration of some memory ability -- because any ability to recognize or use language requires some memory skill, skills such as recognition (of words heard) or recall of the correct words you need to use to state a correct answer.   

The scientific paper "Word retrieval in connected speech in Alzheimer’s disease: a review with meta-analyses" has a Table 1 that shows the MMSE scores for more than 1100  Alzheimer’s disease patients, collected from more than 50 different studies. Page 10 of the paper tells us that the average MMSE score for those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) was 19.07, and that the median was also about 19 (18.95). 

Although definitely an indication that Alzheimer's involves some memory difficulty, this data shows what a glaring error it is to speak about such people by saying, "Alzheimer’s patients are quite conscious; what they lack is memory," as Egnor did.  To the contrary, every single score above 0 on the MMSE is an indication that some memory ability still exists;  and data showing that Alzheimer's patients score an average of about 19 on this test (which has a maximum score of 30) suggests that on average those with Alzheimer's have most of the memory skill that they had in their prime. 

Similar data is found in Table 1 of the paper here, entitled "Brain-age predicts subsequent dementia in memory clinic patients."  We have cognitive performance data on 664 patients classified as "non-dementia," and 476 patients classified with "dementia."  The average MMSE score for those with dementia (about 22 out of 30) is almost as high as the average MMSE score for those classified as "non-dementia," a score of about 24. It would be very wrong to say those classified with dementia were "lacking memory," as you need quite a lot of memory skills to score 22 out of 30 on the MMSE test. The table also gives us figures for brain volume for both groups, and the brain volume for those classified with "dementia" is only slightly less than those classified as "non-dementia." Figure 3 of the paper is the scatter plot below, which tells us no clear tale about any clear relation between "brain age" (largely how much of your brain was loss to atrophy) and whether or not you will have dementia.