They Too Mentally Calculated Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do

 The credibility of claims that mathematical calculation comes from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be mentally calculated. There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast and accurate math calculation is therefore evidence against claims that unaided human math calculation occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another 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.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate calculation occurred by humans unaided by any devices,  the stronger is the evidence against the claim that human math calculation occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human mathematics performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that unaided human math calculation is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that math calculation is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human math  performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to calculate too quickly and too accurately for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do,  the stronger is the case that human thinking is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon. I presented quite a few such cases in my earlier post "They Mentally Calculated Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do." Now let's look at some more such cases. 

On page 54 of the book Mental Prodigies by Fred Barton, which you can read here, we read of a series of very hard questions posed by an examination committee to a calculating marvel named Arumogam. 

The book tells us on page 56 that each of the questions was answered correctly by Arumogam "within a few seconds." Evidently he could do very hard math problems at lightning speeds. 

On page 66 the book tells us of a mental calculator named Oscar Verhaeghe. We read that he could perform the very hard calculations below very quickly:

We are told on the next page that this person was "incapable of devising the slightest calculation artifice," and that the answers seemed to rise up spontaneously in his mind. 

The 1924 article below refers to a "human calculating machine" who can "name immediately the day of the week for any date in the past or future" and who can multiply two forty-digit numbers mentally without using paper or pencil. 

The 1934 newspaper article here refers to people with amazingly rapid calculation ability, saying that many of them had normal or below normal intelligence:

"A boy of sixteen who can tell the day of the week on which any date

occurs, either hack to 1600 or forward to 2000, has been discovered

in a British mental welfare hospital. Youthful prodigies of this kind occur from time to time, but in most cases such powers don't last a very long time. For instance, one youngster who could work out in his head multiplication sums whose answers extended to 30 figures when he was ten years old find no more power of calculation than the ordinary Intelligent person when he grew up. It is also possible, as has been demonstrated In numbers of cases, for a human 'calculating machine' to be below the normal level of intelligence in other respects. Out of thirteen cases described by one investigator, in which those powers wore present during the early years of life, three were of average brain power, four were described as 'low' intelligence, and one as 'very low.' ”

On the page here we have a story entitled "Blind Indian Billed as Adding Machine." We read this:

"As a sort of human calculating machine, a blind employee of the Meenakshi Mills, at Madurai,Madras State, India, can solve intricate mathematical problems in a few seconds.

P. S. Guruswami is the mathematical wizard. His job is to

check and verify calculations made by clerks and accountants."

In the 1921 newspaper story here, we read below of another Indian capable of lightning-fast math calculations such as multiplying together a six-digit numbers and a seven-digit number:

We read in this newspaper article of a boy of only six, Roy Fork, who could perform calculations with astonishing speed:

"He is Master Roy Fork, aged six, son of F. L. Fork, well-driller, residing on Franklin avenue. While bright in all his school work, the youngster is a prodigy in mathematics. He knows the calendar by heart and although given the most severe questions with regard to days and dates, never makes a mistake. If you tell him your age he can tell in a second the year you were born, and if you give him the date of your birth day, and ask him what day of the week it comes on he replies at once, correctly and without fail." 

According to the "Juvenile Wonders" news article you can read here, there were these prodigies:

" 'Marvelous Griffith,' as he was called, could raise a number to the sixth power in eleven seconds. Truman Safford at the age often could multiply one row of fifteen figures by another of eighteen In a minute or less."

According to the press account below, Alfred A. Gamble could multiply two six-digit figures in only four seconds:

The account below is one of many accounts of mental marvels from India. 

The account below (part of the larger account here) tells of an illiterate math marvel named Reuben Fields who seemed to be able to tell the day of the week of any supplied date. He seemed to be a kind of human watch, always able to name the correct time within two or three minutes. He also seemed to have a kind of photographic memory for numbers. The first and third of these abilities has been reported of quite a few other people, but the time-keeping skill is much more rare. 

New Paper Confirms That Brains Shut Down Electrically Within a Few Seconds After Hearts Stop

 Very many of the most impressive-sounding cases of near-death experiences occur after someone has a cardiac arrest or heart attack that causes his heart to stop beating. A minute later or a few minutes later  the person's heart beat may be restored after medical intervention such as CPR or the use of an IED device. There may be even a period of five or ten minutes during which the person's heart is stopped before the restoration of the heart beat. The person may then have an amazing and elaborate story to tell of what went on during this interval between his heart stopping and the restoration of his heart beating. He may recall floating out of his body and observing his body from two meters or from the top of the ceiling. He may recall traveling through some mysterious tunnel at high speeds, and briefly visiting some mystical realm where he encounters a deceased relative or some numinous mysterious Being of light. 

When evaluating whether there is any possible neural explanation for the most dramatic cases of near-death experiences, a key issue is whether the brain shuts down electrically very quickly after the heart stops beating.  Constant electrical activity is the hallmark of a normally functioning brain.  If it were true that brains keep running fairly normally in the minutes after the heart stops beating, we might be able to explain some of these near-death experiences as being caused by something going on in the brain.  The more quickly and the more fully that a brain shuts down electrically after the heart stops beating, the more difficult or impossible it is to explain near-death experiences as being caused by brain activity. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia [heart stopping] without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric." meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this: 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

You can find quite a few additional papers asserting that brains flat-line very quickly after cardiac arrest by doing Google or Google Scholar searches for the phrase "EEG becomes isoelectric" or "EEG becomes iso-electric." 

A 2013 paper co-authored by Jimo Borjigin had the misleading title "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." The paper's graphs told us a different story than the idea suggested by that title. Figure 1 of the paper is shown below. We see EEG brain wave signals from rats who were injected with a chemical causing the heart to stop. 

Nothing impressive is seen. It's just what you would expect: brain signals trailing off and dying out very quickly after the heart stops. This data offers no justification for a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." An honest title of the paper would have been:  "Brain waves very quickly trail off and die out after hearts stop in rats." 

A 2017 paper was "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death." That 2017 paper studied the brain waves of four humans who died in Ontario, Canada after their hearts stopped. These were patients different from the four Michigan, USA patients whose deaths were documented in the 2023 Borjigin paper described below. Referring to the 2013 paper co-authored by Borjigin, the 2017 paper stated, "We also did not observe any well-defined EEG states following the early cardiac arrest period as previously reported in rats." Of course -- brain electrical activity stops when the heart stops, or only a few seconds later. The paper points out that "one must be careful about false positive EEG signals from muscular and/or cardiac sources."  Motion and muscle activity shows up on EEG readouts, producing what are called motion artifacts. An involuntary muscle twitch (or a movement by a medical person of part of an unconscious body) a few seconds after death may show up as a blip on an EEG reading. Such a thing is no actual evidence of brain activity during conscious experience. A scientific paper commentary says, "Contamination of EEG recordings by muscle artifact is a well-recognized problem, especially in the high-frequency gamma range, leading to erroneous estimates of EEG spectral power and coherence  (Goncharova et al., 2003; Pope et al., 2009; Fitzgibbon et al., 2013)."  It is just such a false-alarm-prone gamma range that Borjigin's papers on this topic have been centered around. 

Below is Figure 3 from the paper.  In Patients 1, 2 and 3 there is no significant brain wave activity (as shown in the blue EEG lines) after the time point marked 0 (time of last heart beat).  In Patient 4 the EEG lines flatline at five seconds after the heart stopped, and there is about 15 seconds later merely a weak blip or two around the time 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stopped, but that dies away after a few seconds. 

In none of the eight patients graphed in these two papers do we have any substantive evidence of brains working for more than an instant after the patient's last heart beat. 

In a 2023 paper Borjigin again gave us a misleading title trying to suggest that brain waves had been significantly observed after the stopping of the heart. The paper was entitled "Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain." An actual look at the data gathered did not support the insinuations of the title. 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of the paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  

The text below this visual tells us this about these stages that are labeled S5, S6, S7, S8, S9 and S10, using the term "bradycardia" which means lower-than-normal heart rate: 

"The pacemaker was automatically turned off (S5) and restarted from S6. S7 starts when rapid heartrate drop was seen which ended when pacemaker was turned off by clinical staff. S8 denotes the bradycardia period where RR interval (RRI) is longer than 5s. In S9, RRI is below 5s (partial heartrate recovery). S10 saw the reappearance of the P-waves and further recovery of heartrate. S11 ends at the last recorded heartbeat with periodical PAC-like ECG pattern."

The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S10 (when there was "further recovery of heartrate") and no brain activity at all at stage S11, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." The data on this Patient One showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. It was a similar story for the other three patients whose data is given in this paper. By studying the graphs in the supplemental information of the paper, you can see that none of the patients showed evidence of significant brain activity occurring more than 15 or 20 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. 

There is a new paper giving some additional data on this topic. The January 2025 paper is entitled "Parametrization of the dying brain: A case report from ICU bed-side EEG monitoring." We have data on a man in a coma, whose life was being maintained by machines. The machines were turned off. To get graphs of the relevant data, we have to look at the paper's Supplementary Materials, which are provided as a Word document. Supplementary Figures 3-6 show us the relevant data. 

Here is one fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity.  Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and  a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute. 

We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says,  "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)." 

Here is the second fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity.  Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and  a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute. 

We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says,  "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)." 

Here is the third fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity.  Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and  a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute. 

We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says,  "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)." 

Here is the last fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity.  Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and  a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute. 

We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says,  "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)." 

The evidence is clear: brains shut down electrically very soon after the heart stops beating, typically within 15 or 20 seconds, as indicated by these visuals and the quotes from medical or scientific authorities I gave above. So the vivid and elaborate narratives (near-death experiences)  so often provided by those whose hearts had stopped cannot be explained as brain activity. The very arising of such narratives corresponding to times when brains had shut down is evidence against both the claim that the brain is the source of the mind and the claim that memory formation occurs by brain activity.  Shut-down brains (electrically inactive) should never be giving rise to vivid and elaborate memories.  

Scientists can be astonishingly stubborn when it comes to realizing the implications of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. I sometimes write science fiction stories on  another blog of mine, and a few of those stories are about the kind of groupthink, dogmatism, and resistance to spooky observations that we see from materialists. Here are some examples:

• My recent story "The Sun Seers of Planet Evercloudy" is about a constantly cloudy planet in which scientists have created a taboo under which believing in the sun is all-but-forbidden. 
• My story "Planet of the Blind" is about a planet of intelligent people where no one can see, except for a small, scorned group who make claims of having a mysterious ability they call "vision," claims that the planet's mainstream scientists reject. 
• My story "The Mars Mission" includes an account of a materialist Mars explorer who resolutely refuses to believe the testimony of his senses when he dies and has an out-of-body experience. 
• My story "The Ocean Deniers of Centralia" is about a mainstream academia community that refuses to believe the reports of a scorned minority that describes seeing a strange realm of existence unlike any that the mainstream authorities have seen with their eyes. 

The Groundless Myth of Concept-Selective Regions in the Brain

 Here is one way that a type of scientific myth can arise:

 (1) Scientists very interested in providing evidence for some untrue claim (which they may believe to be true) may do poorly-designed research guilty of various types of Questionable Research practices such as way-too-small study sizes, a lack of pre-registration, a lack of a proper blinding protocol, and poor, unreliable measurement techniques. Such scientists then write up a paper incorrectly claiming that their research supports the  claim. 

(2) Papers such as these get endlessly cited in the popular press and also in other scientific papers. Typically when a scientific paper cites the poor-quality research, no mention will be made of any of the factors that disqualify the cited paper as being an example good robust evidence. Whatever the paper claimed to show will simply be cited by some other paper as a fact that was established by research. 

In my previous post I documented a case of this type of citation bungling going on. In my 2024 post "Papers Claiming Brain Memory Storage Keep Citing Poor Science Papers" I examined each of the references at the end of this sentence in a scientific paper:  "There is now a substantial body of evidence based on recently developed techniques, including optogenetics, chemogenetics, electrophysiology, and multiphoton confocal imaging, to suggest that memory for basic types of behavioral learning such as contextual fear conditioning is maintained in a population of neurons referred to as engram cells [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]." For each one of the studies cited at the end of this sentence, I wrote a separate paragraph showing that the cited study was not an example of robust scientific research, but instead a low-quality study guilty of various types of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study sizes, a lack of pre-registration, a lack of a proper blinding protocol, and poor, unreliable measurement techniques.

Let us look at another example of this type of misconduct.  In the recent preprint "MINDSIMULATOR: EXPLORING BRAIN CONCEPT LOCALIZATION VIA SYNTHETIC FMRI," which you can read here, we have the following spurious claim:

"Numerous neuroscience studies have illustrated that specific regions of the visual cortex exhibit concept selectivity. When individuals receive visual stimuli related to particular concepts (such as places, bodies, faces, words, colors, and foods), the respective cortical regions exhibit significant activation (Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998; Sergent et al., 1992; Jain et al., 2023; Pennock et al., 2023; Kanwisher et al., 1997; Allen et al., 2022). These regions are termed visual concept-selective regions and play a vital role in advancing the understanding of brain visual cognition."

This claim that there are "concept-selective" regions of the brain has no basis in fact. It is not true that particular regions of the brain become more active when someone is seeing some particular type of visual stimulus.  All of the papers cited above are examples of very low-quality research severely guilty of Questionable Research Practices. Let us look at each of them. 

Before discussing them,  I should explain why brain imaging studies using small study group sizes are worthless. An article on neursosciencenews.com states this: "A new analysis reveals that task-based fMRI experiments involving typical sample sizes of about 30 participants are only modestly replicable. This means that independent efforts to repeat the experiments are as likely to challenge as to confirm the original results."  The paper "Prevalence of Mixed-methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research" has a Table 2 giving recommendations for minimum study group sizes for different types of research. According to the paper, the minimum number of subjects for an experimental study are 21 subjects per study group. The same table lists 61 subjects per study group as a minimum for a "correlational" study. 

In her post “Why Most Published Neuroscience Findings Are False,” Kelly Zalocusky PhD calculates that the median effect size of neuroscience studies is about .51. She then states the following, talking about statistical power (something that needs to be .5 or greater to be moderately convincing): 

"To get a power of 0.2, with an effect size of 0.51, the sample size needs to be 12 per group. This fits well with my intuition of sample sizes in (behavioral) neuroscience, and might actually be a little generous. To bump our power up to 0.5, we would need an n of 31 per group. A power of 0.8 would require 60 per group."

A study with a statistical power of .5 is considered only modestly replicable, something that will be replicated about half of the time if you try to replicate it.  A study with a statistical power of .8 is considered fairly good evidence.  If we describe a power of .5 as being modestly replicable, it therefore seems that about 31 subjects per study group is needed for an experimental neuroscience study to be worthy of consideration.  

Now let us look at list at the studies cited above as evidence for the claim that there are "concept-selective" regions in the brain. 

• "Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998":  This is a reference to the paper "A cortical representation of the local visual environment,"  which you can read here. The study used a way-too-small study group size of only 9 subjects. So it provided no real evidence for  "concept-selective" regions in the brain. The reported "superior activations" were only about 1%, which can easily be explained as mere random variations. 
• "Sergent et al., 1992": This is a reference to the paper "Functional neuroanatomy of face and object processing: a positron emission tomography study," and you can read the abstract here. The paper is behind a paywall, and the abstract makes no mention of the number of subjects used. Given that it is almost invariably true that the abstract of an experimental neuroscience paper will list the number of subjects used whenever it has a halfway-decent study group size, we may presume with high confidence that the study group size was too-small for anyone to be claiming the study as good evidence for concept-selective regions in the brain. 
• " Jain et al., 2023" :   This is a reference to the paper " Selectivity for food in human ventral visual cortex," which you can read here. The paper claims to have found "two food-selective regions in the ventral visual cortex," but the claim is groundless, because it is based on brain-imaging experiments using a way-too-small study group size of only 8 subjects. 
• "Pennock et al., 2023":  This is a reference to the study "Color-biased regions in the ventral visual pathway are food selective," which you can read here. It's another paper making claims similar to the Jain paper. But the claims are just as groundless, because they are also based on rain-imaging experiments using a way-too-small study group size of only 8 subjects. 
• "Kanwisher et al., 1997":  This is a reference to the paper "The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception," which you can read here. The paper used a too-small study group size of only 15 subjects, a size too small for decent evidence to be claimed.  As discussed above, a minimum for a study like this to be taken seriously is about 30 subjects. For a long discussion of the weakness of Kanwisher's research on this topic, read my post here. 
• "Allen et al., 2022":  This is a reference to the paper "A massive 7T fMRI dataset to bridge  cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence,"  which you can read here. The paper merely describes a dataset created by scanning 8 subjects, and makes no claims that any evidence was produced of concept-selective regions in the brain. 

So it is clear that the paper "MINDSIMULATOR: EXPLORING BRAIN CONCEPT LOCALIZATION VIA SYNTHETIC FMRI," which you can read here, was guilty of citation misconduct. The paper claimed that "numerous neuroscience studies have illustrated that specific regions of the visual cortex exhibit concept selectivity," and cited only the papers in the bullet list above to support this claim. But none of the papers cited provided any good evidence to back up such a claim. 

This type of thing is what constantly occurs in neuroscience literature. Again and again and again we have papers claiming that some grand result was established by neuroscience researchers. There follows a list citing a set of papers. But a careful examination of the papers cited will show that none of them provided any good evidence for the grand result claimed.  The citation of low-quality research is extremely abundant in neuroscience papers. When the citation of low-quality research becomes common, we have a situation in which the neuroscience literature serves to propel and propagate myths and legends, groundless boasts of achievements. 

The practice of citing poor-quality research occurs so abundantly in neuroscience papers that you should never assume the truth of any claim made in a neuroscience paper, merely because it is followed by some list of paper citations that do not discuss the details of the papers cited. When people have good evidence to back up a claim, they tell us about the details of such evidence. A sentence listing a bunch of neuroscience papers without giving us any details about such papers should in general be something regarded with high suspicion. 

If you are writing a neuroscience paper making Claim X, and you know of five well-designed high-quality studies providing strong evidence for Claim X, then you might do something like providing a bullet list in which each of those studies is described as one of the bullets in the bullet list.  You would provide details such as saying "Walker and Miller in 2017 did a well-designed pre-registered study in which a strong Claim X effect was reported in 50 subjects, who were compared to 50 control subjects using a stringent blinding protocol."  Not being worried about your readers reading the studies you mentioned, you would provide links allowing your reader to conveniently open up each of those studies, without copying their titles into the search page of Google Scholar.  

But if you knew of no such high-quality studies, but only low-quality studies, you might merely list those low-quality studies in a single sentence that provided no details about those studies, and had no links to the studies. That way only the most diligent readers of your papers would be able to find out that the studies you had cited were very low-quality studies. If you did that, you would be following the pattern we so often see in neuroscience papers citing poor-quality studies. 

The word "selection" refers to a choice made by a conscious agent. 

There is no robust evidence that any region of the brain is "concept-selective." There is no robust evidence that any region of the brain activates more strongly when certain types of things are shown to a person. People select things, but brain regions don't select things. Claims of "concept-selective" brain regions are another example of biologists making deceptive use of the words "selective" or "selection." Biologists have doing that for well over a century, by using the not-literally-true term "natural selection" to refer to some postulated "survival of the fittest" effect that is not actually selection, because it does not involve a choice by a conscious agent. 

Lighting-Fast Readers Exceed the Speed Limits of a Brain

The paper "A Review of the Savant Syndrome and its Possible Relationship to Epilepsy" by neurologist John R. Hughes has some astonishing accounts of extraordinary mental abilities. We read of "the hyperlexics, who (in one case) can read a page in 8 seconds and recall the text later at a 99% level."  We read of "one savant who could recite without error the value of Pi to 22,514 places," a reference to Daniel Tammet.  Later more specifically we are told that "on American TV many viewers witnessed Daniel at 26 years of age in front of Oxford University dons reciting (without a single mistake) the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places over a 5-hour period."

We read this:

"Thioux et al.. [5] described Donny, a young autistic savant, 'who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described'. The title of this report likely justifies the latter statement : 'The day of the week when you were born in 700 msec.' " 

This seems to be reference to an ability to name the day of the week in which anyone was born, while taking less than a second to perform such a calculation.  We read of a case of hyperlexia:

"The life of one of the most famous savants, Kim Peek, was dramatized in the popular movie, 'Rain Man', played by actor Dustin Hoffman. Kim reads the left side of a page with his left eye and simultaneously the right side of the page with his right eye (without a corpus callosum). The time taken for these two pages for Kim is usually 8 seconds and upon testing for retention he was 99% correct of the material just read [2]. These values are in contrast to 45 seconds for reading and 45% correct on testing seen in a group of normal individuals."

The corpus callosum is the bundle of fibers connecting the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. We might expect under "brains make minds" assumptions that not having a corpus callosum would produce terrible cognitive problems everywhere. But Kim Peek (born without a corpus callosum) had enormous memory abilities and way-better-than-normal reading abilities, as the quote above suggests. It is widely reported that Kim Peek remembered almost everything in thousands of books he had read, a claim that Hughes makes on page 7 of his paper.  

On the same page Hughes refers to acquired savant syndrome, which he describes as when "after some brain injury or brain disease, savant skills unexpectedly emerge, sometimes at a prodigious level, when no such skills were present before injury or illness.” He states this:

"Many examples were given by Treffert, including a 10-year-old boy knocked unconscious by a baseball, then later could do quick

calendar calculations, an 8-year-old boy with the similar talent after a left hemispherectomy [removal of half of the brain] and a 3-year-old child after meningitis was later considered a  musical genius. Also included was a 9-year-old boy who was shot with a bullet to the left brain, leaving him with a right-sided hemiparesis, later developing special mechanical abilities. Finally, two painters were mentioned who had significant qualitative improvements after strokes involving the left occipital lobe and thalamus." 

An old newspaper article describes a very fast reader:

As impressive as the case above is, the article below reports a speed-reading ability ten times faster: a rate of 8000 words per minute. We read that the subject had a 100% comprehension of the material read at this blazing-fast speed, based on test questions he answered about the material. 

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93065779/1954-07-29/ed-1/seq-8/

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

The newspaper article here notes that a 1990 version of the Guinness Book of World Records recorded that Howard Berg could read at 25,000 words per minute. 

In the paper here, we read this:

 "Some hyperlexic children can read anything placed before them, even though they may never have heard or seen those words before,

nor do they understand them. They rarely mispronounce even the most difficult words."

An old newspaper article refers to the phenomenal reading ability of William Gladstone: 

"Perhaps the fastest reader the world ever knew was Gladstone. He could read and digest a novel of 50,000 words, a scientific work as large or larger, a political treatise or a history by merely glancing at the leaves as he turned them over. His eye and mind seemed to photograph with the rapidity of an instantaneous camera."

A 1972 newspaper article tells us this:

"Glen Pesely may be the world's fastest reader. The 18-year-old California boy can read 27,000 words per minute with nearly 100 per cent comprehension."

The 1972 newspaper article below gives us more details on this Glen Peseley, saying he could read up to 27,000 words per minute:

You can read the story here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SCS19721001.1.1&srpos=27&e=-------en--20--21--txt-txIN-%22fastest+reader%22-------

A 1969 newspaper article tells us this: "Jeanne Crandell, age 11, sixth grade, probably is the fastest reader in the world, reading as many as 70,000 words a minute." 

Reading some papers on Google Scholar, after searching for "hyperlexia," it seems that there exists a small number of super swift readers, often autistic, who have a stunning ability to read with astonishing speed, one that does not seem to the result of practice using speed reading techniques. 

The ability of humans to read at any fast rate is something beyond any explanation of neuroscientists or evolutionary biologists, who are also unable to explain the origin of language. We can imagine no "survival of the fittest" scenario that would explain the origin of language. All fast reading involves symbol recognition occurring at a blazing speed. Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how any type of recognition could occur by means of the brain. Humans manufacture things such as books and computers that allow a fast recall of information. From such activity, we know the type of things that make possible fast recall: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting. The human brain has no such things. The brain has no addresses and nothing corresponding to indexes; nothing in a brain is sorted; and the brain has no indexes. The brain has many severe slowing factors which should make impossible very fast reading if such reading were to happen purely by brain activity. Such factors are discussed in my post here.  

The severe slowing factors include relatively slow dendrites, and synapses which each require a synaptic delay to transmit a signal. Because there are very many synapses for every neuron (as many as 1000), the cumulative delay caused by synaptic delays should utterly rule out phenomena such as very fast reading, if such phenomena occur by brain activity. Then there's the fact that only about half of the axons in the cortex of the brain are the faster myelinated type of axon (as discussed in the scientific paper here). The other half of the axons are very much slower unmyelinated axons, which have a transmission speed 10 to 100 times slower than myelinated axons. The diagram below schematically depicts the "speed bumps" in the brain.  Such "speed bumps" vastly outnumber the fastest parts (myelinated axons).  The result is that brains must be too slow to explain phenomena such as very fast reading with good understanding of what is read. 

An ability to read fast is something we should never expect to occur in any naturally arising organism.  An ability to read fast is something we should expect to arise in a species only if some higher power or higher agency wanted for a species to develop a civilization like humans have, one with things like cities, architecture, literature and art. 

In the diagram below we see four colored areas. At the center is the simplest phenomenon of consciousness, merely being awake and aware of something. The yellow area represents some of the commonly known mental phenomena that are more than mere consciousness. The orange area represents little-known powers of the human mind (or types of human experiences) that are not disputed by professors. The green area represents paranormal abilities of the human mind or types of paranormal human experiences that are disputed by professors, even though the evidence for such abilities and experiences is very good. The professors who dispute the reality of such abilities and experiences are typically those who have never bothered to seriously study the evidence for such abilities and experiences.  Almost none of the items mentioned in the diagram can be credibly explained as being caused by the brain. You might call the phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram "icing on the cake" for the person arguing that the brain cannot explain the human mind. The phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram strengthen the case against thinking that your brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of memories. But that case can be adequately made without even appealing to such disputed phenomena. 

Some of the items mentioned in the green part of the diagram are discussed in my posts and free online books here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here (some of which may require pressing Older Posts at the bottom right of the page to fully explore the relevant evidence). 

The diagram helps show the stupidity of the approach taken by many of today's thinkers, an approach in which the thinker tries to make his explanation task a million times easier by the silly trick of describing a mere "problem of consciousness" that needs to be solved.   The human mind and its capabilities and experiences is a reality a million times more than mere "consciousness."  It is an absurd problem misstatement to describe the problem of explaining human minds as a mere problem of explaining consciousness.  The person who makes that mistake is committing a blunder as bad as the person who tries to reduce the problem of explaining the arising of human bodies to a mere "problem of solidity origination."