Misleading Tricks of Those Claiming to Decode "Inner Speech"

You can tell when a person is engaging in muscle activity by analyzing the squiggly lines of EEG readings obtained when someone puts on his head a device containing electrodes. Muscle movements of every type (including speech) produce deviations or disturbances in the wavy lines produced by EEG devices picking up brain waves. Because different types of visual images may produce different types of muscle movements (as illustrated in the visual below), it may be possible to predict above chance which of three photos a person is shown. Different photos may produce different types of muscle movements and different durations of muscle movements. So a computer program analyzing the squiggly lines of EEG readings may score above chance, by considering blips in EEG readings that may have different characteristics when different types of photos are shown. Such an ability is no evidence that brains produce minds, but merely evidence that different visual stimuli may produce different types of reactive muscle movements. 

There is no brain-related technology that allows any person or computer program to figure out what a person is thinking by looking at MRI scans of a brain or EEG electrode readings of brain waves. But there are various tricks and cheats that can be used by someone trying to persuade you that he has decoded a person's thoughts or "inner speech" by analyzing brain states or brain waves. Below are some of these cheats and tricks. 

Trick #1: The leveraging of failures of follow fast-paced hard-to-follow instructions. I have noticed this sleazy trick in some neuroscience papers. It is the trick of doing an experiment that requires an experimental subject to very rapidly switch between speaking a word and merely thinking of a word. So, for example, there may be a computer program that flashes instructions like this, with the instructions appearing on the screen for the times shown below:

Say "hippopotamus" (3 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

Say "asparagus" (3 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

Think "perfect"  (2 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

Say "principle" (3 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

Say "asparagus" (3 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

Think "inventiveness"  (3 seconds)

Pause (2 seconds)

When instructions like this appear on a computer screen, with a very fast pace, and rapid switches between the type of instruction, there is a good chance that a subject will sometimes fail to follow the instructions exactly. So during some percentage of the time that the subject was supposed to be only thinking of a word, the subject may be speaking a word, in audible speech or all-but-silent speech or silent speech involving lip movement. This may allow a neuroscientist to brag about "above chance" results during intervals when supposed "inner speech" occurred.  What is going on is that the instructions have been almost designed in a way to produce a fair amount of audible speech or all-but-silent speech or silent speech involving lip movement during intervals when subjects were supposed to be engaging in only mouth-motionless "inner speech."  And if you are using very sick patients with speech difficulties (as the main paper discussed below did), and  using a very fast rapidly-switching pace, then it is all-but-certain that a large fraction of the brain waves recorded during intervals that are supposed to be only "inner speech" will instead be audible speech, near-audible speech or mouthed speech, an effect that basically invalidates any boasts experimenters may make about decoding "inner speech."

Trick #2: Failing to prevent mouth-movement during intervals supposed to be "inner speech."  There is a simple way to prevent or minimize muscle movement from the mouth during testing intervals that are supposed to be thought-only "inner speech."  One way is to have a test subject wear something in his mouth designed to prevent any movement of the lips or tongue, with the subject wearing such a device during any test interval in which he is supposed to be engaging in speechless "inner speech."  Another way is to make use of some specialized motion detector that will sound an alarm whenever the subject moves his lips or tongue. No such devices are used by neuroscientists doing experiments claiming to decode "inner speech." So whenever they claim that something involved only "inner speech" we should distrust such claims, and suspect that there was a lot of actual speech or muscle movement (audible or not) going on during the recorded periods of supposed "inner speech."  

Trick #3: The word length cheat.  I have noticed this sleazy trick in some neuroscience papers. It is the cheat of doing an experiment that attempts to predict which of a small set of words a person is thinking about, while leveraging the fact that some of the words have longer lengths than others. So, for example, in some quick-paced instructions appearing on a screen, a user may be asked to think (without speaking) one of these words: dog, chameleon, apple, hippopotamus, triangle. If the pace is fast enough, with enough tricky switches between "say this" and "think this,"  some little traces of muscle movement may show up in the EEG readings, even during intervals when the subject is only supposed to be speaking; and from the length of such muscle movement it may be rather easy to predict which word the user was asked to think of.

Trick #4: No exact specification of the experimental procedure. This is a very bad defect of most papers claiming to decode inner speech from brain scans or EEG readings. Such papers will typically offer some sketchy outline of the experiment that went on, without specifying the exact procedure. The rule of thumb we should follow is: regard as worthless any paper claiming successful experimental results which fails to specify in sufficient detail the exact experience that subjects underwent, in a way sufficient for someone to attempt a replication of the reported results. 

Trick #5: Cherry-picking best results. Using multiple subjects and many different electrodes reading from different regions of the brain, a researcher can cherry-pick a best result from the many results (a result that might easily be obtainable by pure chance), and then try to give the impression that such a result was a typical result. Something similar would be going on if you had 20 people try to guess 50 five-digit numbers, and then had some visual graph heading bragging about "60% accuracy" with the fine print revealing that this was for guess target number 35 and guesser number 17 (when the target was 44392 and the guesser guessed 44291). 

Trick #6: Leveraging data backdoors in a sneaky way. This trick goes on when some researcher claims that they got an impressive result "from brain scans" or "EEG readings" when brain scans or EEG readings were only part of the inputs used, with the success mainly coming from some data backdoor. An example is when researchers have subjects look at images obtained from the COCO image dataset. That dataset includes text annotations corresponding to each of the images, an example being that a picture of an apple may be labeled as "apple" or "fruit."  So a computer program analyzing EEG readings while test subjects saw particular images can find out words corresponding to the observed image, by using the data backdoor of the text annotation corresponding to each image. With a little obfuscation and "clouding the waters," a success so unimpressive might be passed off as "mind reading" even though what is powering the success is 98% simply looking up the text annotations corresponding to the images, a feat no more impressive than looking up the definition of a word. 

Trick #7: Leveraging sound inputs. Some people with speech problems have the ability to produce sounds when trying to speak, sounds that an average person is unable to understand. This may sound like someone trying to speak with his mouth filled with food. Some scientist may connect such a person to some EEG device, either one that is invasive (involving brain-implanted electrodes) or not invasive. Some computer program may then train on the person's speech while he is reading something or trying to read something. The computer may get a good idea about correlations between sounds that a human listener cannot understand, and words that a person is attempting to speak.  Then the computer program may report success at "decoding" something that may be called "inner speech" or "brain states" or "brain outputs," even though the success is coming mainly from sound inputs rather than brain states. The effort may be wrongly called "brain-to-text" or a "decoding of brain speech" although such terms are inappropriate under such circumstances. 

Trick #8:  Leveraging phoneme or attempted phoneme EEG correlates. I noted before that muscle movements of every type (including speech) produce deviations or disturbances in the wavy lines produced by EEG devices picking up brain waves. There may be particular EEG correlates for particular phonemes or attempted phenomes that a person may make. So when someone makes the sound at the beginning of "achoo" and "apple," that may tend to produce a particular type of EEG blip; and when someone makes the sound in the middle of the words "cheese" and "sneeze," that may tend to produce some other type of EEG blip. So if you have a computer program that is trained to recognize such characteristic EEG blips, by training after someone connected to an EEG device tries to read some long body of text, that program may gain some ability to pick up lots of what a person is saying from his EEG brain wave readings. This may be described as "brain reading" although it is more accurately described as muscle movement EEG correlation reading. A program trained to recognize particular type of EEG correlates of phoneme pronunciation or attempted phoneme pronunciation may use some fancy AI "fill in the blanks" algorithm (possibly involving frequentist word-guessing or syllable guessing or phoneme guessing) to enhance some limited success it has at picking up EEG correlates of attempted syllable pronunciations. None of what I describe in this paragraph is correctly described as "decoding inner speech," although it may be described as that, particularly under some fast-pace hurry-up methodology in which a good deal of actual speech or attempted speech is occurring during two-second intervals in which someone is supposed to be only thinking of a word, because of a study design that almost guarantees there will be a large amount of this spillover "talking or trying to talk when you were supposed to only think."

Trick #9: The "as high as X percent accurate" trick. This trick is as old as the hills. You slice and dice the prediction results into something like 100 different portions, and pick the portion with the highest predictive accuracy. You then say something like "my method is up to 75% accurate," mentioning the accuracy of the most successful little portion, rather than the overall results. 

Trick #10: Leveraging AI and large language models. An AI system that has trained on very many web pages and online books may be able to fill in lots of blanks in sentences, using guesswork based on word frequencies and the frequency of words used in a particular type of sentence or sentence fragment. So for example, if you have a fragment of a sentence such as "I'm hungry so __ ____ __ ____ ______," the AI system might be able to predict "I'm going to make some food" or some similar phrase as the missing part. Leveraging such AI systems, an experiment might produce some success level at "decoding inner speech" much higher than it would get without using such an AI system, particularly if some experiment uses carefully chosen test sentences of a type that allow an AI system to predict the full sentence from only half of the sentence.  

The latest example of a misspeaking neuroscience paper boasting about decoding inner speech is the paper "Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses" which you can read here.  We get in the paper various boast soundbites that are not backed up by anything reported in the paper. The paper starts out by making the false claim that "Attempted, inner, and perceived speech have a shared representation in motor cortex."  Speech is not represented in the cortex or any other part of the brain. The beginning of the paper contains quite a few untrue statements about the previous results of researchers, statements that are untrue because of various defects in the results published by such researchers. 

Many of today's neuroscientists misspeak like crazy when they use the words "represent," "representations," "decode" and "decoding."  Misstatements by neuroscientists using these words are extremely abundant. As a general rule you should never trust a neuroscientist using the words "represent," "representations," "decode" and "decoding." When it comes to "representations" neuroscientists are often guilty of very bad pareidolia and noise-mining, which involves a kind of seeing things that are not really there. Nowadays it easy for a scientist to kind of see things that are not there, by using "keep torturing the data until it confesses" tactics that often involve shady manipulations of data by dubious custom-written computer programs. We also should have a default distrust over any neuroscientist statement made by a neuroscientist about a decoding percentage accuracy. Such statements are typically extremely dubious, involving very dubious or easy-to-discredit calculation methods, or claims in which no calculation method is ever adequately specified. Often in a paper some impressive "decoding accuracy" figure is stated, but never justified. 

Our first reason for distrusting the "Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses" paper comes when we read that it involved only four subjects. As a general rule, correlation-seeking neuroscience experiments have no value unless they use a study group size of at least 15 or 20 subjects; and usually the required study group size is much larger. 

Another strong reason for distrusting the "Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses" paper comes when we consider the endangerment-of-the-sickest procedure that its researchers engaged in.  The study involves invasively inserting microelectrodes into the brains of four very sick patients.  This was not done for any medical benefit for these patients.  The very sick patients had diseases such as the muscle-wasting disease ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. The insertion of microelectrodes into brains involves very serious medical hazards, and when used on very sick patients it may worsen their difficulties. In this case the very sick patients were used as "experimental guinea pigs," without any medical benefits coming to them from the medical risks they were enduring. 

Whenever such shady business is going on, we should all-the-more tend to distrust any statements made by the people engaging in the shady business. We should nowhere be giving "the benefit of the doubt" when such researchers make grand boasts, but demand the clearest evidence that such boasts are justified. 

In the case of the paper "Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses" no such clear evidence is given. The paper fails to give any very exact specification of the experimental procedures it followed. But from its Supplemental Information document we should have the strongest suspicion that some of the tricks listed above were used.  

When asked to produce "inner speech," instructions were given that seem designed to produce muscle movement rather than pure thought. According to Table S1, the instructions were these:""

• "Imagine mouthing the word. Focus on what your mouth, tongue, lips, jaw and throat would be doing and how they would feel."
• "Imagine uttering the word aloud. Focus on the sound you would be producing."
•  "Imagine hearing me (or someone’s voice you know well) say the word, focus on the sound of my (their) voice."

The same table tells us that instructions such as these were alternated with instructions like these:

• "Say the word aloud (to the best of your ability.'
• "Mouth the word as if you were mouthing to someone across a room, without sound."

How fast were these instructions switched? We cannot tell exactly, because the paper authors have failed to describe their exact test procedure in a way that would allow anyone to reproduce it exactly.  But from Table S4 in the Supplemental Information, we have every reason to suspect that the authors were guilty of Trick #1 described above. We have some table suggesting that very fast, rapidly switching time intervals were used. The table makes it sound as if the subjects were required to do some super-hurried affair in which they had to very rapidly switch between "speak the word" instructions and "think the word" instructions. 

Now let us look at some of the unwarranted and dubious statements made in the paper:

(1) The caption of Figure 1F refers to a "T16-i6v Decoding Accuracy of 92.1%."  This gives an impression of high accuracy, until you figure out that this referring to only a single subject (subject T16) and a single electrode location (corresponding to the name i6V). The figure seems to have been cherry-picked from Figure 1E, which shows a grid of 63 percentages ranging from 11 to 97.9. We may note how misleading this is. A casual viewer of the paper, looking at the figures, may get the idea that some high decoding accuracy was achieved, when no such thing occurred.  Something shady as this should deepen our distrust of this paper. We have no decent explanation of how these numbers in Figure 1E were obtained, and the whole grid should be regarded with suspicion. What little explanation is given (some mention of a "Gaussian naive Bayes" with a 500 millisecond window)  is something that does not inspire confidence. Figure 1D graphs a suspiciously hurried-up affair that seems to involve a trick like described in Trick #1 above. 

(2) The careful critical reader of the paper will tend to suspect that what is going on is noise-mining and cherry-picking from electrode data corresponding to many different reading locations in the brain. Each of the four patients had multiple electrodes inserted into their brains. So when Figure 1F refers to a "T16-i6v Decoding Accuracy of 92.1%,"  this is referring to only a single subject (subject T16) and a single electrode location (corresponding to the name i6V). It is not at all the average accuracy of decoding attempts using this subject. Do we have here any reason for thinking that the results are better than chance, when you consider the results from each patient's electrodes?  There seems to be no such reason. 

Each of the four subjects had about 6 electrode arrays in their brains. So with 24 or more possible areas to check, it is hardly surprising that some researcher might be able to report a relatively high "decoding accuracy" involving one of those areas and one of these subjects. Similarly, if I ask 24 people to pick the score and teams of the next Super Bowl, I will probably have one that I can claim as having a high predictive accuracy, even if mere chance is involved. 

We also have some insinuations in the paper ""Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses" that some  relatively high accuracy was achieved in experiments involving a 125,000 word vocabulary. None of the claims should be trusted, because the procedure involved is not described in adequate detail.  We have a link to a video showing a woman (subject T16)  seeing a computer screen that displays some text. The video says, "In this task the target sentence appears at the top of the screen, and the inner speech BCI [brain computer interface] is shown below, generated in real time."  First, the computer displays the sentence "That's probably a good idea." Then we see below that a line slowly appearing; "That's probably a good idea."

We should treat with the greatest skepticism any claim that this is a "decoding" of what the very sick subject was thinking. Some computer program already knew the target sentence. We don't know what tricks are going on for the computer program to go from this known target to a supposed "decoding" matching the target, because the testing procedure and programming is nowhere decently described in the paper or its Supplemental Information. Were the sentences randomly selected from some very large set such as a group of 100,000 sentences? Or were the sentences only a very limited number of sentences that some AI program had trained on, which would tend to create a vastly higher chance of success? We don't know, because the authors haven't explained their method decently. We have no idea of what kind of tricks and cheats may have helped produced this impressive-looking result.  Part of what is going on seems to be AI prediction based on phrase frequencies in sentences starting a particular way. An AI system can predict "a good idea" as one of the most likely endings of a sentence beginning "That's probably..."

Seeing the video you might assume that there was some "Chinese wall" affair in which one part of the software knew that the target sentence was "That's probably a good idea," and some other part of the software (a decoding part) did not know that this sentence was the target, and figured out the target from brain waves. But you should not make any such assumption, because it is never made explicitly in the paper; and what was going on when you see that video clip is never adequately explained. The paper authors have given us reasons for distrusting their work, and our default attitude should be distrust, rather than making generous assumptions the authors are trying to suggest. 

The video is attempting to give us the impression that some randomly generated sentence (created from a vocabulary list of 125,000 words) is being decoded by brain signal analysis. But nowhere in the text do we actually have a claim that any of the sentences were randomly generated from such a vocabulary list; and nowhere in the text do we have an assertion that the sentence was randomly chosen from a very large set of sentences such as a set of 100,000 sentences.  For all we know there may be only a very small number of sentences, each of which was previously given to the subjects. So the impressive-looking "decoding" might actually be something a thousand times less impressive, something easily obtainable by a few statistical or programing tricks, even if it is utterly impossible to decode what word someone is thinking of by gathering EEG signals from someone whose mouth is immobile.  

Referring to the subject T16 shown in their little video clip, the paper says, "T16 had online retraining only for the 125,000-word vocabulary evaluation blocks, in which the cued sentences were used as ground truth to retrain the model, but only after those sentences had been decoded online." Although obscure, that sentence should be enough to make us suspect that the video involving subject T16 is just some smoke-and-mirrors affair, not any real decoding of what someone was thinking from the person's brain states or brain waves. 

As the paper lacks adequate documentation on what was going on, we should have no confidence in the results.  The authors of the paper help create a fog of mystery about what they did by having the paper document about five different experiments, none of which is clearly and consistently named, and none of which is very well documented in regard to the exact procedure followed. This is not how to do a persuasive experiment showing an ability to decode "inner speech" from brain waves. Instead, do a single experiment in which everything that went on is so well-documented that someone else might be able to reproduce the result.  

Whenever a completely silent person's lips and tongue are motionless, and he is not moving any of his muscles,  it is impossible to decode what a person is thinking or imagining (or a sentence he is trying to speak) using only brain scans produced by MRI machines or the brain waves picked up by EEG readings. But using a variety of misleading tricks such as the ones listed above and many other possible misleading tricks, researchers can create misleading impressions that they are making progress at a task that is impossible. 

He Had Almost No Brain, But Was Bilingual With Near-Normal Verbal Skills

Neuroscientists are members of a belief community dedicated to preserving the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. So when neuroscientists discover case histories that seem to defy such a dogma, neuroscientists tend to write up the results with papers having a title not likely to be noticed. An example of this was when neuroscientists discovered that a French civil servant had almost no brain. The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet with a paper having the title "Brain of a White Collar Worker," as if the authors were trying to get as few readers as possible by creating the dullest-sounding title they could create.  The paper had the visual below, in which missing parts of the brain are shown in black:

The 2007 paper told us that the subject had an overall IQ of 75 and a verbal IQ of 84, and that he was a father employed as a civil servant (a government worker). Such occupational success with so little brain defies claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. The Reuters story here discusses the case. 

An equally dramatic case of high mental function and very little brain was discussed in a 2018 paper with a title that also seemed chosen to attract as little attention as possible. The title of the paper (which can be read here) was "Volumetric MRI Analysis of a Case of Severe Ventriculomegaly," a title that sounds as dull as dishwater. But the case is a fascinating one. We read of a bilingual 60-year-old man with near-normal verbal skills but very little brain. 

We are given the visual below, which shows on the left the brain of the 60-year-old man, and on the right what a normal brain looks like. The black areas are areas in which normal brain tissue is gone, having been replaced by fluid. 

We read this about tests performed on the person whose brain is 

"The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III; Wechsler, 1997) revealed a borderline IQ of 79, with a verbal IQ of 88, non-verbal performance IQ of 74, poor working memory IQ of 71, verbal comprehension IQ of 93, and visual-spatial IQ of 80. The patient had difficulty completing tasks requiring working memory, which was in the 3rd percentile, and processing speed was extremely slow (in the 1st percentile)."

A verbal IQ of 88 is near-normal, and a normal verbal IQ is about 100. 

We read that this person with little brain tissue was bilingual (in other words, someone who could speak two languages). We read that he "plays guitar well." We hear some vague, vacuous speculation trying (in the thinnest way) to offer a bit of explanation of how someone with so little brain could have "preserved function, including being fluent in two languages and mastering playing a musical instrument."

I have another example of a neuroscientist paper with a dull-as-dishwater title but a sensational case of high mental function and little brain tissue. It is the paper "Colpocephaly in adults" which you can read here. We read of a 60-year-old woman who had the great majority of her brain destroyed by a congenital disease, apparently one present from birth or from early childhood. We read this:

"Growing up, she had a reading learning disability; however, she graduated from high school with average grades, married in her 20s and had one child. She worked in a factory and most recently as a home health aide. At the time of presentation...She was alert, appropriately oriented and had normal language function."  

Below is what the woman's brain looked like. The black areas are areas hollowed out by the congenital disease. 

The cases discussed here are only a fraction of the cases of high mental function despite extremely severe brain loss. You can read of many more such cases in my post here. Collectively the cases provide one of the strongest reasons for thinking that the brain is not the source of the human mind. 

The Reckless Foolishness of Brain-Scanning Healthy Babies in Neuroscience Experiments

 A recent article in Scientific American by neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies.  In a previous post, I documented the untruth of the article's claims that two people could not form memories because of damage to their hippocampus. Let us now look at other aspects of the article that are just as dubious and misleading. 

Turk-Browne makes this untrue claim: "Scientists were able to retrieve an otherwise forgotten memory by stimulating neurons in the hippocampus that had been active during an early experience." His only support for this untrue claim is a link to an interview with neuroscientist Tomas Ryan. In the interview Ryan claims, "We found out we could optically stimulate the engrams for forgotten memories -- and the memories were recalled." In the text of the interview that statement by Ryan has a link to Ryan's very low-quality paper "Engram Cells Retain Memory Under Retrograde Amnesia." That is a junk science paper guilty of several examples of bad research practices, such as the use of an unreliable method of trying to judge recall in rodents (the worthless "freezing behavior" method"), and also the use of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 8 mice or 10 mice. Contrary to the groundless boasts of Turk-Browne and Ryan, no evidence was produced by experiments of this type that a forgotten memory can be artificially reactivated.  

What goes on in poorly designed experiments of this type is that mice are brain-zapped using light stimulation (optogenetics), and scientists claim the mice are "freezing in fear" because they are recalling a memory of a fearful experience, one "artificially activated" by the optogenetic light stimulation. But it is known that such optogenetic stimulation by itself causes "freezing behavior." A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing in rodents by stimulating a wide variety of regions. It says, "It is possible to induce freezing by activating a variety of brain areas and projections, including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012), lateral, basal and central amygdala (Ciocchi et al., 2010); Johansen et al., 2010;  Gore et al., 2015a), periaqueductal gray (Tovote et al., 2016), motor and primary sensory cortices (Kass et al., 2013), prefrontal projections (Rajasethupathy et al., 2015) and retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014).”

So no actual evidence is being produced of an artificial evocation of a memory stored in a brain when you use optogenetic stimulation of a brain region. All that is going on is that mice are allegedly becoming more immobile while they are brain-zapped, which does not tell us anything about memory. I say "allegedly" because there are no standards when it comes to judging whether mice were more immobile when exposed to some stimulus, with the reports of immobility typically being subjective, unreliable ratings by observers who did not follow a blinding protocol and who are free to choose any time span for judging immobility (30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, two minutes or three minutes), whichever time span best seems to support a claim of "higher freezing behavior." 

I later read a claim in the Scientific American article that shocked me. It was this statement: "My lab has been on a decade long quixotic adventure to study awake infants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a form of brain imaging that can measure activity from regions deep in the brain such as the hippocampus." When we examine the history of MRI scans, we see a history of overconfidence, and authorities dogmatically asserting that "MRI scans are perfectly safe," when they did not actually know whether they were perfectly safe. The 2009 study here ("Genotoxic effects of 3 T magnetic resonance imaging in cultured human lymphocytes") cautions about the use of a high-intensity("3T and above") MRI, and states that "potential health risks are implied in the MRI and especially HF MRI environment due to high-static magnetic  fields, fast gradient magnetic fields, and strong radiofrequency electromagnetic fields," also noting that "these results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human  lymphocytes," referring to effects  that may cause cancer. The experiment discussed below used just such a 3 T MRI scanner. 

There is a rule-of-thumb about things that may increase a person's risk of cancer. The rule is that the younger a person is, the more likely some possibly carcinogenic effect is to produce cancer in someone.  Some particular stimulus might give you a 1% greater chance of cancer per year. But if you are 75 years, that is very unlikely to cause cancer in you. Conversely, if you are ten years old, that stimulus might have a very substantial chance or likelihood of producing cancer in you, if it increases your chance of getting cancer by 1% per year. 

So the rule in medicine is: take the greatest caution to avoid exposing children to any possible cancer risk. We should then be horrified to hear of some neuroscientist subjecting infants to unnecessary fMRI scans. There is not merely a substantial cancer risk from fMRI scans to infants. There are also other risks. Less than 30 days ago someone was killed by an fMRI machine after being magnetically sucked into the machine.  In 2001 a six-year-old boy was killed by an fMRI machine after its powerful magnets caused an oxygen cannister to hit his head. 

Historical headlines of MRI deaths in the past

Turk-Browne tells us that he has conducted 400 fMRI sessions, making this sound like 400 experimental sessions with infants. None of the parents who allowed this should have agreed to allow such MRI scans on their infant children, unless there was a medical necessity for such work. Subjecting infants to potentially hazardous experiments sounds like  neuroscience research gone far astray, an example of morally reckless inanity.  

Turk-Browne makes an unfounded boast, claiming "A team at my lab led by Tristan Yates...used this method to discover that the infant hippocampus can store memories beginning around one year of age." The claim is untrue. The claim has a link to the very low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne.  You can read the paper here. The paper provides not the slightest evidence of any such thing as an encoding or storage of memory in the hippocampus or anywhere else. The study group sizes are only 13, too small for any reliable result to be claimed. 

The authors of the paper try to make use of an analysis of a "subsequent memory effect." That is an unreliable neuroscience method that is usually pure pareidolia. It works like this: you scan someone's brain when he is being exposed to some stimulus, and also scan the person's brain when that person is asked to recall that stimulus. (For example, you might scan a person's brain while he is looking at some word pair he is asked to memorize, and then scan the same person's brain when he is asked to recall the second word, given only the first.) Then a neuroscientist looks for some region of the brain that showed "superior activation" both during the exposure to the stimulus, and the recall of the stimulus. This is an example of noise-mining. Regions of the brain randomly undergo tiny fluctuations in activity. So anyone analyzing brain scans can always find some tiny little region that was, say, 1% more active during the exposure to the visual stimulus and the later recall of the stimulus. We would expect you to be able to find such regions even if brains do not store memories. Similarly, if I eagerly analyze rain puddles in Chicago when the New England Patriots are playing football and rain puddles in Chicago when the Kansas City Chiefs are playing football, I may be able to find some little part of Chicago where there was an increased number of rain puddles during both of these types of games. But that does nothing to show that such football games have any causal relation to rain puddles in Chicago. 

The paper "Identifying Causal Subsequent Memory Effects" reported that "we are unable to identify any signal that reliably predicts subsequent memory after adjusting for confounding variables, bringing into doubt the causal status of these effects." In other words, when properly analyzed in the fullest way, there was no evidence for any "subsequent memory effect." 

Any paper claiming a "subsequent memory effect" with any credibility would have to meet various rigorous standards:

(1) The paper would have to be a pre-registered paper dedicated to trying to confirm some very specific hypothesis related to a subsequent memory effect. 

(2) There would have to be a rigorous blinding protocol, to prevent some deal in which the scientists were guilty of "seeing what you are hoping to see." 

(3) The subjects would have to be old enough to follow instructions, so that you could reliably tell what seconds were the learning period (or exposure-to-stimulus) and what seconds were the recall-of-stimulus period. 

(4) Adequate study groups (probably of at least 30 subjects per study group) would be needed. 

(5) A sample size calculation would need to be done to show that the study had used a study group size large enough to produce a high statistical power such as 80%.

None of these things occurred in the low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne. There was no pre-registration of a hypothesis to be tested. No substantial blinding protocol was followed, but merely a very limited level of blinding subverted by rater suggestions (as described below), with apparently no blinding occurring for the brain scan analysis. The paper has no discussion of a detailed blinding protocol. The study group sizes were only 13. The subjects were not old enough to follow instructions, being mere babies. No sample size calculation was done.

 Turk-Browne and his colleagues attempt to derive some "subsequent memory effect" through some bizarre method in which they are trying to judge which stimulus a baby was looking at, and trying to guess whether a baby remembered a previously seen photo, based on which he looked at. It's methodological fumbling.  You can't reliably tell which of two photos a baby is looking at, nor does which photo a baby looks at tell you anything about what a baby is recalling.  

We read in the Supplemental Information document that judgments about which directions babies were looking in were made by human raters.  We read this description of the nonsensical procedure:

"Human coders labeled frames of the video recordings of infant gaze during the encoding and test trials as: looking center, right of center, left of center, off-screen (blinking or looking away), or undetected (out of the camera’s field of view or otherwise not visible, such as being blocked by the infant’s arm). During encoding trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking at center' because there was only one image on the screen at center. During test trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking left or right' because there were two images, left and right of center, respectively."

 Instead of simply judging objectively about which direction the babies were looking at, these "human coders" were pushed to judge in a particular way, like some baseball umpire getting a message in his earphone telling him "that was probably a strike" or "that was probably a ball." These instructions amount to a form of bias injection, and they mean none of the data about which direction the babies were looking at is reliable. Since none of that data is reliable, none of the claimed data about a "subsequent memory effect" is reliable. 

We read in the Supplemental Information file about shady statistical fooling around which sounds like "keep torturing the data until it confesses" shenanigans. Here is only a small part of the impossible-to-justify convoluted rigmarole that went on:

"We used nonparametric bootstrap resampling to test for statistical significance. Specifically, we resampled participants for the contrast of interest with replacement 1000 times and recalculated the average for each iteration. The P value was quantified as the proportion of iterations with the opposite sign of the original subsequent memory effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. This analysis was first performed across the full sample, then separately in median splits of lower and higher average familiarity preference groups and younger and older infant age groups. We similarly quantified age-group differences by: resampling participants from among the younger and older infants, respectively, with replacement; calculating the mean value for each age group; and then subtracting the younger group mean from the older group mean. Again, the P value was the proportion of 1000 iterations that were of the opposite sign as the original group difference, doubled for a two-tailed test. Finally, we tested for a continuous age effect by resampling participants with replacement and recalculating the Spearman’s rank correlation between the subsequent memory effect and age in months over the sampled bivariate data pairs. Again, the P value was calculated as the proportion of resampled coefficients with the opposite sign as the original age effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. In exploratory whole-brain analyses, we performed nonparametric group statistics using the randomise function in FSL."

In the Scientific American article Turk-Browne speaks clearly about his ridiculous methodology when he says this: "If the infant looked longer at the photograph they had seen before, we labeled that image as remembered; otherwise, it was forgotten." That's an absurd procedure. You can't tell whether a baby remembered something by whether he looked longer at a picture on the left or the right, and human raters typically cannot even reliably tell which of two photos placed in front of him a baby is looking longer at. When later in the Scientific American article Turk-Browne claims that "the hippocampus was more active when infants viewed images that they seemed to remember," he is making a groundless statement based on his defective methodology, which provides no reliable data on what infants remembered in his experiments. 

The idea of "familiarity preference" made in the paper (the assumption that babies would be more likely to look at a photo they had seen before) is an idea the exact opposite of the "novelty preference" assumption in many mouse experiments done by neuroscientists, which assume that a rodent will be more likely to explore some compartment they have not explored before. The authors confess "we did not observe a familiarity preference at the group level," which is a confession that helps show how misguided the methods and design of the study was. In other words, judging from the whole data set gathered, babies do not have any tendency to look more at a photo they have seen before. This comes as no surprise to me, having co-raised academically high-scoring twin daughters who never paid any attention to anything on the TV screen until they were 20 months old or older. Figure 2 of the paper is laughable, being data gathered from only a single subject. 

The whole experiment is just a horrible-methodology mess of reckless infant endangerment inanity. Nothing has been learned about human memory from this nonsense. What has mainly happened is that some infants have been senselessly put at risk for the sake of a junk science paper. What percent (if any) of the babies endangered here will end up getting cancer because of their needless involvement in this methodological nonsense, because of the genotoxic effects of 3T MRI scanners mentioned in the scientific paper quoted above? We will not know for many years, if ever. The general rule of neuroscientists is  "scan them and forget them." Neuroscientists do not do long-term tracking of health problems arising over a lifetime from subjects who participated in experimental fMRI scanning.  

In the wikipedia.org article for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we read the troubling passage below:

"Genotoxic (i.e., potentially carcinogenic) effects of MRI scanning have been demonstrated in vivo and in vitro, leading a recent review to recommend 'a need for further studies and prudent use in order to avoid unnecessary examinations, according to the precautionary principle'."

A 2011 paper different from the 2009 paper quoted above states this:

"We observed a significant increase in the frequency of single-strand DNA breaks following exposure to a 3 T MRI...These results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human lymphocytes."

A more recent year 2024 study ("Evaluation of the Biological Effects of Exposures to Magnetic Resonance Imaging on Single-Strand DNA: An In-vivo Study") found similar results, finding that MRI scanners only half as powerful as 3T scanners can produce genotoxic effects.  It reported this:

"The DNA single-strand breaks were significant for all tested parameters in both MRI 1.5 T (p<0.01) and 3.0 T (p<0.001)....The percentage of cells destroyed in the group exposed to 3.0 T MRI was increased to 12.65 ± 1.0 after 10 minutes of exposure."

The supplemental information of the "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants" paper discussed above mentions an average MRI exposure time of 8 minutes using a 3T MRI scanner. Given what is reported in the year 2024 study quoted above, we have every reason to fear that genotoxic effects and cell damage may have occurred in the infants senselessly involved in this poorly designed study. 

A paper tells us the following about the newer twice-as-powerful

3T MRI machines that have been replacing the older 1.5T MRI

machines, suggesting their magnetic fields are much stronger than

the strength needed to lift a car:

"The main magnetic field of a 3T system is 60,000 times

 the earth's magnet field. The strength of electromagnets

 used to pick up cars in junk yards is about the field strength 

of MRI systems with field strengths from 1.5-2.0T.

 It is strong enough to pull fork-lift tires off of machinery,

 pull heavy-duty floor buffers and mop buckets into

 the bore of the magnet, pull stretchers across the room

 and turn oxygen bottles into flying projectiles reaching

 speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour."   

I strongly advise all parents never to let their children participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless a doctor has told them that the brain scan is medically advisable solely for the health of the child.  I advise adults not to participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless they have read something that gives them warrant for believing that the experimenters are following best experimental practices (as experimental neuroscientists rarely do), and that there will not be a very high chance that the adults will be undergoing unnecessary health risks for the sake of some "bad practices" poorly designed "fishing expedition" experiment that does not advance human understanding.  If a neuroscientist looking for research subjects tells you that brain scans are perfectly safe, remember that many neuroscientists often dogmatically make claims that are unproven or doubtful, and often pretend to know things they do not actually know (see the posts of this site for very many examples). 

I also strongly advise anyone who participated in any brain scanning experiment to permanently keep very careful records of their participation, to find out and write down the name of the scientific paper corresponding to the study, to write down and keep the names of any scientists or helpers they were involved with, to permanently keep a copy of any forms they signed, and to keep a careful log of any health problems experienced by the person who had the brain scan.  Such information may be useful should such a person decide to file a lawsuit. 

Misstatements About Lonni Sue Johnson Are Like Misstatements About Henry Molaison

 A recent article in Scientific American is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies. 

The author is a neuroscientist named Nick Turk-Browne who fills up his article with unfounded claims and bad reasoning. First he suggests the reason people cannot remember their first five years is that the hippocampus is not active during those years. That makes no sense. The hippocampus is active during the first five years of life. 

Turk-Browne then repeats the very frequently repeated false claim that patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) suffered hippocampus damage in adulthood that made him unable to form new memories, saying that Henry Molaison was "unable to store memories,"  The claim is not true. 

Henry Molaison (patient H.M.)  was able to remember very many things from his life before his hippocampus damage. A 14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

Another paper ("Evidence for Semantic Learning in Profound Amnesia: An Investigation With Patient H.M.") tells us this about patient H.M., clearly providing evidence that patient HM could form many new memories:

"We used cued recall and forced-choice recognition tasks to investigate whether the patient H.M. had acquired knowledge of people who became famous after the onset of his amnesia. Results revealed that, with first names provided as cues, he was able to recall the corresponding famous last name for 12 of 35 postoperatively famous personalities. This number nearly doubled when semantic cues were added, suggesting that his knowledge of the names was not limited to perceptual information, but was incorporated in a semantic network capable of supporting explicit recall. In forced-choice recognition, H.M. discriminated 87% of postmorbid famous names from foils. Critically, he was able to provide uniquely identifying semantic facts for one-third of these recognized names, describing John Glenn, for example, as 'the first rocketeer' and Lee Harvey Oswald as a man who 'assassinated the president.' Although H.M.’s semantic learning was clearly impaired, the results provide robust, unambiguous evidence that some new semantic learning can be supported by structures beyond the hippocampus proper."

Turk-Browne also makes the claim that because of a bad case of a  hippocampus damage, Lonni Sue Johnson was "unable to store memories."  That claim is also untrue.  Lonni Sue Johnson had very bad brain damage after a case of viral encephalitis. She was discussed at length in a book "The Eternal Now" by Michael D. Lemonick. But on page 13 of the preface of the book, we read a different claim. Instead of someone claiming that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form any new memories, we merely read that "she could no longer form new memories that she'd be able to rely on in the future, except in the most rudimentary way." This is an admission that Loni Sue Johnson could form new memories. 

We can have some skepticism about such a claim, because it is by an author trying to present a compilation of interesting cases of loss of memory, and such a person may be motivated to exaggerate memory loss, to make the story more interesting and the book more marketable. 

Lemonick's makes generalizations that the memory of Lonni Sue Johnson that we should take with some skepticism, because they are not established by formal tests. What seems to often be happening is that Lemonick is making generalizations based on limited anecdotal evidence, generalizations that may be hasty generalizations that would be disproven by extended formal testing.  

Lemonick tells us that Lonnie Sue Johnson had a big hole in the center of her head. That may have affected her recognition memory and her visual acuity.  So when we later read about Lonnie failing to recognize someone she had previously met, that is no proof of an inability to form new memories. It may be mere evidence of a visual problem or a recognition problem. 

So, for example, when Lemonick tells us on page 9 that "if she sees someone new, then sees them again a day later (or even five minutes later, as I discovered for myself), she'll have no idea that she ever saw them before," we do not actually know that this is some inability to form new memories.  It could be some mere difficulty in visual recognition or visual perception. Or, it could be that Lemonick is wrongly making sweeping generalizations based on very little data. If someone does not recognize you after meeting you a few minutes before, that is nowhere close to sufficient evidence that the person is unable to form new memories. 

The claim that Lemonick makes on page 9 that Lonni had lost memory of some of her family members is another claim that we should treat with suspicion. It may be a claim based mainly on a failure of visual recognition. Lemonick makes statements such as "she didn't know Kay, or her daughter Maya," referring to someone who was not Lonni's daughter. But what justification does Lemonick have for such claims?  How does he presume to know what a brain-damaged person did or did not know or remember when seeing some friend or her daughter?  Was the claim based merely on a failure of Lonni to recite their names after seeing them? We don't know. 

What we need here is some systematic procedure to test such a claim that a memory of someone's daughter had been lost. Such a procedure would include both a test of visual recognition, and a transcript of a long interview.  The interview might ask questions such as "Do you remember Kay?" and "Have you ever heard the voice that will speak next?" and "Do you recognize the face you will see next?" and so forth.  But we don't get details of any such a procedure.  We mainly get Lemonick kind of presuming what Lonni did or did not remember, based on thin evidence. 

On the next page (page 10) it becomes clear that the heavily brain-damaged Lonni did not lose all her memories of the past. We read that "she knows Maggi and Aline, but when you show her photographs of her aunts and uncles, she recognizes only some of them." We read that "she does know that she once had two airplanes." When Lemonick claims that Lonni does not remember her wedding day or her divorce, we should treat such claims with great skepticism, because they are not backed up by any quotes that Lemonick gives. And if you have a  quote from someone saying she does not remember some event, that does not well prove that the person has no memory of such an event. Ask the right questions at different times, and the same person may give you some details of the event. For example, ask a person about Napoleon, and she may say, "I don't remember anything about Napoleon." But then ask about Napoleon's final battle, and you may get an answer of "Waterloo." I can hardly overemphasize the importance of this point. Single-statement self-reports by a person about what he remembers on a topic may be very unreliable. And such self-reports coming from brain-damaged persons may be particularly unreliable. 

Often when a person says that he does not remember anything about some topic, it's just a way of indicating that the person does not want to be bothered with trying to recall what he remembers about that topic. Ask an adult what he remembers about the war of 1812, and there's a good chance he may say something like, "I don't remember anything about that." But ask the same person whether he remembers any fire occurring during that war, and there's a good chance the person may give an answer such as, "Yes, I remember the British burnt the White House," referring to an event of that war.  It is easy to imagine possible reasons why someone who got divorced might make some statement sounding like she does not remember her wedding or her divorce (for example, the person might be making an excuse to avoid recalling possibly painful memories of an unsuccessful marriage). 

Later on the same page when Lemonick claims that Lonni had lost "just about every other memory she'd accumulated in fifty-seven years of life," we should doubt very much that Lemonick is speaking correctly. What is the justification for such a claim? Was some formal standard test done to justify such a claim? Or is Lemonick simply making guesses about what Lonni remembers?

I made a search on Google Scholar for scientific papers referring to Lonni Sue Johnson. I was unable to find a single scientific paper that mentioned her using that name. I did find an article by a science writer, one claiming that Lonni "could not form new memories." That does not match the previously quoted statement by Lemonick suggesting that Lonni could form "rudimentary" new memories. The article presents no data supporting this claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. The article refers to "published studies of her memory after the viral attack."  We have some citations at the end of the paper. Only one of the papers cited refers to Lonni Sue Johnson, using the initials L. S. J.  The paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract of the paper does not mention any inability of this L. S. J. to form new memories. 

The claim in the article above does not match what we are told in a 2016 Johns Hopkins article, which merely says that Lonni Sue Johnson had a "severely restricted ability to learn new facts," which is different from being unable to learn new facts. 

The video here shows a picture of Lonni Sue's brain, showing severe damage, with the black areas being places hollowed out by the virus:

We hear a narrator (whose claims should be taken with skepticism) claiming that Lonni Sue lost almost all of her memories. But around the 2:50 mark we hear Lonni Sue successfully and very rapidly reciting all of the letters in the alphabet in correct order, performance seemingly incompatible with the narrator's claim. Around the 3:00 mark the narrator says Lonni Sue has "a little ability to create new memories," contrary to Turk-Browne's claim that she could not form new memories.  At the 3:28 mark we see Lonni Sue playing what looks like a violin very well (the instrument seems to be a viola). Around the 5:36 mark we see very good drawings Lonni Sue made after her brain damage. 

Around the 5:56 mark we hear Lonni Sue speaking like a normal person, saying art "is a language, a visual language, that you can reach everyone of every nationality," and that "writing is fun too." Around the 8:30 mark we hear Lonni Sue sing-speaking, singing in an apparently improvised melody. 

Another video on Lonni Sue has the phony title "The Woman Who Lost All Her Memories," a title not matching the facts of the case described above. The video provides no evidence to support the claim that Lonni Sue could not form new memories. 

In this case we are lacking any systematic evidence for the claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. For such a claim to be made with credibility, we would need something like a transcript of a long interview, or the results of hours of systematic testing. A failure of someone to recognize a person they had met before is not good evidence of an inability to form new memories.  Such a failure could be due to visual processing defects and visual recognition problems that are mainly related to vision rather than memory. 

Remembering that old slogan "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," we can translate the slogan to mean "you should have very strong evidence before making a claim of the extraordinary."  The claim that Hubert Pearce had extrasensory perception is an extraordinary claim, but it is backed up very well by many hundreds of hours of very careful tests that Professor Joseph Rhine did with Hubert Pearce (tests described here).  The claim that Alexis Didier had powers of clairvoyance is an extraordinary claim, but it is supported by endless successful tests performed of Alexis Didier, some of which are described here. No one should be making a claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories unless they have very strong evidence to back up such a claim, such as a long, detailed scientific paper giving the results of very careful tests of her. Such evidence seems nowhere to be found. 

Lack of motivation by someone asked a question is usually a more plausible explanation for a lack of an answer than some explanation of an inability to learn. Claims of an inability to learn would be far more convincing if they were backed up by careful tests repeated many times, in which subjects were strongly motivated to perform highly.  You can imagine all kinds of ways to motivate better performance, such as offering 300 dollars for each item recalled.

He may be wrongly reported as having antegrade amnesia

In my next post in a few days I will discuss other misstatements in the Scientific American article, in which we hear a discussion of   neuroscience experiments done on infants, experiments I will criticize as being goofy and reckless.  We should always remember that when it comes to cases of memory difficulties, the world of neuroscience literature is a "give them an inch, and they'll take a mile" affair. We should remember that there is a very strong incentive for people to make cases of memory difficulties sound worse than they are, because such claims may increase citation counts and book sales and video viewership, in a way that leads to greater profit or success for someone engaging in such exaggerations, and because such claims may be made by those very eager to conjure up claims that may seem to support "brains store memories" dogmas. 

There Is No Robust Evidence That Neuron Firing in the Brain's Frontal Lobes Is Information Processing

 On the day I am writing this post I see in some news article a typical statement about the brain. Someone states this

"Our brains process information via a vast network containing many millions of neurons, which can each send and receive chemical and electrical signals. Information is transmitted by nerve impulses that pass from one neuron to the next, thanks to a flow of ions across the neuron’s cell membrane. This results in an experimentally detectable change in electrical potential difference across the membrane known as the 'action potential' or 'spike.' "

But is this an accurate description of what is occurring in the frontal lobes of the brain? It would seem not. Neurons are continually firing in the frontal lobes of the brain, but there is no evidence that such firing is information processing or information transmittal in the sense of data or knowledge being passed around. 

It is true that a certain type of information processing is occurring throughout the brain. The chromosomes of all cells (including neurons) contain DNA, and when that DNA is read, it can be considered a form of information processing. But such information processing is something different from the firing of neurons.

Neuron firing may involve some information processing in two areas of the brain: the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe. These two regions are shown below (the parietal lobe in yellow and the occipital lobe in green, at the back). The occipital lobe is connected to the eyes by the optic nerve, so you might say that this lobe at the back of the brain processes information received from the eyes. The parietal lobe receives inputs such as touch sensations and pain sensations, so you might say that this lobe processes such inputs. 

But what about the frontal lobes at the front of the brain? (I will refer to lobes because there is one such lobe in each hemisphere or half of the brain.) The neurons in the frontal lobes are always firing, at a rate of about 1 action potential per second, to as high as 100 or more action potentials per second. Is there any adequate warrant for claiming that such neuron firing is an example of information processing? There is not. 

We might have a reasonable basis for calling such neuron firing in the frontal lobes "information processing" if someone had been able to decipher some kind of code corresponding to such neuron firing. But no one has been able to do any such thing. There has been all kinds of speculation about some kind of coding system that might be used by firing neurons to transmit information. But that has all been mainly  nothing but speculation. No robust evidence has ever been produced that the firing of neurons in the frontal lobe is any kind of real information processing or information transmittal.  When scientists have tried to produce evidence for such a thing, the results are merely pareidolia, like someone claiming to see the face of Jesus in his toast. 

But, it may be claimed, don't we know that the frontal lobes produce human thought, and does not such human thought qualify as information processing? No, we do not actually know that the frontal lobes of the brain or any part of the brain produce human thought. 

When fMRI scans are taken of the brain during cognitive activity, no strong evidence is produced backing up claims that the frontal lobes of the brain are some "seat of thought." Such scans typically show variations from region to region of only about 1 part in 200. The little regions with 1 part in 200 greater difference are scattered around the brain. Such fMRI scans are actually consistent with the claim that the brain is not the source of human thinking or cognition. because the variations are no greater than you might expect from chance variations. But you might think otherwise after looking at one of those "lying with colors" visuals that tries to make regions that differ by only 1 part in 200 look like they differ by some substantial percentage. 

It is part of the dubious folklore of neuroscientists that the prefrontal cortex or frontal lobes are some center of higher reasoning. But the scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The authors of the scientific paper tried an alternate approach, using a test of so-called "fluid" intelligence on 80 patients with prefrontal damage. They concluded "our findings do not support a connection between fluid intelligence and the frontal lobes." Table 7 of this study reveals that the average intelligence of the 80 patients with prefrontal cortex damage was 99.5 – only a tiny bit lower than the average IQ of 100. Table 8 tells us that two of the  patients with prefrontal cortex damage had genius IQs of higher than 140.

In a similar vein, the paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence (a plausible assumption given that smarter people would be more likely to have smart behavior reducing their chance of injury). Similarly, this study checked the IQ of 7 patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and found that they had an average IQ of 101.

It also should be remembered that brain-damaged patients taking standard IQ tests may have higher intelligence than the test score suggests.  A standard IQ test requires visual perception skill (to read the test book) and finger coordination (to fill in the right answers using a pencil). Brain damage might cause reduced finger coordination and reduced visual perception unrelated to intelligence; and such things might cause a subject to do below-average on a standard IQ test even if his intelligence is normal.  

Using the term "neoplasms" to refer to brain tumors, the 1966 study here states, "Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test."  

In the paper "Neurocognitive outcome after pediatric epilepsy surgery" by Elisabeth M. S. Sherman, we have some discussion of the effects on children of hemispherectomy, surgically removing half of their brains to stop seizures. Such a procedure involves a 50% reduction in the total volume of the frontal lobes of the brain, and a 50% reduction of the prefrontal cortex. We are told this:

Cognitive levels in many children do not appear to be altered significantly by hemispherectomy. Several researchers have also noted increases in the intellectual functioning of some children following this procedure....Explanations for the lack of decline in intellectual function following hemispherectomy have not been well elucidated. 

Referring to a study by Gilliam, the paper states that of 21 children who had parts of their brains removed to treat epilepsy, including 10 who had surgery to the frontal lobe, none of the 10 patients with frontal lobe surgery had a decline in IQ post-operatively, and that two of the children with frontal lobe resections had "an increase in IQ greater than 10 points following surgery." 

The paper here gives precise before and after IQ scores for more than 50 children who had half of their brains removed in a hemispherectomy operation.  For one set of 31 patients, the IQ went down by an average of only 5 points. For another set of 15 patients, the IQ went down less than 1 point. For another set of 7 patients the IQ went up by 6 points. 

A writer at Slate.com states the following: 

"And victims of prefrontal injuries can still pass most neurological exams with flying colors. Pretty much anything you can measure in the lab—memory, language, motor skills, reasoning, intelligence—seems intact in these people."

In 1930 a patient listed as Joe A. in the medical literature underwent a bilateral frontal lobectomy performed by Dr. Walter Dandy, who removed almost all of his frontal lobes. An autopsy in 1949 confirmed that "both frontal lobes had been removed." The paper describing the autopsy said that from 1930 to 1944 Joe A.'s behavior was "virtually unchanged." On page 236 of this source, we read that Dandy said this of three patients including Joe A.: "These three patients with the extirpation of such vast areas of brain tissue without the disclosure of any resulting defect is most disappointing." I could see how it would be disappointing for someone hoping to prove a connection between some brain area and intellectual function. Page 237 of the same source tells us that on casual meeting Joe A. appeared to be mentally normal.  Page 239 of this source states this about Joe A, summarizing the findings of Brickner.:

"Nor was intellectual disturbance primary. The frontal lobes played no essential role in intellectual function; they merely added to intellectual intricacy, and ' were not intellectual centers in any sense except, perhaps, a quantitative one.' " 

A 1939 paper you can read here was entitled "A Study of the Effect of Right Frontal Lobectomy on Intelligence and Temperament." A patient C.J was tested for IQ before and after an operation removing his right frontal lobe. He had the same IQ of 139 before and after the operation. Page 9 says the lobectomy "produced no modification of intellectual or personality functions."  On page 10 we are told this about patients having one of their frontal lobes removed:

"Jefferson (1937) reported a series of eight frontal lobectomies in which the patients were observed for intellectual and emotional deficits following operation. There were five cases of right frontal lobectomy, three of whom were living and well when the article was written. It could be stated definitely that in two of the three cases there were no abnormalities which could be noted by the surgeon, patient, or family, and while the third case showed a mild memory defect, the operation had been too recently performed to judge whether or not the loss would be permanent. The three cases of left frontal excision likewise showed no significant changes, but comment was made that one patient was slightly lacking in reserve, another remained slightly facetious, and the third, who suffered a transient post-operative aphasia, appeared a trifle slow and diffident."

The following excerpt from a scientific paper tells us of additional cases of people who did not seem to suffer much mind damage after massive damage to the frontal lobes or prefrontal cortex. Resection is defined as "the process of cutting out tissue or part of an organ."

"Several well-documented patients have been described with a normal level of consciousness after extensive frontal damage. For example, Patient A (Brickner, 1952) (Fig. 2A), after extensive surgical removal of the frontal lobes bilaterally, including Brodmann areas 8–12, 16, 24, 32, 33, and 45–47, sparing only area 6 and Broca's area (Brickner, 1936), 'toured the Neurological Institute in a party of five, two of whom were distinguished neurologists, and none of them noticed anything unusual until their attention was especially called to A after the passage of more than an hour.'  Patient KM (Hebb and Penfield, 1940) had a near-complete bilateral prefrontal resection for epilepsy surgery (including bilateral Brodmann areas 9–12, 32, and 45–47), after which his IQ improved. Patients undergoing bilateral resection of prefrontal cortical areas for psychosurgery (Mettler et al., 1949), including Brodmann areas 10, 11, 45, 46, 47, or 8, 9, 10, or 44, 45, 46, 10, or area 24 (ventral anterior cingulate), remained fully conscious (see also Penfield and Jasper, 1954; Kozuch, 2014; Tononi et al., 2016b). A young man who had fallen on an iron spike that completely penetrated both frontal lobes, affecting bilateral Brodmann areas 10, 11, 24, 25, 32, and 45–47, and areas 44 and 6 on the right side, went on to marry, raise two children, have a professional life, and never complained of perceptual or other deficits (Mataró et al., 2001)."

Apparently patient KM got smarter after they took out most of his prefrontal cortex. That's a case helping to show that brains don't make minds. The book here discusses intelligence tests done on patients who underwent surgery on the frontal lobes:

"It was natural that the effect of an injury on the frontal lobes, said to be concerned with the higher functions of men, should be measured by these tests of intelligence. The absence of marked effects on mental ability, as measured by these intelligence tests, was, not surprisingly, felt to be puzzling." 

This paper here describes a case of a "modern Phineas Gage": a patient C.D. who suffered massive prefrontal  damage after a penetrating head injury. But C.D's IQ after the injury was measured at 113, well above average.  His verbal IQ after the injury was 119, in the 90th percentile. We read:

"C.D. reported that he did not have any cognitive or emotional problems following the accident. In describing how his thinking skills were completely unaffected, C.D. stated that, 'all the shattered bone was caught in the gray matter in front of the brain.' " 

The paper also tells us, "C.D.’s performances on memory tests were all in the average to above-average ranges in terms of the traditional measure of level of correct responses." 

There is another case of this type. The case is particularly interesting because it helps to discredit the claim that the frontal lobes of the brain are necessary for language and thinking.  The case is reported in the paper "Early bilateral and massive compromise of the frontal lobes."  We read about an amazing case of an 8-year-old girl with good mental skills despite having basically no frontal lobes of the brain. We see an MRI scan showing a gigantic black empty region in the brain corresponding to missing frontal lobes.

We read that a brain scan at age three revealed this:

"GC's first report of frontal compromise at age three. MRI scans revealed no structures in the frontal lobe, covered with cerebrospinal fluid. Weighed-T1 MRI scans showed no recognizable frontal structures, expect for a small portion of the ventral frontal cortex. The mesencephalon, pons, and medulla oblongata were present, and so were all other lobes and the cerebellum."  

We read that a brain scan of the girl at age 8 showed basically the same results, with at most only a tiny of the frontal lobes existing. 

Under a heading of "Neurological and neuropsychological assessment" we read that "she could describe sensory and affective experiences, and reacted to environmental events with apparent emotional and cognitive congruency (e.g., pleasure, tiredness, playfulness, anger, and basic symbolization  Supplementary Video 1, Supplementary Video 2)." The links take us to a page of videos of the young girl. We see her seeming to act pretty much like a normal girl of her age. I recommend watching all of the short videos on the page. The girl with basically no frontal lobes stands, dances, seems to speak normally, and responds to requests to touch parts of her body, and show how she brushes her teeth. The person asking the questions to the girl speaks very rapidly, but the girl seems to have no difficulty understanding the questions, and the girl makes appropriate verbal and manual responses.  Asked to point to the questioner's thumb, the girl points to the right spot. Asked to point to the girl's eyes, the girl points to the right spot. Asked where she would wear a pair of glasses, the girl points to her eyes. Asked where she would wear a pair of shoes, she points to her feet. The girl is able to distinguish between herself and a fantasy character (Minnie Mouse), and says that she is not Minnie (Video 9). 

We see below a visual of the girl's brain, from Supplementary Video 11:

A much better title for the paper would have been "Good cognitive performance despite loss of the frontal lobes."

In this post I have taken selected excerpts from my much longer post "Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex," which you can read here. The post includes most of the evidence discussed above, along with a discussion of many other papers and cases that collectively provide a very strong basis for rejecting common claims that thought or cognition comes from the frontal lobes or prefrontal cortex of the brain. Other posts of mine very relevant to this discussion are my posts discussing how all parts of the brain have an abundance of many types of severe signal noise. 

The truth is that we have no basis for claiming that the neurons firing in the brain's front lobes are either any type of information processing or any type of computation or any type of thinking. What we know is consistent with the idea that the firing of neurons in the frontal lobes is mere noise, no more examples of information processing than the arising of bubbles on the surface of a boiling soup.