Crude "Finger in the Sand" Diagrams of "Engrams" Suggest Vacuous Theorizing

 There's a year 2025 paper on the Cornell physics paper server, one entitled "Engram Memory Encoding and Retrieval: A Neurocomputational Perspective." The author attempts to persuade us that he understands something about engrams (alleged memories stored in brains), something for which there is no real evidence. What we have in the paper is misstatements, hand-waving, bluffing and boasting, adorned by about the most primitive diagrams anyone could give. The "finger in the sand" crudity of the diagrams suggests that there is no real underlying understanding of how a brain could store or retrieve memories. 

Before discussing how crude are the diagrams, let me list some of the bad misstatements and half truths in the paper:

• The author states, "Despite substantial research into the biological basis of memory, the precise mechanisms by which experiences are encoded, stored, and retrieved in the brain remain incompletely understood." The truth is that scientists have no understanding at all of such a thing, and no robust evidence that any such mechanisms even exist. 
• The author states, " A growing body of evidence supports the engram theory, which posits that sparse populations of neurons undergo lasting physical and biochemical changes to support long-term memory."  This is false. The claimed evidence for engrams is all junk-science research guilty of sins such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measurement techniques such as judgments of claimed "freezing behavior." 
• The author states, "These findings suggest that memory efficiency, capacity, and stability emerge from the interaction of plasticity and sparsity constraints." This is an example of vacuous hand-waving.
• The author states, "Modern discoveries of 'silent engrams' — which exist as physical traces but cannot be retrieved by natural cues, yet can be artificially reactivated — directly align with Semon’s concept of 'primarily latent modifications.' " There has been no actual discovery of 'silent engrams' or any other type of engram. All claims to have made such a discovery are unfounded, and not supported by any well-designed studies with high statistical power. 
• The author states, "Modern technological advancements have revolutionized the study of engrams, enabling researchers to investigate how specific memories translate into neuronal changes with unprecedented resolution (Luis & Ryan, 2022). These technologies include transgenic manipulation, optogenetics, chemogenetics, electrophysiology, and sophisticated behavioral techniques." The statement is untrue. Fancy technologies are used in studies looking for engrams, often as a kind of window-dressing to impress the easily impressed. But such studies have produced no robust evidence for any such thing as an engram. No one has ever found the slightest trace of any learned information in brain tissue by studying human brain tissue. Studies looking for evidence of engrams in animals have been a cesspool of junk science, and have been almost invariably guilty of very bad research practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, a lack of pre-registration, and the use of unreliable measurement techniques such as "freezing behavior" judgments. 
• The author states, "Modern neuroscience, armed with advanced technologies like optogenetics and immediate early gene labeling, has provided compelling evidence for the existence and dynamic nature of engram neurons and their ensembles." To the contrary, no such evidence has ever been produced. Any papers claiming to have produced such evidence will not hold up to critical scrutiny. 
• The author states, "Furthermore, the activity of engram neurons can be tracked in vivo during their maturation from encoding through consolidation using functional indicators like GCaMP (calcium indicators; Cupollilo et al., 2025). These experimental manipulations, particularly in the hippocampus, have demonstrated the necessity and sufficiency of engram cells for memory functions, enabling selective memory erasure, artificial recall, and even the creation of synthetic memories."  The first reference is one of many references the author makes to the paper "Early changes in the properties of CA3 engram cells explored with a novel viral tool" authored by Cupollilo and others, which is a very low-quality junk science paper using way-too-small study group sizes such as about 5 mice per study group, a paper guilty of defects such as failing to do any sample size calculation, and relying on unreliable "freezing behavior" judgments. The second sentence (beginning with "these experimental manipulations") is simply untrue, and none of the things claimed as "demonstrated" has actually been demonstrated. 

When the paper's author (Daniel Szelogowski) gives us a diagram regarding these claimed "engrams," we get a visual sign of the lack of any substantive theory underlying his claims. Below is a screen shot from the paper showing its Figure 1:

Notice the "finger in the sand" nature of the diagrams. The diagrams are like those a five-year-old child might draw, using crayons. When people understand things, they may produce very detailed diagrams showing the depth of their understanding. For example, do a Google image search for "genetic code" and you will get a very detailed diagram showing the exact scheme of representations used by DNA. But when people do not understand things, and they are merely feigning understanding, they may tend to produce very crude "finger in the sand" diagrams like those in the visual above. 

For example, imagine you had no understanding of how the Apollo 11 mission was able to leave our planet, land on the moon, and return to our planet. Rather than producing detailed diagrams showing things like the Saturn 5 rocket and the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), you might produce "finger in the sand" type of diagrams like the ones below:

The Apollo 11 diagram above is as laughable a "finger in the sand" diagram as the diagrams in Szelogowski's paper. Neither Szelogowski nor any scientist has any real understanding of how a brain could ever encode and store any of the types of learned information that humans can remember. Neither Szelogowski nor any scientist has any real understanding of how a brain could ever instantly retrieve the correct information when a person hears a name or sees a face. 

When attempting to persuade us that they have some understanding of how memory could work in a brain, what those such as Szelogowski do is to mainly engage in vacuous jargon-adorned hand-waving.  Some vague wooly phrase such as "synapse strengthening" is used. Then some mentions are made of some type of actual chemistry observed in the brain, to make such vacuous hand-waving sound more substantive. There is no substance involved and no detail involved when Szelogowski states this:

"Synaptic changes primarily encode the specific content of a memory by modifying the strength of connections between neurons, while intrinsic and non-synaptic changes modulate the overall responsiveness and participation of individual neurons within the engram. This coordinated interplay ensures both the precise encoding of information and the dynamic integration of neurons into stable memory circuits."  

The claim above make no sense. Information is not encoded by some "strengthening" action. Humans are familiar with various ways in which information is encoded and stored, and none of these ways occur by strengthening.  When information is encoded and stored, what occurs is writing, according to some scheme of representation such as the English alphabet, the ASCII code, and so forth. 

For the neuroscientist, the problem is that nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a some unit for writing information. So what do you do if you are a neuroscientist trying to suggest that brains write memories?  You appeal to "strengthening." and hope that people don't recognize how silly your language is. It's rather like a suitor who has no evidence that he is earning money, and who tries to impress a woman by bragging about how he is improving his muscles by weight training, while hoping that the woman somehow thinks that this is something like earning money. 

When people understand something and are asked to explain it, they tend to speak exactly in ways that show their understanding. Imagine you interview someone for a job as a computer programmer, and you ask the person, "How can I modify my web site so that it can store and remember data the users type in on a registration page?" If the job candidate is knowledgeable about this topic, he would tend to give a very exact and very detailed answer rather like this:

"Well, it depends on how much you want to spend, and how many people use your site.  If you don't have many users or don't want to spend much, you could use a simple pipe-delimited text file to store your data. Each row in such a file would give data on one user, and the pipe character would be used to separate the data fields such as name and email address. But finding a user in such a file requires a scan of the whole file which isn't efficient if you have many thousands of users. If you have many thousands of users, it might be better to use a relational database product such as MySQL. You could create a database, and then use the 'CREATE TABLE' command to create a new table with text storage fields such as UserName and Email. Once you had that table, you could have your web site add a new record for each new user, using the handy INSERT command available in SQL products such as MySQL. For the case of updating an existing user's data, you could use the UPDATE command available in SQL products such as MySQL. Products such as that take care of such details as converting from text strings to ASCII, and converting from ASCII to binary -- that's all encapsulated under the engine of such  relational database products. Your evocation of MySQL commands would take place in a handler function you would write that would respond to the press of a Submit button on your web site's form. Of course, some prefer never to get involved with SQL commands. If you're that type, there are various class libraries that will encapsulate all the SQL commands, so you don't have to remember any. Then you can just call the methods of some object that you have instantiated, and supply the data as arguments to a method of some class, a function that would take parameter inputs." 

But imagine you are interviewing a job candidate who does not know how a web page stores data. If you ask him how you can modify your web site to store user's data that they submit on a form, you might get some answer like this:

"Data processing is a very important function of a web site. Of course, when user's submit data, they want it to be saved not forgotten. Various components can be crafted that enable this functionality. It would require strengthening of the code that underlies your web site. It would require an encoding of information and a coordinated interplay between complex electronic components, as well as the participation of diverse units of functionality."

This job candidate apparently knows nothing about how a web site can store data a user types into a form. All he has given is some vacuous wooly phrases lacking in specifics. His answer sounds like the equally empty and vacuous lines I quote above from Szelogowski, who uses empty verbiage such as "coordinated interplay" and "modulate the overall responsiveness." Szelogowski sounds just as if he has no actual understanding of how a brain could store or retrieve a memory. And he's in the same boat as every neuroscientist, none of whom understand any such thing. 

One huge problem is that what Szelogowski is appealing to (synapse strengthening) is a slow process requiring hours or days. But that cannot explain human learning, which can occur instantly. If someone tells you that your mother or child has just died, you do not require hours or days to learn such a fact. You learn such a fact instantly. 

 Szelogowski's only mention of this issue is a feeble one. Appealing to some wild speculation, he says, "Furthermore, non-synaptic plasticity, such as the regulation of neural membrane properties, can operate on faster timescales, potentially enabling rapid initial information storage, complementing the slower, more enduring synaptic plasticity processes (Ferrand et al., 2025)." This is basically equivalent to a goofy statement such as, "I say memory storage occurs to synapse strengthening, but that isn't fast enough, so maybe there might be something else that is fast enough." 

Szelogowski's Figure 2 in the paper is just as vacuous a "finger in the sand" affair as his Figure 1. Below is his Figure 2:

This is not the kind of diagrams that people produce when they understand something.  A group of connected nodes as we see above is not even a sensible depiction of any such thing as the encoding of learned information. 

Just as unimpressive is Szelogowski's Figure 6. He takes a pentagram of circles, and repeats that pentagram about 13 times, with variations of how the circles are colored. It's another very crude "finger in the sand" kind of diagram suggesting that Szelogowski has no substantive understanding of how a brain could store a memory or preserve a memory for a lifetime or instantly retrieve a memory. 

Were anyone to ever explain how a brain could store memories and allow for instant memory retrieval, they would have to pay very much attention to speed. One of the biggest reasons why a brain cannot be the storage place of human memories is that humans can remember just the right information instantly, upon seeing a face or hearing a name. But there is nothing in a brain that can account for such blazing speed. We know the type of things that make possible fast retrieval in products humans make: things such as addresses, sorting and indexes. The brain has no addresses, no sorting and no indexes. So when a human instantly recalls many relevant facts after hearing a single name such as "Obama" or "Napoleon,"  that cannot be the result of brain activity. 

In this regard Szelogowski fails entirely. His paper makes zero uses of the word "speed," and has zero substantive references to the topic of  speed. The paper fails to even explain how so small an item as the word "cat" could be converted to some neuron state or synapse state. 

But think for a moment of how utterly impossible it could be to explain how a brain could encode (translate into neural and synapse states) all the types of things humans can learn and remember, which includes all of these types of things:

• Memories of daily experiences, such as what you were doing on some day
• Facts you learned in school, such as the fact that Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theater
• Sequences of numbers such as your social security number
• Sequences of words, such as the dialog an actor has to recite in a play
• Sequences of musical notes, such as the notes an opera singer has to sing
• Abstract concepts that you have learned
• Memories of particular non-visual sensations such as sounds, food tastes, smells, pain, and physical pleasure
• Memories of how to do physical things, such as how to ride a bicycle
• Memories of how you felt at emotional moments of your life
• Rules and principles, such as “look both ways before crossing the street”
• Memories of visual information, such as what a particular person's face looks like

Below are some quotes:

• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).