A very important skill in life is the ability to distinguish vacuous hand-waving when it happens. Vacuous hand-waving is when someone tries to make it sound like he understands something he does not understand. Such hand-waving is often characterized by empty phrases and the use of jargon used merely to create some impression of understanding.
To illustrate the use of vacuous hand-waving. let's consider the question: how do you store patient's information at a doctor's office? We can distinguish the kind of talk we might get from a woman named Jane (who understands very well how it is done), and a man named John (who does not understand how it is done). Jane might give an answer like this:
Jane: We store medical records the old-fashioned way, rather than doing everything by computers. We use a separate manila folder for each patient. The top edge of the folder has a blank slot. In that slot, you write the patient's name: last name, followed by a comma, followed by a first name. Whenever a new patient comes in for the first time, you have to take a blank manila folder, and write the person's name on the folder tab, last name first. You also have to get the patient to fill out one of our forms marked "New Patient Form." That form asks for the patient's name, phone number, email, health insurance type, health insurance number, and so forth. That "New Patient Form" must be put in the patient's folder. Once the patient has seen the doctor, the doctor puts his notes in the patient's folder. That way we can always know what happened with any particular patient. The new patient's folder is then added to our file shelf, and you have to be careful to put that folder, in the correct spot, using alphabetical order. The folders are sorted in alphabetical order, by last name. But what happens if a patient comes in and says he has already visited the doctor? Then we have to retrieve his file from our file shelf. That's easy to do, because all of the files on our file shelf are kept in alphabetical order. So once we have retrieved the patient's folder on the day he has an appointment, we give that patient's folder to the doctor, so he can add new notes to the file. Later that day, we file the patient's folder back in our file shelf, being careful to put it in the correct spot, so that alphabetical order is maintained."
It is clear from this very detailed answer that Jane is aware of an exact system for storing patient data at a doctor's office, and how such a system can meet all of the requirements for storing patient's data at that office. The system involves no fancy technology, but at least it is clear from her answer that Jane knows exactly how the system works. But let's imagine a different answer from John, an example that is merely a case of vacuous hand waving.
John: "So how would you store patient's records in a medical office? That would have to be done very carefully. It would cause all kinds of problems if the data for two different patients were mixed up. It is clear that such an office would involve some type of literary specification that would allow the exact details of a patient's treatment to be preserved. The real explanation for how the storage would work is: paper accumulation. As more and more patients were seen, more and more pieces of paper would accumulate. But paper cannot be very easily copied. So an alternative would be an electronic accumulation of data, that would allow rapid digital backups."
Nothing in John's answer indicates that he actually understands the specifics of how you could store medical records at a doctor's office. John's answer is an example of vacuous hand-waving. It sounds like he has no understanding of basic issues such as how to create a way of storing a new patient's data, how to avoid getting the records of two patients mixed up, how to add new treatments notes for a particular patient, how to easily find the data for a particular patient, and so forth. Jane's answer shows that she knew the answers to such questions, but John's answer makes us doubt that he has any understanding of such matters.
Now, how do neuroscientists sound when they speculate about how a brain might store or retrieve memories? Do they sound like Jane, or do they sound like John? They always sound like John. Dictionary.com defines "hand waving" as "insubstantial words, arguments, gestures, or actions used in an attempt to explain or persuade." When neuroscientists attempt to explain memory by referring to the brain, they offer only the most hazy hand-waving. Typically what occurs is the repetition of empty slogans and catchphrases.
For example, a neuroscientist may claim that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving. We have many examples of the storage of knowledge in human-made things such as books, drawings, computer files, messages, handwritten notes and electronic data. Such knowledge storage never occurs through strengthening. Instead what typically happens when knowledge is stored in books, messages, notes and computer files is that there occurs a repetition of symbolic tokens by some kind of writing process, and the use of some encoding system in which certain combinations of symbolic tokens represent particular words, things or ideas. That is not strengthening.
To give another example of empty hazy hand-waving, a neuroscientist may vaguely claim that memories are formed by "the formation of synaptic patterns." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving. It is possible to store information by the use of pattern repetitions. For example, you might consider each word in the English language as a pixel pattern, and then say that each use of the word "dog" in a printed book is a pattern repetition. But synapses do not form any recognizable repeating patterns. And if synapses did form such patterns, there would need to exist some synapse pattern reader to read and recognize such patterns; but no such thing exists. Instead of being anything that could consist of stable repeating patterns, synapses are unstable "shifting sands" kind of things. Synapses are built from proteins that have an average lifetime of only two weeks or less. The maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years) is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in a synapse. So synapses cannot be the storage place of memories that can last reliably for so long.
Another example of the empty hand-waving of neuroscientists in regard to memory can be found in the paper here, entitled "Why not connectomics?" We have this example of conceptually empty hand-waving about memory storage:
"Brains can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer. The physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known, but it seems likely to us that they are embodied in the same way intrinsic behaviors (such as reflexes) are: that is, in the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells. In this view, experience alters connections between nerve cells to record a memory for later recall. Both the sensory experience that lays down a memory and its later recall are indeed trains of action potentials, but in-between, and persisting for long periods, is a stable physical structural entity that holds that memory. In this sense, a map of all the things the brain has put to memory is found in the structure—the connectional map."
The first sentence is groundless dogma. There is no evidence that brains "can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer." There is merely the fact that humans can have experiences and learn skills that they remember for decades. The beginning of the second sentence is a confession that there is no understanding of how such a brain storage of memories can happen. The authors confess that "the physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known," The claim that memories are stored by "the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells" is empty hand-waving, and the speculation stated is unbelievable. No one who has ever studied the connections between nerve cells (neurons) has ever seen anything like some symbolic pattern that could encode a record of human experiences or human learned skills or learned conceptual knowledge such as school learning. The brain does not have any such thing as a connection pattern reader that could read and interpret such patterns if they existed.
Another example of utterly vacuous hand-waving by a neuroscientist can be found on the page here, where we have a neuroscientist state, "That is what learning is – forming new connections between neurons that didn’t exist before." You do not explain a storage of information by imagining new synapses forming between neurons. A forming of new synapses between neurons is a structural effect that would require many minutes or hours, but humans can learn new things instantly. If you hear from a police officer that your child or spouse or father has died, you do not have wait for new connections to form between neurons (which would take hours). Instead you instantly form a permanent new memory of that very important fact.
I had a medical incident this Friday, from which I have recovered. I reported to an emergency room and reported symptoms that a good physician should have been able to diagnosis and treat by the simple use of a particular liquid. My case was bungled by some physician who sent some completely unsuitable medication to my pharmacist. "You're being discharged" was used as a phrase meaning "we don't know what your issue is, so get out of here." The people were all very nice, but I was reminded again how biomedical authorities may blunder.
