Neuroscientists Have No Brain-Based Explanation for Either Remembering or Forgetting

Decades ago I regarded Time Magazine as being the epitome of respectable journalism. I remembered there was a 48-story skyscraper in New York City that was called the Time-Life Building. I imagined the building stuffed with conscientious reporters and fact checkers, who would make sure that what you read in the weekly Time magazine was something you could trust. In the days of my youth, the average man might keep up on world events by watching his 6:30 Evening News broadcast, by reading his daily newspaper, and by reading his weekly copies of Life magazine and Time magazine. 

Now the Time-Life Building has been renamed, and is merely called 1271 Avenue of the Americas. Life magazine ceased publishing in the year 2000. Time magazine still publishes in print, but only 22 editions a year, rather than the previous weekly editions. Time magazine also has an online presence. But judging from its recent defective article on memory, we may wonder how trustworthy its science coverage is these days. 

The article (which you can read here) was one was a typical example of a type of article we can call a why-or-how-misspeaking article. Such an article starts out with the word "How" or "Why," and does not end with a question mark, offering an attempt to explain some thing that may have puzzled you, while offering only some unbelievable story line. The title of the article is "Why You Can't Remember Being a Toddler."  

Referring to the tendency of people to not remember their youth before age 4, the article states this:

"In recent years, scientists who study this phenomenon—sometimes called childhood or infantile amnesia—have made some surprising findings that illuminate how this nearly universal form of forgetting works. At the lab of Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, researchers tagged the cells in the brain that were activated as young mice learned to fear a chamber. Three months later, when the full-grown mice had forgotten their fear, the researchers activated those cells again—and suddenly, the mice remembered."

All of these claims are false. No, scientists have not illuminated how forgetting of childhood memories works or how any type of forgetting works. There are no cells in the brain that are activated only when you learn something or form a memory. Almost every cell in the brain is continually active, and there is zero evidence that some type of cell "turns on" or activates only when something is learned or only when a memory is formed. The claim about the experimental result is unfounded, being based on a very poor example of junk science. 

The link in the quote above takes us to only the abstract of a paper entitled "Recovery of 'Lost" Infant Memories in Mice." An examination of the full paper shows it to be a poor piece of neuroscience. We have way-too-small study group sizes of only 7, 9 or 10 mice. No study like this should be taken serious unless at least 15 to 20 mice were used for each of the study groups. In addition, the study depends on an utterly unreliable method for trying to determine how well mice remembered: the worthless technique of judging how much a mouse moved during an arbitrary time period, and then referring to that as a "freezing percentage." For reasons discussed here, all studies based on so unreliable a method are examples of junk science. 

Here we have the use of "freezing behavior" methodology in its most unreliable and untrustworthy form, with claims being made that some mice remembered better, claims based on reports they "froze" more (in other words, moved less) after some part of their brain was zapped by optogenetic stimulation. Researchers who use this method are compounding the folly of trying to measure fear or recall by judging "freezing behavior," because it is known that zapping many different parts of the brain will itself produce "freezing behavior" even if there is no difference in fear or recall. So it's like this:

What the neuroscientist said: "I zapped the mouse's brain, and he 'froze' in the sense of moving less so I must be reactivating his forgotten fear memories which are causing him to 'freeze in fear.' "

What the neuroscientist should be saying: "I zapped the mouse's brain, and he 'froze'  in the sense of moving less, and that's probably just a response to the very action of zapping the mouse, telling me nothing about whether the mouse remembered something the mouse was trained to fear."

The title of the paper is misleading. Nothing has been done here to show "Recovery of 'Lost' Infant Memories in Mice." No decent study group sizes were used. No claim is made by the authors to have a sample size calculation to determine whether they were using adequate sample sizes. And no reliable method has been used to measure whether any of these mice remembered anything. So no evidence has been provided that any lost memories were recovered. 

Referring to the loss of infant memories, the Time article says this: "Animals whose brains tend to add smaller crops of neurons after birth—guinea pigs, for instance—do not show signs of this amnesia, Frankland and colleagues have found." This makes no sense under "brains store memories" claims. Under such ideas, you would expect that adding more neurons would tend to produce stronger memories. 

The Time article then gives us a claim based on another low-quality neuroscience paper, one using the same bad methods for judging fear, as well as a way-too-small study group size of only 8 mice. 

The Time article then gives us this make-your-head-hurt piece of silliness, stating, "However, Nick Turk-Browne at Yale University and his colleagues have managed to scan the brains of a growing number of little kids, and they’ve discovered that kids as young as a year old do appear to be forming memories, in the same way that adults create recollections of past events, called episodic memory."  The reference is to a senseless child-endangering set of experiments in which small infants have their brains scanned, without any medical justification. The experiments do not do anything to show that such infants are forming memories. There is nothing an MRI scan can ever produce that will ever show that someone is forming a memory.  And the last thing we would ever need is brain scans of infants to show that they are forming memories. The ability of an infant to learn in many ways as it progresses proves its ability to form memories. 

A child once died in an MRI accident. The use of MRI scans in healthy infants by experimenting scientists is a morally troubling affair. Some studies have suggested a cancer risk from MRI scans, and no one knows whether MRI scans in infancy increase cancer likelihood over a 70-year time span.  The younger the subject, the more objectionable it is to be exposing that subject to any unnecessary MRI scans that might increase his chance of getting cancer decades later. 

We then have this quote in which a neuroscientist makes a silly statement: 

"To get a better sense of precisely when memories are formed and forgotten, Sarah Power at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and her colleagues built a media room where children have experiences they will never encounter in the outside world. 'One of the really important things about the task is that everything only exists inside the lab space. We wanted to make sure it was completely unique in the sense that…the contextual environments don't exist anywhere outside in the real world, so that we could know that if they did remember these associations, it could only be from the fact that they had been in the lab,' she says. They have so far observed 400 toddlers between the ages of 18 and 24 months, having them form memories of the lab space, and they intend to follow them over time. The project is still in its early stages, but  'from the preliminary data, we've been very surprised at their ability to encode and retain these episodic-like memories,' she says."

But why on Earth would someone be surprised by these results? Is it not extremely obvious that every infant has to form memories to progress as an infant normally does, learning skills such as crawling and walking and the beginnings of language? The scientists Power here sounds like someone who jumps in a swimming pool, and then says that she is very surprised to have got wet. 

The Time article then states, "It’s a mystery why our brains, and those of other mammals, forget our early lives." It thereby confesses that the article's title ("Why You Can't Remember Being a Toddler") is bogus clickbait. We then have a quote from the scientist who is senselessly brain-scanning healthy infants in MRI scanners, without medical justification. He says, "There's tons of behavioral evidence that even newborn infants are really good at aggregating statistics." Yeah, right -- and my neighbor's dog is the King of Mars.

The article and its quotes and the papers its cites may make you shake your head and ask some question such as "What has caused these people to say and do things so silly-sounding?"

Neuroscientists have been studying brains for many decades, trying to shed some light on how memory occurs. They have got nowhere, although you might think differently from all the misleading papers they have written. No neuroscientist has ever found the slightest trace of learned information by microscopically studying brain tissue.  No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how a human could form a memory allowing him to later recall complex information. No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how a human could ever instantly recall lots of relevant information he learned decades ago, after merely hearing a name or seeing an image (the kind of thing that happens when a child asks a parent to tell him about some famous historical figure). No scientist has any credible tale to tell of why a 70-year-old can remember in very great detail very many things that happened in his teenage years more than 50 years ago, while a typical 20-year-old cannot remember anything that happened in his first four years.