One Year Later, the Blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Still Sounds Evidence-Poor

 On March 7, 2025 I posted on this blog a post entitled "Examining the Evidence-Poor Blog Archive of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2020 to 2025," one you can read here. 

After reviewing all of the posts that sounded as if they might be relevant to "brains make minds" claims and "brains store memories" claims, I stated this:

"So examining all the posts on this [Cognitive Neuroscience Society] site from January 2020 to March 2025 that had headlines sounding like they might be some substantive evidence for 'brains make minds' and 'brains store memories' claims, I find no such substantive evidence. We have lots of cognitive neuroscientists claiming to know things they don't know. But a close look at their research always fails to find robust evidence in support of the dogmas that cognitive neuroscientists keep chanting."

It has now been one year since I wrote that post. Let us look at all the last year's posts on the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, to see whether anything in the past year should change our opinion about the blog being evidence-poor in regard to the main claims of cognitive neuroscientists. 

Here are all the posts the blog has published in the past year:

March 3, 2026: "From an Outsider to a Champion for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion." We have an interview with a neuroscientist LeDoux who is the author of a book with the dumb title "The Emotional Brain." It is not brains that are emotional, but people who are emotional. We have this ridiculous statement by the neuroscientist: "Eventually, I would write the book The Emotional Brain [one of several books written by LeDoux], which I think helped put emotion on the map." It is an example of the kind of senseless boasting that neuroscientists frequently engage in. Obviously emotions were "on the map" long before such a book was written.  The next statement by LeDoux is equally ridiculous, with him saying , "If you take a look at the study of consciousness, one thing that's missing is emotion." No, scholars of the human mind have always made human emotions one of the main objects of their study. Nothing that LeDoux says does anything to support claims that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

January 9, 2026: "Threading Together Attention Across Human Cognition."  We have an interview with neuroscientist Monica Rosenberg. She starts out by saying, "Brains are so commonplace in our lives that it’s easy to take them for granted, but when you stop to think about it, it’s absolutely remarkable that our minds emerge from electrified meat.” A more truthful sentence would be "it's absolutely unbelievable that our minds emerge from electrified meat." Rosenberg incorrectly states, "We have evidence that individual differences in features of brain activity, like functional connectome organization, can predict differences in behavior but we still don’t understand why." No such evidence exists, if by "differences in behavior" you mean the type of choices a person would make. Rosenberg makes unfounded boasts about things done by people she works with. She claims, "Ziwei Zhang, a PhD student in my lab, showed that dynamics of the same functional brain network predict when people are surprised as they do a learning task and watch basketball games." There's a link to the paper here, entitled "Brain network dynamics predict moments of surprise across contexts." It's not any good evidence for brains-making-minds. It is well known that particular type of emotions tend to produce distinctive muscle movements showing up as facial expressions; and particular types of muscle movements show up as distinctive blips in fMRI scans or EEG readings. 

December 16, 2025: "Taking Action Seriously in the Brain: Revealing the Role of Cognition in Motor Skills." We have an interview with a scientist studying the role of the brain in motor skills. He talks about "motor working memory" without clearly explaining what he means by that term. The idea of "working memory" has some substance in reference to a kind of "mental scratchpad" where you can remember a few things for a short time, without memorizing them. There is no brain understanding of how that works, and there is no part of the brain that corresponds to such a "mental scratchpad." The idea of a working memory involving motor skills is not one that has much substance. Motor skills such as learning to swim or ride a bicycle require repeated practice sessions. It is clear that brains have some involvement in muscle movement. But such a relation does nothing to show that your brain produces your mind. 

November 24, 2025: "50 Years of Busting Myths About Aging in the Brain." We have an interview with a neuroscientist Carol Barnes who studies aging in brains. Barnes makes this groundless claim: "For my PhD thesis, I was to build off work that had discovered the biological basis of memory, long-term potentiation (LTP)." No one has ever discovered any biological basis for memory. The claim that LTP is any such thing is a groundless legend of neuroscientists (as I discuss in my posts here). Utterly unable to account for memories that can last decades, LTP is a very short-lived change produced by artificial electrode stimulation. The very term "long-term potentiation" is a misleading one, as so-called LTP typically decays away with days or weeks. 

Barnes then proceeds to recite another groundless legend of neuroscientists, the legend that "place cells" were discovered. She says, "In my postdoctoral work with John O’Keefe, we looked at the first recordings from place cells in young and old rats." A look at O' Keefe's research on this topic will show that it was not robust research. Here is a quote from a previous post of mine:

"The 'place cells' papers of John O'Keefe that I have examined are papers that do not meet standards of good experimental science. An example of such a paper was the paper 'Hippocampal Place Units in the Freely Moving Rat: Why They Fire Where They Fire.'  For one thing, the study group size used (consisting of only four rats) was way too small for robust evidence to have been produced. 15 animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately convincing result in animal studies looking for correlations.  For another thing no blinding protocol was used. And the study was not a pre-registered study, but was apparently one of those studies in which an analyst is free to fish for whatever effect he may feel like finding after data has been collected, using any of innumerable possible analysis pipelines."

We have in the interview no claims by Barnes of any substance backing up claims that brains produce minds or that brains store memories. All of her main references to research are references to weak, unconvincing research. 

November 3, 2025: "Making the Brain Language Ready: A Journey of Discovery."   We have an interview with neuroscientist Peter Hagoort, who has tried to show some brain basis for language ability. Hagoort talks on and on, but fails to show any knowledge of how a brain could acquire a language or allow people to speak as rapidly as they do. He mentions aphasia. A person can have a stroke that prevents him from being able to speak, or damages his ability to speak. But that merely shows that when people speak they are using muscles; and no one doubts that brains have a strong connection to muscle activity. 

September 10, 2025: "The Lasting Cognitive Effect of Smell on Memory." We have an interview with a scientist doing research on smells and memory. Without giving any specifics, the scientist makes vague claims trying to suggest links between smells, brains and memory. About all we know on this topic is that particular smells can evoke particular memories. 

August 14, 2025: "Language in the Brain is More Than the Sum of Its Parts."  We read this: "In a new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bourguignon and Salvatore Lo Bue make a case for language as an emergent property of the brain." Such talk is very misleading. A property of something is some simple characteristic that can be expressed by a single number. For example, properties of a wooden cube include length, width, depth, height, color and weight, each of which can be expressed by a single number. Language is not a property, but a capability, an extremely impressive capability with many different aspects. So trying to explain language by describing it as a "property" is extremely erroneous. We hear from a neuroscientist named Bourguignon who says, "We argue for a broad, seemingly simplistic, yet unbiased, conception of language as 'any piece of information that can be verbalized.' " That is a senseless conception of language.  It sounds more simpleminded than "seemingly simplistic." Language is something gigantically more than "any piece of information."  Bourguignon confesses that "the very notion that language cannot be pinpointed in a neatly delineated area or network of the brain will be surprising to some people, and unpalatable to others." That sounds like what we might find if brains cannot explain language. 

June 30, 2025: "Exploring Auditory Interconnectivity One Sound at a Time."  We have an interview with a neuroscientist studying the brain and hearing. Nothing discussed backs up "brains make minds" claims (as opposed to mere "brains are involved in hearing" claims). 

May 29, 2025: "How Was Your School Day?: Unpacking Free Recall in Young Children." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 21, 2025: "Moving Beyond Traditional Pathways in Cognitive Neuroscience." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 4 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

April 1, 2025: "How VR Technology is Changing the Game for Alzheimer’s Disease." The headline is incorrect. VR technology (virtual reality technology) is not "changing the game" in regard to Alzheimer's disease. We hear merely about some fancy virtual reality system used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease. The disease can be diagnosed through much simpler methods. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 3 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 31, 2025: "How Dreams, Novelty, and Emotions Can Shape Memories: Lessons from Smartphone Studies."  We have a discussion of some research involving memory, conducted with smartphones. It is pure psychology research. The authors claim connection between sleep and memory recall. But there's no discussion of any brain data, so the post does nothing to back up "brains store memories" claims. 

March 31, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 2 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 30, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 1 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

It would seem from the last year of posts at the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society that cognitive neuroscientists are not making any real progress in their attempts to provide evidence backing up claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories.