A Netflix documentary TVseries has the crowing title "The Mind, Explained." The episode episode entitled "Memory" is a cesspool of junk explanation and misleading claims.
For materialists, the high performance of human memory is a scandal that undermines their claims that memory occurs through brain activity. Nothing in a brain bears any resemblance to a device for storing learned information or preserving learned information for decades or a device for instantly retrieving information. But humans have the most astonishing memory abilities, such as the ability to instantly learn something, the ability to preserve knowledge and memories for 60 years, and the ability to instantly recall relevant information as soon as someone hears a name or sees a face. The gap between human memory performance and what a brain should be capable of is as big as the gap between Earth and the planet Mars.
So if you are a materialist, what you might want to do is to try to make that gap seem much smaller, by trying to depict human memory performance so that it sounds much worse than it is. That is exactly what the "Memory" episode of "The Mind, Explained" series starts out doing right at its beginning. The series starts out immediately by deceptively attempting a "make human memory sound weak" strategy.
At the 1:38 mark we hear neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps make this false claim about memories of the September 11 attack: "We know that about 50% of the details of that memory change in a year." No, we don't know any such thing. The statement is contradicted by a statement by Phelps on page 34 in a paper co-authored by Phelps, where she states this:
"Although participants clearly formed flashbulb memories of the reception of information about the 9/11 attack, in that they reported an elaborate recollection even after ten years (Brown & Kulik, 1977), they nevertheless experienced forgetting, in the sense that they no longer remembered the original reception event as they initially reported it. Forgetting in this sense occurred mainly in the first year and then leveled off, so that no change in memory performance was detectable between Years 3 and 10."
Phelps' TV claim is also contradicted by what her paper says on page 38:
"As a result, memory accuracy was high from the beginning and remained high for critical facts. This high level of performance limited the chance for corrections over time, because inaccuracies are rare."
At the 2:08 mark the narrator asks the misleading question, "Why are memories so unreliable?" At the 2:50 mark the TV show has a demonstration by a memory grandmaster, who can recall an incredibly long series of random numbers. The demonstration contradicts the question asked at the 2:08 mark.
We then have (around the 5:00 mark) a standard feature of almost all materialist accounts of memory, a repetition of the untrue claim that Henry Molaison (Patient HM) had his brain damaged by surgery, causing him to be unable to form new memories. The claim is untrue, as I document in my post here, which includes examples of Henry recalling things he learned after his brain surgery.
The show's attempt to show that Henry Molaison could not form new episodic memories is laughable as evidence. At the 5:10 mark we have a quote in which Susan Corkin asks Henry "Do you know what you did yesterday?" and he replies, "No, I don't." Corkin then asks, "How about this morning?" and the reply is, "I don't even remember that." Of course, a mere failure to answer such questions a few times is no proof that someone cannot form new memories. There are many simpler explanations of why someone might give such answers, such as laziness or disinterest.
Around the 6:15 mark we have the narrator giving some unfounded claims that the medial temporal lobe "helps combines those elements once again" to produce a memory recollection. The claim is unfounded. No trace of anything someone has learned or experienced can be discovered through microscopic examination. There is zero evidence that any part of the brain creates a memory recollection by some act of combination or gathering up data read from different places in the brain.
Scientists have no credible explanation to give for how anyone could recall anything using a brain, because nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a system for storing or retrieving learned information. Neuroscientists are utterly lacking any credible "how" accounts relating to memory recall or memory storage. When a person lacks a decent "how" account, he may try instead to use a "where" account, and hope you don't notice that he has failed to give a "how" but merely given a "where." And that's just what neuroscientists do. Asked to explain how memory occurs, they engage in hand-waving decorated by jargon, mentioning a few anatomical structures in the brain. This does not amount to a decent explanation for how the many wonders of memory could occur.
At the 7;15 mark the TV show then makes the very dubious claim, "Undergraduates were able to increase their score on the verbal GREs from 460 to 520, just by taking a mindfulness meditation class." We have no reference to a paper making this claim. At the 7:41 mark neuroscientist Donna Rose Addis makes the groundless claim that the amygdala influences the hippocampus "and allows it to form a more detailed and stronger memory." Neuroscientists have no credible explanation for how a brain could form a memory. When neuroscientists make the more narrow claim that the hippocampus is forming a memory, without explaining how that could occur, we should not be fooled by such attempts to add a little specificity for the sake of sounding like knowledge the speaker does not have. Similarly, if someone claims his house is being visited by extraterrestrials, you should probably be skeptical; and you should probably be just as skeptical if that person throws in a bit of specifics by saying he is being visited by extraterrestrials from the Alpha Centauri star system.
At the 8:48 mark neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps makes this unfounded claim, "If you actually look at the hippocampus, there seems to be cells that are specifically responsive to time and place." This is the socially constructed legend of "place cells" and the socially constructed legend of "time cells," neither of which is well-supported by robust well-designed studies. You can read here about why claims about "place cells" are not well founded. The narrator then spends a minute repeating these unfounded claims, describing a hypothetical effect that has not been well-replicated by well-designed studies.
This is followed at the 9:28 mark by a repetition of another groundless legend of neuroscience, the claim that London cab drivers had a larger hippocampus because of all the memorization of streets they did. But when we actually look at a scientific paper stating the results, the paper says no such thing. The study (entitled “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers”) says “the analysis revealed no difference in the overall volume of the hippocampi between taxi drivers and controls.” We have at the 9:54 mark in the Netflix TV program a graph that does not match any of the graphs in the paper, one making it look like the London cab drivers had bigger hippocampi than controls.
We then have a discussion of memorization techniques such as the Memory Palace technique, and the narrator claims that memory aces "change the connections within their brains by training with techniques like the memory palace." There is no evidence that the formation of new memories occurs by a change of connections within brains. We know that humans can form new memories instantly, something that could not occur if such memory formation required the slow process of changing connections within brains.
Around the 13:00 mark the narrator tells us that a dozen people in the world have memorized more than 20,000 digits of Pi. Then the narrator points out that many people have memorized the role of Hamlet, which contains more than 50,000 letters. But failing to stick to this truthfulness about the high accuracy of human memories, the narrator quickly reverts to misstatements trying to make it look like human memory is weak. In an outrage at the 13:52 mark, the narrator says, "Emotional 9/11 memories are just as inaccurate as everyday memories." The memories of those like myself who witnessed while in the World Trade Center the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City are not inaccurate, and suggesting otherwise is as deplorable as questioning the memories of Holocaust victims.
At the 15:08 mark we have a screen shot showing the scientific study "Constructing False Memories of Committing a Crime." The study is a morally deplorable one in which subjects were lied to and tricked, to try to confuse them into thinking they had committed some crime they had not committed. We have this confession of very bad misconduct by those conducting the study:
"This study used a modified familial-informant false narrative paradigm to attempt to convince young adult participants that they had committed a crime when they were between the ages of 11 and 14....Participants in the criminal condition were told that they had committed a crime resulting in police contact; one third of them were told that they had committed assault, another third that they had committed assault with a weapon, and the remainder that they had committed theft."
Nothing reported by these researchers should be believed, given this horrible deception. It is appalling for the Netflix TV show to be citing this bottom-of-the-barrel junk study as evidence in support of a false "weak human memory" thesis.
At the 18:20 mark the narrator discusses experiments in which people were brain scanned when remembering something, with the narrator saying, "When people remembered, a particular network lit up." There is actually no robust evidence that any particular part of the brain is more active when people remember things. To read about the lack of any such evidence, read my post "Brain Imaging Shows No Appreciable Neural Correlates of Memory Activity" using the link here.
A kind of nadir of this very low-quality Netflix program comes at the 16:47 mark where the program attempts to convince us that people cannot remember their youth very well (a claim radically contrary to the experience of almost all of us). We hear of some paper (behind a paywall) called "The Altering of Reported Experiences" that interviewed at age 48 some subjects who had been surveyed when they were only 14. We are told that based on discrepancies in their answers at age 48 and 14, their memories were "uniformly poor" and that "accurate memory was generally no better than expected by chance." But it is an obvious fact of human experience that people can remember their youth very much "better than expected by chance."
A look at some of the sample questions suggests how the false conclusion was derived. People were not asked questions with specific answers such as "Who was your best friend in junior high?" or "What city did you live in when you graduated high school?" Instead, people were asked questions like these:
What is (was) your mother's best trait?
Competence
Relationship with subject
Intelligence and knowledge
Discipline
Emotionally responsive
With questions such as these, it would be very easy for someone to give differing answers as a 14-year-old and as a 48-year-old, even without any change in what you remembered. The difference would mainly be because the answer could be correctly answered in multiple ways, and there would be no difference in memory involved in giving different answers.
By using the trick phrase "generally no better than chance" the authors of the paper "The Altering of Reported Experiences" suggest language abuse and malfeasance by themselves. For example, imagine there are 100 questions about childhood experiences, and all of the first 45 answers given are the same for 14-year-olds and 48-year-olds. Then imagine 20% of the answers are the same (for 14-year-olds and 48-year-olds) for the last 55 answers. You could then use deceptive trick language and claim that the answers are "generally no better than chance" even though the overall matching is 56 out of 100, which is very much better than the expected chance result of only 20 out of 100. No honest scientist should be using a phrase such as "generally no better than chance" but should instead be telling us in the abstract how much better or worse than chance the overall results were. The use of this kind of trick language in the paper's abstract is enough to disqualify the paper as a result to be taken seriously.
It is a fact of human experience that people can very well remember their childhood many decades later. We should have contempt for any paper using trick language trying to persuade us otherwise, and equally great contempt for TV programs quoting such deceptive papers.
The Netflix show about memory does nothing at all to credibly explain how any of the main capabilities of human memory could possibly occur as a brain process. What the TV show mainly does is to use misleading tactics to try to convince us that human memory is not very good. A thousand examples could be provided of exceptional memory that show how misleading such an attempt is. Very many examples of the most astonishingly powerful human memories can be found at the bullet list at the beginning of my just-published post here.
No comments:
Post a Comment