"Brains Make Minds" Is Dumb, and "Brain Waves Make Minds" Is Even Dumber

 We have the strongest reasons for rejecting the dogma that brains make minds. Specifically:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

Given such realities, what is the intelligent direction to move in, to resolve the explanatory shortfall? That direction is to try to explain human minds and human memory by looking for something more than the brain. What is the wrong direction to move in, to resolve the explanatory shortfall? It is to try to explain the human mind by postulating something less than a brain. 

We have in the article here a discussion of neuroscientist named Miller  moving in such an "ass-backward" direction. It is an article entitled "MIT Neuroscientist Proposes Brain Waves are the Hidden Engine Behind Thought and Consciousness." You may start to realize how stupid this idea is once you realize that so-called brain waves are not a discrete thing that really always exist independently in the brain, but are instead a kind of measurement artifact conjured up by neuroscientists and neurologists, an artifact appearing only when a particular technological protocol is used. 

What are brain waves? They are the squiggly lines that a neuroscientist or neurologist gets when he puts on someone's head a device called an EEG headcap. Such a headcap is connected to a machine. The kind of setup is shown in the visual below:

Now, the waves shown on the computer screen are not discrete things that exist independently throughout your day-to-day existence. Such waves really only come into existence when a neuroscientist sticks one of these caps on someone's head and starts doing the reading. 

You really have every day all of these things:

• You have a brain. 
• You have neurons inside your brain. 
• You have synapses inside your brain. 
• You have electricity and chemicals traveling between different neurons of your brain.
• You have very many mental capabilities. 
• Your have a self.
• You have thoughts, feelings and experiences.
• You have memories, and various memory abilities, such as the ability to learn new things, and the ability to recall old memories. 

But today you do not really have any such thing as brain waves corresponding to the waves shown on EEG screens like the one shown above. It is possible for you today to conjure up such brain waves, by going to a doctor or neuroscientist, and having him put on your head an EEG cap like the one shown above. Or, if you paid for some at-home EEG-type device, you might be able to conjure up brain waves, by sticking such a device on your head, and seeing brain wave readings on a computer screen. 

A device that shows brain waves is one that engages in a largely arbitrary act of pictorial representation. To understand that, let's first look at the ground reality that is used as a starting point for the pictorial construction of brain waves. The brain consists mainly of neurons, and each neuron has a particular firing rate, with the firing rate varying from between 1 time a second to about 100 or 200 times per second. Over any time interval, the average firing rates of neurons can be measured.  So imagine a cube consisting of 100 smaller cubes, and imagine each of those cubes has in it a number, with the number varying over time. We can think of the numbers as being the average firing rates of one particular area in the brain. 

When an EEG headcap is put on someone's head, particular electrodes kind of line up with some of the outer parts of the brain. An analogy would be if you hooked up a wire to each of about 30 of the cubes shown in the diagram above. So you can get readings that correspond to variations of the average firing rates of particular parts of the brain. 

Such readings are not any direct capturing of a wave, comparable to a photo showing a wave on a beach. But the data received from such readings of brain firings can be visually depicted as a wave. You can plot changes in firing frequency over time, and depict that as a wave. Similarly, there are no real waves in the data of a baseball game. But you could visually plot some of that data as a wave. For example, you might have a "hits per inning" graph that used waves, as below. The graph shows how many many hits a particular team got during each of the nine innings in a baseball game. 

Baseball games don't really have "hitting waves" like shown above as parts of what happens inside them; baseball games only have events such as hits (singles, doubles, etc.) and outs (such as a strikeout or a force out). But by graphing the data in a particular way, you can construct a "hitting wave" graph. Similarly, brains don't really have "brain waves," but you can graph data on fluctuations in brain firing rates, in a way that shows waves. "Hitting waves" would be an analytic construction of baseball analysts, and "brain waves" are an analytic construction of brain analysts. 

From this discussion we can start to realize how silly is the notion suggested by some MIT scientist that "brain waves are the hidden engine behind thought and consciousness." Strictly speaking, you don't really even have in your brain today any such thing as "brain waves," and so-called "brain waves" are only what appears after some technology is used to graph  fluctuations in brain firing rates. 

An ocean wave is a real thing that requires no arbitrary special processing to create. When you see something like what is shown below, that does not involve any "try to show a wave" algorithm. 

But when brain waves are shown on electronic screens connected to EEG devices, that does involve a special arbitrary  "try to show a wave" algorithm. 

In the article mentioned above, the neuroscientist makes these full-of-falsehoods claims about brain waves, which appear as consecutive statements. 

• "The brain uses these oscillatory waves to organize itself.” No, brain waves do not do anything at all to organize brains. 
• “Cognition is large-scale neural self-organization." No, cognition is mental, and not any physical organization. 
• "The brain has got to organize itself to perform complex behaviors. Brain waves are the patterns of excitation and inhibition that organize the brain, and this leads to consciousness because consciousness is this organized knitting together of the cortex.” No, brain waves do not do anything to organize any part of the brain, and consciousness is not any such thing as an "organized knitting together of the cortex."

The article makes this untrue boast with no basis in fact: "Over three decades of research in Dr. Miller’s lab at MIT have demonstrated how these waves help organize information flow across the cortex—the outermost layer of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions." Brain waves are an epiphenomenon of electrical activity in the brain, comparable to the scent that arises when you cook a meal. Brain waves no more organize information than the scent you make when cooking organizes the meal you are cooking. 

Later the author of the article makes all kinds of claims about Miller's research that have no basis in fact. There is no robust research backing up any of the author's statements below:

"His work suggests that brain waves act like traffic signals for thought: slower 'top-down' frequencies carry goals and rules, while faster waves deliver sensory information. Together, they guide what we perceive, remember, and decide."

This is as groundless as claiming that ocean waves carry philosophical thoughts, and that the scent from your cooking carries rules about how you cook.  The word "guide" is one of the most abused words in science writing. People writing about biology are constantly claiming without adequate warrant that this or that chemical or mechanical effect "guides" something or "regulates" something, using statements that they have no warrant for using. The author is making the most groundless and senseless speculations when he says things such as "In essence, the balance between these wave patterns determines when certain thoughts emerge and when they remain suppressed." 

The theory that brain waves create minds is disproven by the reality of near-death experiences during cardiac arrest, when the brain's electrical activity shuts down, and brain waves flatline. While the brain is electrically shut down during cardiac arrest, many people have the most vivid experiences, which they remember very well. This proves that neither brains nor brain waves are necessary for vivid experiences involving memory. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia [heart stopping] without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric." meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this: 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

For example, below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of a scientific paper. We see the brain waves of a dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  

What people recall during near-death experiences in which their hearts have stopped and their brain waves have stopped are not some shadowy experiences only a tiny fraction as real-seeming as normal experiences. Instead, people having near-death experiences often report experiences that seemed more real and vivid than anything they have ever experienced. When people have such experiences in brains that are flatlining, with the brain waves shut down, that shows that brain waves are not any source of the human mind.