Misrepresenting the BRAIN Initiative, Neuroscientists Beg for Its Lavish Funding to Continue

 The BRAIN Initiative is a multi-year big-science project launched during the Obama administration in 2013. It started off in 2014 with a budget of about $110 million, and its funding increased in subsequent years. One of its documents claims on page 121 that the BRAIN Initiative ”will require new and distinct funding of between 300-500 million per year." A graph at the page here gives us this depiction of the funding of the BRAIN Initiative, which has added up to be more than 4 billion dollars. 

Too bad the program consists largely of not-terribly-useful research designed to try to prove an untrue ideology about the mind.

The assumptions behind the project are made clear in a document called Brain 2025: A Scientific Vision, which is offered at one of the project's two main web sites. The “scientific vision” laid out in the document is largely an ideological vision, based on the far-fetched idea that the human mind is merely the product of the brain. The dubious ideology of the authors is made clear in the very first sentence of the document, in which the authors state, “The human brain is the source of our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, actions, and memories; it confers on us the abilities that make us human, while simultaneously making each of us unique.” It has certainly not been proven that any brain has ever generated a thought or stored a memory.

In fact, later in the document the authors confess, “We do not yet have a systematic theory of how information is encoded in the chemical and electrical activity of neurons, how it is fused to determine behavior on short time scales, and how it is used to adapt, refine, and learn behaviors on longer time scales.” This is certainly true. No one has anything like a systematic theory of how a brain could store memories as neural states, nor has anyone come up with anything like a systematic theory of how a brain could generate a thought. So why, then, does the document start out by stating that “the human brain is the source of our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, actions, and memories”? No one has any business making such a claim unless he first has or knows of "a systematic theory of how information is encoded in the chemical and electrical activity of neurons.” But the document admits that no such theory exists.

The document makes clear that the main purpose of the BRAIN Initiative will be to shore up claims about mechanistic causes of the  human mind. The document states, “The most important outcome of the BRAIN Initiative will be a comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function that emerges from synergistic application of the new technologies and conceptual structures developed under the BRAIN Initiative.” That makes it pretty clear that the project is ideology-driven. The idea that mental function can be explained mechanistically is an unbelievable piece of ideology inconsistent with many forms of evidence. One of these forms of evidence involves the many cases of minds that worked well after half or more of the brain was lost to injury, disease or surgery. Another such form of evidence is that scientists cannot find any plausible storage place in the brain where memories could be stored for 50 years, synapses (subject to very rapid molecular turnover) being no such thing.

What are some of the things that this BRAIN Initiative has been spending money on? Most of the project's money has apparently be spent as follows:

1. Trying to develop new tools to study the brain.
2. Creating circuit maps of the brain.
3. Identifying various types of brain cells.
4. Playing around with zapping people's brains in various different ways.

There is no reason to believe that any of this activity will actually result in the project's goal of a “comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function” or even something much smaller, a fragmentary mechanistic understanding of mental function. There is no “circuit map” that we can possibly imagine that would allow us to understand how neurons might produce thoughts, how neural activity could result in such a thing as selfhood, or how human episodic memories could ever be stored as neural states. No real insight into such things has been produced by previous efforts to identify different types of brain cells or map out the connections of the brain. So why should we believe that any further insight on these matters will come from further activity along these lines?

In a section entitled “Manipulating circuit activity,” the Brain 2025 document tries to suggest that electrically zapping people's brains might tell us something about memory. It says, “In the 1950s, Penfield’s electrical stimulation experiments suggested that a memory or thought could be elicited by activating neurons in the underlying network.” Penfield's experiments did not actually suggest such a thing, for reasons I explain in my post here. The document fails to tell us that a review of 80 years of electrical stimulation of the brain found that it was very rare for people to recall anything during electrical stimulation of the brain and said this: “Overall, only one patient reported what appeared to be a clearly detailed episodic memory for which he spontaneously specified that he had never thought about it.” 

But nonetheless the BRAIN Initiative fellows expressed great enthusiasm for monkeying with people's brains. After noting approvingly that “stimulating electrodes are being placed in human patients,” the BRAIN 2025 document says, “Entirely new tools could be developed based on magnetic stimulation, gases, infrared excitation, ultrasound, or organic or physical chemistry to allow access to neurons deep within the brain.” It sounds like their plan is kind of like this:

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MASTER PLAN FOR UNDERSTANDING HUMAN MIND

1. Gas people's brains.

2. Shock their skulls with electricity

3. Bombard their neurons with various forms of radiation and magnetism. 

4. Cross fingers and hope for breakthrough.

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So far the BRAIN Initiative has been running for well over a decade and has accomplished nothing extremely noteworthy. Our understanding of the brain has not dramatically advanced during those many years, and all the old mysteries of mind and memory seem as mysterious as ever. 

At this “Achievements” page there is a discussion of what the BRAIN Initiative has accomplished so far. At the top of the text is a big bold headline saying “Transformative Advances,” but the BRAIN Initiative has produced no such transformative advances. Go beyond the flashy spin on the web site, the high-tech glitter, and the discussion of things in progress that haven't yet yielded much, and you have not a single major accomplishment relating to our understanding of the mind or memory. 

We read the false claim that "2024 was a historic year for groundbreaking advancements in neuroscience." No, it sure was not. Clicking on the links we read some attempts to justify such a claim. We hear a mention of a paper with the misleading title "Representation of internal speech by single neurons in human supramarginal gyrus." The tricks used by the paper are discussed in my post "Look Very Closely at a Study Claiming Thought Reading of Brains, and You'll Find the Shady Tricks Behind It," which you can read here. The paper provides no actual evidence that anyone's "internal speech" is represented anywhere in the brain, or that such speech can be decoded by studying brain waves picked up by EEG readings 

We also have a reference to a paper involving a semi-paralyzed man who can produce slurred speech. With some electrodes attached to the motor cortex region of his head or brain, there is some kind of processing that is able to decode his slurred speech making it intelligible. This isn't picking up any "internal speech," which does not involve using your muscles to try to speak. 

I found a BRAIN Initiative .pdf document promoting the BRAIN Initiative, trying to summarize its accomplishments.  It had the  utterly phony statement, "Researchers uncover how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieves memories." Nothing of the sort has occurred. The boast is as phony as a three-dollar bill. 

The document mentioned a 2022 study by Zheng, and a web search shows that an identical claim ("Researchers uncover how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieves memories") was the title of a 2022 NIH press release promoting a study co-authored by Jie Zheng. You can read that press release here. The press release published by the National Institute of Health is one of the worst examples of government BS I have ever read. It discusses a study that I debunk in my post here. The study was one of those ethically objectionable studies in which very sick epilepsy patients are lured into experiments involving electrodes implanted deep in their brains. The study did not do anything to show that a brain either stores or retrieves memories, nor did it do anything to clarify how a brain could either store or retrieve memories. It is now four years later, and neuroscientists still lack any credible theory of how a brain could either store or retrieve memories.  No one has ever been able to retrieve any trace of anything anyone learned by the microscopic examination of brain tissue. 

At the recent page here, we read that a letter has been sent to the US Congress, begging that the BRAIN Initiative continue to get the lavish funding it has got for the past decade. In that letter, neuroscience authorities say, "For FY 2027, we

respectfully request that you provide $468 million for the BRAIN Initiative." The letter makes this false claim: "The BRAIN Initiative is revolutionizing our understanding of the brain."  No, it sure is not. The BRAIN Initiative has not met any of the grand goals that were set out for it when it was started 12 years ago. Claims to the contrary are examples of groundless hype, which is epidemic in today's neuroscience literature. 

The letter fails to make specific claims about advances in neuroscience that came from the billions of dollars already spent on the BRAIN Initiative. The letter states, "The BRAIN Initiative has supported scientists in developing adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS), a therapy that sends electrical signals to the brain and monitors brain activity in real time to help treat various neurological disorders." The reference is to some questionable "zap the brain" technology that is profitable for medical device manufacturers, but of very questionable worth for the sick. The request for the huge handout (many millions of government funding) sounds like a request for many millions in "corporate welfare."

Is THIS  their plan for trying to get neuroscience progress?

Do we need the government to be funding experiments involving brain-zapping devices? Probably not, because such experiments can be funded by the manufacturers of such devices, who will profit enormously if the experiments get impressive results. Of course, neuroscientists financially entangled with such biomedical device makers will tend to recommend what is best for such corporations. 

The National Institute of Health page here seems to be the main web page of the BRAIN Initiative, which has got most of its funding from the National Institute of Health. Clicking on the "Latest News" link takes us to the page here, which takes us to a page that seems to list no very noteworthy news announcements. The page gives no news announcements later than May 2025. The page rather gives us an impression of a floundering project, not getting much of anywhere. You would think that with the several billions of dollars of funding that the BRAIN Initiative has received, that its researchers would at least try to make a halfway decent effort to sell their research results. Instead we have a page that gives you a feeling of: these guys are not  getting much of anywhere recently. The page has three references to mouse brain studies, one reference to a fruit fly study, and only one reference to "the human brain." So we get a "they're mostly fooling around with mice and flies" impression. 

At the link here, we have a pdf file at the BRAIN Initiative web site, one trying to sell the BRAIN Initiative. At the top is the question, "Why do we need the NIH BRAIN Initiative?" The first statement following that question is a falsehood. It is the statement, "The human brain is the most powerful, flexible and energy-efficient computer known to humankind." The brain is not a computer. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a computer as "a device that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information." Brains are not devices and brains are not programmable. 

The table below illustrates why it is nonsensical to claim that your brain is like a computer. 

	COMPUTER	BRAIN
Made of metal?	Yes	No
Has an operating system?	Yes	No
Has application programs?	Yes	No
Has a known system for writing information to itself?	Yes	No
Has a known system for reading non-genetic information from itself?	Yes	No
Has addresses, indexes or a position notation system?	Yes	No
Great effects or disabling if you remove small parts?	Yes	No
All components stable?	Yes	No
Reliably transmits information?	Yes	No
Digital?	Yes	No
Has known encoding systems for storing images and language?	Yes	No
Very fast signal transmission throughout system?	Yes	No
Images or text found in removed parts?	Yes	No
Has no effect on consciousness?	Yes	No

The image below has the same table, using "check box" graphics:

I can justify some of the claims above:

• An operating system is a software framework providing low-level services that are needed for application software programs to work. Examples include UNIX, Linux, MS-DOS, the various versions of Windows, and the various versions of the Apple operating system. Creating an operating system requires man-years of intentional programming work by programmers. The brain has nothing like an operating system. 
• Application programs are software programs created by software developers using programming languages such as Java, C, Python and C++. The brain has nothing like application programs. Genes are mere lists of amino acids, and are not application programs. A key feature of application programs is abundant use of "if/then" logic, something not found in genes, proteins or DNA. 
• No one has ever shown that a brain has any system or capability for writing learned information. Claims that information is written by "synapse strengthening" or "LTP" are examples of groundless hand-waving. No one has ever shown how even the simplest phrase such as "my dog has fleas" could be written by either synapse strengthening or LTP. 
• Like all parts of the body, the brain is capable of reading genetic information from DNA. No one has ever shown that the brain has any such thing as a system or capability for reading non-genetic information such as information learned in school. We know that humans can recall school-learned information, but do not know that brains can do that. 
• While neurons are stable components, the synapses and dendritic spines of the brain are unstable components. The average lifetime of the proteins in synapses is less that two weeks. Imaging of dendritic spines show they are unstable components that do not last for years. It is estimated that the average synapse does not last for years. 
• The average speed of signal transmission in the brain is not very fast. While some components such as myelinated axons can transmit information very quickly, the brain is full of chemical synapses that transmit signals relatively slowly, because of the delays caused by chemical transmission across synaptic gaps. Also, signals travel relatively slowly through dendrites. 
• The great majority of synapses in the brain are chemical synapses, and signals do not reliably transmit across chemical synapses. Tests have shown that signals transmit across the gaps in such synapses with a transmission likelihood of only about 10% to 50%. A scientific states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." The failure of synapses to reliably transmit information is a major reason for thinking that recall and thinking does not come from the brain. Recall of very large amounts of memorized text can occur with 100% accuracy, and humans can do complex math calculations in their minds with 100% accuracy. But it would seem such feats should be impossible if achieved by brains that transmit signals so unreliably.  
• A computer engineer can detach the hard drive of a computer, and retrieve very many images and a great deal of written text from such a detached component.  No one has ever found by microscopic examination of brain tissue any such thing as something someone saw or something someone read or experienced.  Not a single word anyone ever read has ever been found through microscopic examination of brain tissue. This failure is a major reason for rejecting the claim that brains store memories. 
• No one has ever discovered any system by which a brain could encode learned information so that it could be stored in brain states or synapse states, nor has anyone ever even advanced a detailed credible theory of how such a thing could be done. 
• Computers can be made unusable (or all-but-unusable) by removing small parts such as the CPU. Brains, on the other hand, can operate well even when large parts of them have been removed. See my posts here and here for examples of people who suffered relatively little cognitive damage after very large parts of their brains were lost due to disease or surgery. 

 By claiming over and over again that the brain is a computer,  neuroscientists have been guilty of a misstatement as bad as if they were to claim that your bath towel is a flying carpet that can transport you from city to city.