When Pure Computer Work Is Passed Off as Neuroscience Research

Neuroscientists are unable to produce any solid research supporting the claim that the brain could do anything such as store memories. See the appendix of this post for more than 40 statements by more than 100 scientists, all essentially confessing that scientists do not have any good understanding of how a brain could store memories. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device or component for storing learned information. 

So how does the neuroscientist belief community coverup the shortfall? One technique is to take pure computer work, and try to pass that off as neuroscience research about the brain and learning. 

We saw an example of that in the recent press release here. The press release is entitled "Learning may rely on stronger neural connections, not expanding networks."

 The press release states this:

"How does the brain learn? Does it acquire new knowledge by creating new neural pathways or by strengthening existing connections? A new study from Bar-Ilan University offers evidence in favor of the latter, suggesting that learning is driven primarily by changes in the strength of existing neural connections rather than by expanding the brain's underlying architecture."

The claim in the last sentence is groundless. The study referred to (which you can read here)  is not a neuroscience study, but a computer science study discussing some way to store information in human-designed computer systems. The paper makes no substantive mention of brains, human learning or any parts of brains until its last paragraph. That paragraph reads as follows:

"Finally, one of the major unresolved questions in the study of brain learning is the nature of its underlying mechanism. Specifically, it is not yet known whether learning primarily results from modifications of synaptic weights[42], [43], [44] and dendritic learning[45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50] or from changes in network topology. The second observation presented in this work demonstrates that, for a fixed token set, model accuracy increases with dataset size. However, the maximum dilution level that preserves the performance of the undiluted network is largely independent of dataset size. This observation suggests that gains in language-learning performance are predominantly achieved through weight adaptation driven by larger training datasets. By contrast, the number of neurons in the brain remains approximately constant over time, and there is currently no evidence for a biological mechanism that enables gradual large-scale reconfiguration of neural topology during learning."

We have here nothing of any substance in the way of neuroscience research.  The authors have confessed that there is no well-established theory of how a brain could store memories.  They suggest that their computer-science work is more compatible with the idea that memories are stored by a "modification of synaptic weights."  But there are very many reasons for rejecting such an idea.  One is that the idea is the most vacuous hand-waving.  Information is stored by writing, not by a modification of weights. And there's no component in a brain that could do the writing of learned information. 

We do know of several important characteristics that synapses have which should cause us to reject the claim that memories are stored in synapses. One is that synapses are made up of proteins that are very short-lived. The average lifetime of a synapse protein is only a few weeks. There are more than a thousand proteins used in synapses, and fewer than five have been determined to have a lifetime of more than a month.  The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days). It has not been proven that any synapse protein has a lifetime of more than a year. But old people can remember things for 50 years or longer. Astonishingly, the maximum length of time that people can remember things is about 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of a synapse protein. If the proteins in synapses have short lifetimes, it seems impossible that synapses could be storing memories for 50 years. Similarly, you couldn't store your childhood recollections for 50 years if you wrote them on maple leaves that crumble away after a few months.

How is it that a synapse could store a memory? Our neuroscientists never give a precise answer to this question, and never even give an exact speculation as to precisely how synapses could possibly store an episodic experience such as, say, your experience of hitting a home run in the big ball game. All that neuroscientists do is to make vague claims in this regard, typically the claim that memories are stored when synapses are strengthened. This idea makes no sense. We know that when information is stored, symbolic tokens are written. There is no proven case of any information ever being stored by an act of mere strengthening. I'm not counting cases in which some computer system increments a numerical value stored at some place, and someone calls that "strengthening," although it really is not. 

Moreover, we know of an exact reason why memories cannot be stored through some act of synapse strengthening. It is the fact that synapse strengthening requires a synthesis of proteins, which takes minutes. But it is not at all true that a person requires minutes to form a new memory. If someone tells you that your parent or child just died,  you will instantly form a permanent new memory that you will never forget. There is no neuroscience theory of the formation of memories in the brain that is consistent with the fact that humans can form permanent new memories instantly.

One simple fact with gigantic implications is the fact that synapses inside the human cortex do not reliably transmit signals. It has been found that synapses inside the cortex transmit brain signals with a reliability of between 10% and 50%. A 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."

Senselessly ignored by dogma-clinging neuroscientists, the fact that  synaptic transmission is unreliable has very big implications. It means that when you instantly give a detailed correct answer to some general knowledge question such as who was this person or who was that person was, such a feat cannot be occurring through a retrieval of information stored in synapses. There are more than a trillion synapses in the brain, and every neuron connects to many synapses. If information was being retrieved from synapses, and each transmission of a signal across a synapse occurred with less than 50% reliability, it would be like doing an Internet search in which each letter or character was received with less than 50% reliability. 

So, for example, imagine you tried to remember the beginning of the Gettysburg Address, which starts out like this:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

If you tried to retrieve that information from synapses that transmit with less than 50% accuracy over each synaptic gap, the result might be something like this:

"four sroce and seven yraes ago our farhets bhrugot forth on this cneoinntt, a new nitoan, cvoceined ii ltrebiy, and dtdeciaed to the poirostpion that all men are cteared eauql. now we are eenaggd in a greer civ3l wir, tentisg weethhr that noaitn, or any noaitn ss ccnveoeid and ss daetciedd, can long ednure. we are met oo a gaert bfti-elateld of that war. we have come to detacide a piotorn of that field, aa a fanil rnstieg pcale for tsohe who here gave their levis that that notain might live. it ii alhtgeeotr fnititg and perpor that we soluhd do this."

Think of what happens when someone sings one of the longer opera roles, such as the role of Siegfried, Tristan, Isolde or Norma. A singer of these roles has to sing on the stage for hours, remembering thousands of words and also which notes correspond to each word.  Many humans perform such memory recall tasks flawlessly, not missing a single word or a single note, getting every word and note correctly. Such feats of recall could never occur if memory recall was occurring by a retrieval of information from synapses that transmit so unreliably. 

Then there's the fact that memory recall would be way too slow if it required retrieval from information stored in synapses. Every transmission of a signal across a synaptic cleft involves a delay of between about 1 and 5 milliseconds, something called synaptic delay. But the brain has trillions of synapses. If a brain stored memory in synapses, recalling complex answers would require a cumulative synaptic delay of many seconds or minutes, preventing people from ever being able to instantly give a complex answer to a question. You can't get out of this jam by appealing to brain addresses or brain sorting or brain indexes. The brain has none of these three things. 

We don't answer questions at the speed of brains. We answer questions at the speed of souls. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."  -- PhD thesis of a scientist, 2007 (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 
• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
•  "Very little is known about the underlying mechanisms for visual recognition memory."  -- two scientists (link). 
• "Conclusive evidence that specific long-term memory formation relies on dendritic growth and structural synaptic changes has proven elusive. Connectionist models of memory based on this hypothesis are confronted with the so-called plasticity stability dilemma or catastrophic interference. Other fundamental limitations of these models are the feature binding problem, the speed of learning, the capacity of the memory, the localisation in time of an event and the problem of spatio-temporal pattern generation."  -- Two scientists in 2022 (link). 
• "The mechanisms governing successful episodic memory formation, consolidation and retrieval remain elusive,"  - Bogdan Draganski, cogntive neuroscientist (link). 
• " The mechanisms underlying the formation and management of the memory traces are still poorly understood." -- Three scientists in 2023 (link). 
• "The underlying electrophysiological processes underlying memory formation and retrieval in humans remains very poorly understood." --  A scientist in 2021 (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 
• "We still lack fundamental knowledge about the mechanisms involved." -- Neuroscientist Eleanor A. Maguire, after mentioning "autobiographical memory" (link).
• "We still lack an integrative computational framework capable of jointly explaining the main empirical findings on semantic and episodic memory and their dynamic interactions." -- Five scientists (link).