Neurons Are Just as Active During Sleep, Contrary to "Brains Make Minds" Claims

Under the assumption that the brain produces thinking, we would expect that neurons would fire much more often when a person is awake than when he was asleep. The reality is a very embarrassing one for "brains make minds" claimants. The reality is that neurons are continually active, firing between about 1 to 200 times per second. This activity continues full-blast during sleep, without any major decrease in the firing rates of neurons. Asking Google "what kind of diurnal variations are there in neural firing rates?" I get an AI overview answer that includes this statement referring to neurons: "the average firing rates of excitatory pyramidal populations (such as in the hippocampus) remain remarkably static and stable across the 24-hour period, independent of sleep states."

The graph below is from the scientific paper here, entitled "Neuronal firing rates diverge during REM and homogenize during non-REM." We see neural firing rates in the hippocampus of rats during short periods of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, during long periods of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep (shown underneath the blue bars), and during some short periods of being awake (shown underneath the orange bars). The firing rates all look the same.

The same paper gives us this graph showing neuron firing rates in the cortex. We see neural firing rates in the cortex during short periods of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep (shown underneath the short purple bars), during long periods of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep (shown underneath the blue bars), and during some short periods of being awake (shown underneath the orange bars). The firing rates look pretty much the same in sleep and wakefulness. The highest spikes occur not during wakefulness but during REM sleep. 

The graph below (from the paper here) shows no appreciable difference between neural firing rates of awake rats and neural firing rates of asleep rats. The "hz" on the side stands for "hertz," and 1 hertz means I time per second. In both asleep rats and awake rats, neurons firing at an average rate of about 1 time per second, 

Below is a graph from the scientific paper here, entitled "Increased neuronal firing in resting and sleep in areas of the macaque medial prefrontal cortex." We see neural firing rates in a monkey during sleep (the shaded areas) and during an awake state. The neurons are firing more frequently during sleep than during the wake state. 

This data makes no sense under the idea that your brain makes your mind and the idea that your brain stores your memories. Why would the hippocampus (claimed wrongly to be "the memory center" of the brain) keep firing its neurons at the same rate when you are awake (and need to be continually creating memories) as when you are asleep (when you  are not creating important memories, are not receiving sensory inputs and you are not thinking)? Why would the cortex (wrongly claimed to be the "thinking center" of your brain) fire its neurons more often during sleep (when someone is not thinking) than during wakefulness?

The Mystery Is Not Infantile Amnesia, But How Anything Can Be Instantly Learned or Instantly Recalled

 A recent article at the neuroscience site The Transmitter is entitled "Infant Memories: Lost But Not Gone?" The article has quite a few groundless and incorrect claims about memory, which the authors (Paul Frankland, Sheena Josselyn and Nick Turke-Browne) attempt to substantiate by linking mostly to low-quality papers, some of which they co-authored themselves. 

Early on, the authors state, "The advent of activity-dependent engram labeling and optogenetic tools has enabled researchers to directly address the encoding versus retrieval debate." No such thing as engram labeling exists, and claims that scientists have discovered engrams (reputed places of memory storage in a brain) are without any foundation in good science. 

It is interesting that both of the links above are to papers authored by two of the three Transmitter article authors (Frankland and Josselyn). So we have self-citation. The first paper is a paper by Frankland, Josselyn and Kohler entitled "Engrams." We have the claim, "At the largest scale, engrams are thought to be composed of sparse neuronal ensembles, distributed throughout the brain." That sure does not sound like some specific thing discovered in some particular part of the brain. We read this: "Between 1950 — when Lashley published his scientific magnum opus (In Search of the Engram) — and the late 2000s, barely any scientific articles bore the term engram in their title."

Then we read in the paper about experiments done in recent years. The authors of the paper fail to discuss the low quality of these experiments, and how they were guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study groups, and unreliable methods for measuring how well a rodent remembered. In a paragraph entitled "What is the best evidence for engrams?" we have a reference to rodent experiments using "freezing behavior" judgments (really just immobility tracking).  All such studies are examples of junk science, for reasons explained here. Trying to judge a rodent's immobility (and calling that a tracking of "freezing behavior") is a worthless technique for judging whether an animal remembered something. 

The other link in the quote above from the Transmitter article is to a review article by Frankland, Josselyn and Kohler. It is called "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval," but fails to explain how any such thing can occur. The article is one of those review articles in which many a low-quality study is treated as if it was good evidence.

Later in the Transmitter article the authors state, "In mice, researchers can tag engrams in infant pups, track their persistence across development and optogenetically reactivate them later in life to recover seemingly lost memories." That is not at all true. The link is to a low-quality paper "Recovery of 'Lost' Infant Memories in Mice" co-authored by Josselyn, Frankland and others. The study group sizes were way below the minimum of 15 or 20 rodents needed for a study like this to be taken seriously. We read, "Separate groups of infant and adult mice were tested either 1 (P17, N = 9; P60, N = 7), 15 (P17, N = 9; P60, N = 12), 30 (P17, N = 10; P60, N = 7), or 90 days (P17, N = 8; P60, N = 10) after training." The "N" refers to how many rodents were used in particular study groups. Averaging about nine rodents per study group, those are all way-too-small study group sizes. And the worthless method of trying to judge "freezing behavior" was used throughout the study. 

Referring to this low-quality paper as if it was something good, the Transmitter article states this:

"Animals that undergo contextual fear conditioning in infancy show no behavioral evidence of remembering when tested in adulthood (that is, they do not freeze when placed back in a context where they were  shocked as pups). However, optogenetic stimulation of the neurons that were active when the pup was first conditioned triggers expression of the memory; the mature animal now freezes."

But using "freezing behavior" judgments is a worthless technique for trying to measure how well a rodent remembered. And it is particularly invalid to apply "optogenetic stimulation" (a type of brain zapping), and to then claim that this shows that a memory was artificially reactivated because an animal exhibited "freezing behavior." It has been realized by neuroscientists that artificial stimulation of many areas of the brain will produce "freezing behavior" regardless of whether any memory is being recalled. 

Imagine you are running along, and suddenly a scientist switches on some weird thing that causes some energy to pour into your brain. This all by itself might cause you to stop, even if it didn't cause you to recall some memory that caused you to stop. What could have been going on in the mice was just a kind of pausing effect caused by a novel stimulus rather than a recalled fear effect. A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing [i.e. immobility] in rodents by stimulating a wide variety of regions. It says, "It is possible to induce freezing by activating a variety of brain areas and projections, including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012), lateral, basal and central amygdala (Ciocchi et al., 2010); Johansen et al., 2010; Gore et al., 2015a), periaqueductal gray (Tovote et al., 2016), motor and primary sensory cortices (Kass et al., 2013), prefrontal projections (Rajasethupathy et al., 2015) and retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014).”

It is not sound to assume that you can judge the degree of immobility of a mouse in a cage, and then assume that the higher levels of immobility are evidence of a mouse “freezing in fear" because it remembers a fear stimulus.  The "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge recall in mice works like this. A mouse will be trained to fear a shock plate that produces an electrical shock. The mouse will later be put in a cage with such a shock plate. Scientists will then attempt to judge immobility of the mouse during some arbitrary time unit that can be either 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes or three minutes. An arbitrary criteria will be used to judge immobility. For example, not moving for most of ten seconds can be counted as immobility during those seconds, or not moving for most of 20 seconds can be counted as immobility during those seconds, or not moving for  most of 30 seconds can be counted as immobility. Or, any movement at all during those seconds can be counted as movement during that time period. This immobility will be called "freezing," even though scientists have no idea whether the mouse was afraid when it was not moving.  The result of trying to track the mouse's immobility is a "freezing percentage" graph that can be produced in any of 100 different ways. With so many possible analysis choices, it will be almost certain that the experimenter will be able to produce a graph purporting to show the desired difference in "freezing behavior." There are no standards in producing these "freezing behavior" charts. 

Neuroscientists follow this bungling method of trying to measure mouse recall because it is a "see whatever you want to see" method providing the researcher with a near-certainty that the desired results can be claimed. Instead of using so deficient a technique, there are other reliable techniques that can be used. A reliable way to judge whether a a rodent trained to fear some stimulus such as a shock plate is to use some setup such as the one shown below, in which an animal remembering the fear stimulus will take the harder path towards a reward rather than the easier path.

Or, more simply, a very hungry mouse trained to fear a shock plate can be put in a cage like the one show below, and it can be recorded whether he touched the shock plate while trying to get the reward, or whether the mouse did not go get the food (as it would only do if it remembered that the shock plate produces pain). 

The Transmitter article authors then approvingly cite an appalling set of studies trying to show evidence of memory formation in infants by brain scanning them. Such studies are criticized in my post "The Reckless Foolishness of Brain-Scanning Healthy Babies in Neuroscience Experiments."  Having no value in helping to understand memory, experiments such as these run very serious risks to the infants who are needlessly put in brain scanners. There is both a risk of an accident that might harm or kill the child (a young boy once died in an MRI accident), and also a very serious risk that such brain scanning may increase the child's lifetime risk of developing cancer.  

The authors of the paper are trying in a self-serving manner to get us to believe in a socially constructed triumphal legend that researchers such as themselves have done something to substantiate the idea of an engram, a claim that has no basis in robust and well-designed experimental studies. Contrary to their insinuation that this "engram" concept has blossomed in the past 15 years, a search for references to "engram" using the Google Books Ngram viewer shows little evidence of such a blossoming. 

We may compare this result with a search for a word that seems to have skyrocketed in use since the year 2000, the word "ghosts."

Judging from the graph above, you might conclude that the observational evidence for apparitions is far stronger than the observational evidence for engrams.  

The mystery is not why a 70-year-old fails to remember the first five years of his life. The mysteries are how any human is able to remember anything at all, how people asked questions with specific answers are able to instantly answer correctly by giving information they learned decades ago, and also why old people are able to remember very well what occurred to them 50 or 60 years ago. 

Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device for storing learned information, and nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device for retrieving learned information. The brain has no known writing mechanism and no known mechanism for reading learned information. The microscopic examination of brain tissue has never detected the slightest trace of anything a human ever learned, even though the brains of many corpses of recently-deceased people have been studied by scientists, and even though much brain tissue extracted from living people has been microscopically studied. 

Neuroscientists senselessly claim that memories are stored in synapses, but the proteins that make up synapses have average lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans remember things (average lifetimes of only a few weeks). Synapses fail to even transmit data reliably, with each transmission across a synaptic gap occurring with a reliability of only 50% or less. Such signal transmission unreliability should make both a brain storage of memory and a brain retrieval of memory impossible, because signals would have to pass over so very many synapses when either event occurred (there are very many synapses for every neuron). A human can remember the answers to very many thousands of questions instantly, but nothing in a brain can explain such a wonder. Humans construct things that allow the instant retrieval of information, and so we know the type of things that make possible instant information retrieval. Those things are addresses, indexes and sorting. The brain has no addresses, no indexes, and no sorting. The physical architecture of the brain makes sorting within it impossible. Humans can learn things instantly, something that cannot be explained by synapse strengthening which is a slow affair.

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view [73]. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?" -- The paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules" by 7 scientists.
• "Neural circuits consist of many noisy, slow components, with individual neurons subject to ion channel noise, axonal propagation delays, and unreliable and slow synaptic transmission." -- Four scientists (link). 
• "Neurons communicate primarily through chemical synapses, and that communication is critical for proper brain function. However, chemical synaptic transmission appears unreliable: for most synapses, when an action potential arrives at an axon terminal, about half the time, no neurotransmitter is released and so no communication happens... Furthermore, when neurotransmitter is released at an individual synaptic release site, the size of the local postsynaptic membrane conductance change is also variable. Given the importance of synapses, the energetic cost of generating action potentials, and the evolutionary timescales over which the brain has been optimized, the high level of synaptic noise seems surprising."  -- Four scientists (link). 
• "The probability of [synaptic] vesicle release [i.e. successful synaptic transmission] is known to be generally low (0.1 to 0.4) from in vitro studies in some vertebrate and invertebrate systems (Stevens, 1994). This unreliability is further compounded by the trial-to-trial variability in the amplitude of the post-synaptic response to a vesicular release." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "The release probability, the average probability that an active zone of a presynaptic terminal releases one or more vesicles following an action potential, is tightly regulated. Measurements in cultured neurons or in slices indicate that this probability can vary greatly between synapses, but on average it is estimated to be as high as 0.5....Existing evidence thus suggests that under physiological conditions in vivo, presynaptic action potentials trigger the release of neurotransmitter much less frequently than what is observed in in vitro preparations." -- A paper by two scientists, suggesting synapses transmit signals with a reliability much less than 50% (link). 
• "On average most synapses respond to only less than half of the presynaptic spikes, and if they respond, the amplitude of the postsynaptic current varies. This high degree of unreliability has been puzzling as it impairs information transmission." -- Four scientists (link).
• "Transmission at individual synaptic contacts on CAI hippocampal pyramidal neurons has been found to be very unreliable, with greater than half of the arriving presynaptic nerve impulses failing to evoke a postsynaptlc response." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A precise estimate of the in vivo [synaptic] release probability is difficult, but...it can be expected to be closer to 0.1 than to the previous estimates of around 0.5. " -- "The low synaptic release probability in vivo" by J. Gerard G. Borst (link). 
• "The average number of connections between areas in different hemispheres is even smaller, below 1,500 axons. While previous studies have hinted that connectivity between some areas could be sparse [1], the overall sparsity of cortical connections implied by the present study still comes as a surprise. It is as if a traffic system presumed to consist of multilane highways running between most brain areas in fact consists of just a few precarious footpaths." --  The paper "The Highways and Byways of the Brain" by two scientists (link), a paper referring to "the generally very sparse connectivity" of the brain. 
• "The scale of the vast gulf in absolute connectivity between local and long-range connections is startling."--  Paper "An estimation of the absolute number of axons indicates that human cortical areas are sparsely connected" by two scientists (link).
• "Interestingly, signal propagation speeds in various conditions are similar (~0.1 m/s). Neural spikes generated by 4-aminopyridine (4-AP) travel with a longitudinal speed of 0.09/0.03 m/s along the CA3 region (Kiblerand Durand, 2011), whereas in the presence of picrotoxin, synchronous firing events propagate longitudinally at 0.14 /0.04m/s (Miles et al., 1988). High K+-, low Mg2+-, and zero-Ca2+- triggered spikes again exhibit speeds of 0.07-0.1 m/s, 0.1– 0.15m/s, and 0.04 – 0.15 m/s, respectively (Haas and Jefferys, 1984;Quilichini et al., 2002;Liu et al., 2013). In normal tissue, theta oscillations travel with a speed of 0.08 – 0.107 m/s in the hippocampus of living rodent rats (Lubenov and Siapas, 2009),whereas carbachol-induced theta oscillations travels with a speed of 0.119 m/s along the CA1 cell layer and a 0.141 m/s along the CA3 cell layer (Cappaert et al., 2009). Together, it is clear that 0.1m/s is a common propagation speed regardless of experimental models." -- Two scientists telling us that a common speed of brain signal transmission is about 3.6 inches per second (i.e. a tenth of a meter per second), 1000 times slower than the "100 meters per second" commonly given (link). 

Gadgets Tracking Your Brain Waves Continuously Will Probably Not Help You

 The false "brains make minds" dogma has inspired medical predators and quack gadget sellers. One guy has made an enormous fortune luring people into medically unnecessary PET scans that have a significant chance of increasing someone's risk of cancer. 

PET scans involve the injection of radioactive materials into the body. The radioactive materials have a short half-life, and neuroscientists claim the scans are not risky. But there is every reason to suspect that such scans involve very significant risks to people. PET scans involve significant doses of ionizing radiation that increase the chance of cancer. A PET scan typically involves as much radiation as a CT scan, and it is well-known that every CT scan that you have slightly increases your chance of cancer.   A page on the website of the American Cancer Society says this:

"A PET/CT exposes you to about 25 mSv of radiation. This is equal to about 8 years of average background radiation exposure."

How does that translate to an increased cancer risk? Using the calculator at the web site www.xrayrisk.com (which also allows you to calculate the risk of other things such as CT scans), we get the estimate below:

The answer is that 25 mSv of radiation increases your cancer risk by about 1 part in 328. 

The guy I refer to above is someone who lures people into paying huge amounts of money for medically unnecessary and potentially hazardous PET scans, under the false premise that such scans will tell you something you did not know about your mind.  Scanning brains sheds no insight on a person's mind. But a scammer can always dredge up some low-quality Questionable Research Practices study to try and make it look like some tiny thing found here or there in a brain scan has some value in telling you something about your mind. 

A company called ATLAS has recently announced some very expensive brain monitoring product that has similarities to what I mention above, except that in this case no objection can be made about a potential health hazard (the product seems to involve no health risk).  The product is announced in the recent press release here. Strangely, the press release has no picture of what the device looks like when someone is wearing it. Looking around in the company's site, we get this image:

You have to wonder: how could such a device stay in the shown position? Through some adhesive, perhaps? I would have thought that the way to invent a continuous EEG-like device for monitoring brain waves would have been to create something that leveraged the ear-touching parts of eyeglasses. 

But let's ignore this issue, and ask: is there any reason to think that such a device might be worth its very high cost? The device has a price tag of 499 dollars, and also requires a 30 dollar a month subscription. 

The press release fails to mention any benefit in any convincing way. The press release gives us this laughable sales pitch:

"Imagine a world where data from your own mind helps you redefine what truly matters. ATLAS enables you to ask questions to better understand how your mind works: Was I really present for dinner with my family? Who makes me feel more like myself? Do I actually perform better under pressure? Why am I defining a successful run in minutes rather than stress relief? When I'm exhausted, what do I still show up for? ATLAS helps you discover what brings out the best in you everyday and enables you to become more of that person to optimize your life."

This sales pitch is comically bungling. No, wearing some brain wave tracking device will not enable you to ask questions such as the listed questions. You can ask those questions just fine without wearing any such device. And one of the examples of a question is laughable: "Was I really present for dinner with my family?" You don't need some fancy brain wave tracking device to know that.  The last sentence in the quote is pure "hot air." 

What are brain waves? They are waves that show up in EEG readings taken when lots of electrodes are attached to someone's head. A full EEG reading will involve some cap with many different electrodes positioned at different spots on the top of someone's head.  But you can take a kind of "poor man's EEG" by using readings from just one spot in the head. 

A full EEG reading

Can EEG readings be analyzed to determine what a person is thinking or feeling? No, they cannot. Nowadays there is a great deal of pareidolia and junk science involving the analyzing of brain waves, typically occurring in studies guilty of Questionable Research Practices. There is no robust evidence that anything someone is thinking or feeling or remembering can be determined from analyzing brain waves (with a very few exceptions such as fear or rage, which might cause something like panic trembling or facial expressions that might be detectable by analyzing brain waves, because of related body movements that cause brain wave blips). 

The press release has a chief executive officer of the company telling us this bad example of groundless baloney: "ATLAS gives you a map of your own mind, so you can understand what brings out the best in you, change what doesn't, and become who you want to be." There are no are no EEG readings and no brain scans that can ever produce any such thing as a map of your mind. 

A FAQ page of the company offers no specifics that would justify a purchase. We read, "Atlas does not read individual thoughts, decode memories or know the private meaning of what you are thinking." We merely read these dubious claims:

"It can tell whether you're stressed or relaxed, or whether your mind is engaged with the outside world or if you're in your head, reflecting or focusing on deep work. It can also tell when your mind is using a lot of energy and when it is exhausted and in need of some recovery."

EEG readings cannot distinguish between (1) a motionless person with closed eyes who is doing mental work and (2) a motionless person with closed eyes who is resting his mind. But any type of muscle movements can show up in EEG readings, including mere eye movements, strong facial expressions and finger movements.   So EEG readings could probably distinguish between someone "engaged with the outside world" in the sense of reading, looking around, or using a smartphone or computer, and someone who was sitting motionless and reflecting, with his eyes closed or staring into space. But why would you need some fancy device to distinguish between those two things, when you would already know which you were doing?  And also, you don't need some fancy device to tell you when your mind is exhausted. 

A continuous EEG reader might rarely be useful in detecting epilepsy. But only about 1 in 26 people have epilepsy. And epilepsy produces seizures that allow you to detect it without any high-tech device. 

If the company selling this Atlas device wants to make a convincing case for its brain wave reader product, it will have to produce something way better than its laughable press release here. And it will need to put up a FAQ page much more convincing than its current FAQ page.

He Lost a Tenth of His Brain, But Still Had Above Average Intelligence

One of the very great investigation failures of today's psychologists and neuroscientists is their tendency to only search scientific papers when writing scientific papers. The fact is that there are huge additional sources of information providing very important medical case histories. Those include newspapers and magazines. It is not hard to search for medical case histories documented in newspapers. For example, the free Chronicling America site allows you to search through more than 100 years of American newspapers. You can use the site by using the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

 Below is one of the very interesting cases I get when using the phrase "brain gone." In the 1927 news account, we read of a boy (Alfonso Bedra) who lost five ounces of his brain. The average ten-year-old boy has a brain with a weight of about 40 to 50 ounces. We read that the despite this large loss of brain tissue, the boy had above average intelligence. You can read the story here. 

Use the link here to read other post of mine describing cases of people who retained above-average intelligence despite losing very large parts of their brain.

Goofs at the Brains Blog Site

 A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Let's look at some of the posts at the site:

• "Caitlan Mace: Vehicle Indeterminacy in Memory Neuroscience." The post starts out with a repetition of groundless boasts of neuroscientists about "memory engrams," with the author stating, "I draw on neuroscientific investigations of memory engrams, which are neural representations of memory that result from learning-induced changes, retain information about some fact, feature of the world, or past experience, and are used to retrieve that information for memory recall." All such claims are spurious and bogus, and are not backed up by any robust research. No one has ever discovered in a brain any such thing as a representation of a fact or anything anyone learned. Microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to produce a single sentence any one ever learned, and has also failed to produce a single word anyone ever learned, with there also never being any discovery of a single image anyone ever saw or a single pixel of any such image. Later the author makes this statement conflicting with her previous boast: "It remains unclear which kind of structure—molecules, synapses, or neural ensembles—performs a representational role in any case."  The correct answer is: there is no evidence that any of these things play any such role in representing something someone learned; and the failure to find such evidence is a very strong for believing that no representations of learned information exist in the brain. 
• "Self-Consciousness and 'Split'  Brains: The Objection from Unified Behavior." We have very bad misrepresentation from a writer who states, "In yesterday’s post I argued that a split-brain subject is not unitary qua thinker but is actually composed of two thinkers." Split-brain subjects are those who have two separated hemispheres of the brain. You can have such subjects by two ways. On one hand, quite a few people are born without any of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain (a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum). Then there are those born with such fibers, who undergo operations in which such fibers are severed, to prevent very bad seizures that are resistant to drug treatment. Contrary to the prediction of the claim that brains make minds, which predicts that split-brain patients should have two minds, such split-brain subjects have a single unified mind. Attempts by materialists to claim otherwise are one of the worst examples of deception by materialists. 
• "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5". In the 300+ posts at this blog supposedly dedicated to "the philosophy and science of mind," this is the only post mentioning out-of-body experiences in its title. We have no substantive discussion of the topic, but merely an attempt to gaslight the significant fraction of the population that has such experiences, by accusing them of "disorders of self-consciousness." The post has no evidence of any deep scholarship of this topic. The author makes a bad description of conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. 
• "Introduction" and "CFP: Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice." These are the only two posts that come up when I search for "near-death experience" at the Brains Blog site. The second post has only a mere mention of "near-death experience" as a bullet list of topics that will be discussed in some journal that is being promoted. The first post says nothing of any substance about near-death experience, other than the promise that in some book it will be shown that near-death "experiences are contingent on the brain." That is not true, because such experiences often occur during cardiac arrest when the brain is electrically shut down, in the state called asystole in which brain waves appear as flat lines. 

The topic of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are two of the most important topics that should be covered by any blog dealing philosophically with the brain and the mind. But we get nothing of any substance on these topics in the 300+ posts on this blog. 

The physical design of the blog is poor.  You cannot conveniently navigate its posts, unless you wish to do endless clicking on titles that are only followed by a few lines from the corresponding post. None of the posts is tagged. So you cannot conveniently examine all posts on a particular topic, unless you are willing to laboriously type in topic names in a search bar. 

Using the blog's search tool, I search for topics that should be discussed by a blog of this type that has been published since 2005, without getting any results. Specifically:

• A search for "clairvoyance" gives 0 results. 
• A search for "telepathy" gives 0 results, as does a search for "Ganzfeld" (a word that would be used by anyone decently discussing ESP research), as does a search for "extrasensory perception." 
• A search for "HSAM" gives 0 results, as does a search for "hyperthymesia."
• A search for "autistic savants" gives 0 results, as does a search for the most famous autistic savant, Kim Peek.
• A search for "psychical research" gives only one result, the gaslighting article mentioned above. 
• A search for "eidetic memory" gives 0 results, as does a search for "photographic memory."
• A search for "hemispherectomy" gives only one badly misinforming article, which does not mention hemispherectomy cases.
• A search for "near-death experience" gives only two results, neither mentioning near-death experiences in the title, and neither discussing the topic in any depth.
• A search for "hydrocephalus" produces 0 results, as does a search for "French civil servant," meaning that the blog is failing to discuss cases of loss of most of the brain but good mental performance.
• A search for "morphogenesis" produces 0 results (see here and here for why the topic is very relevant to the topic of how minds arise).
• A search for "terminal lucidity" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "synaptic delay" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "dendritic spines" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "Questionable Research Practices" (an epidemic in today's neuroscience research) produces only 1 result, which fails to discuss the topic decently. 
• A search for "protein turnover" produces 0 results, as does a search for "protein half-life" and "protein lifetime."

These are all topics that are very relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind." It seems that the experts long writing at the Brains Blog are failing to adequately study the things that they should be studying in order to have an intelligent philosophy of mind consistent with observations. 

What are some of the things a philosopher of mind should be doing? They include these:

• He should be constantly testing the claims that brains make minds,  by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be enumerating all of the mental powers that humans have, and be asking whether there are credible neuroscience explanations for each such power, expressed in the form of detailed theories "hitting all the bases," rather than just vacuous hand-waving catchphrases. 
• He should be constantly testing the claim that brains store memories, by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim, and observation failures that may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be critically examining the research output of today's neuroscientists, always asking whether best-practices are being followed, and looking for cases in which low-quality research is being produced because of the use of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measuring techniques. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to cases of exceptional human mental performance, cases in which people seem to remember better and recall better and think faster and calculate better than a brain could ever do. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports and experiments suggesting psychic phenomena and paranormal human mind abilities, reports suggesting humans have mental abilities that a brain could never allow. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports of experiences such as out-of-body experiences, reports we would never expect to occur if the brain is the source of the mind. 
• He should  be giving the deepest study to medical case histories involving loss of brain tissue or loss or half or more of the brain, to see whether they produce results expected under "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" assumptions, or whether they produce results not expected under such assumptions. 
• He should be making a very deep study of human biology and morphogenesis, to see whether there is a "failure to explain the origin of a human body" that is of great relevance to the discussion of whether there is a failure to explain the origin of a human mind.

I don't see much of these activities going on at the Brains Blog site. 

They Had Good Minds After Losing the Left Half of Their Brains

Although neuroscientists are brain specialists, very many neuroscientists are not very deep and broad scholars of the topic of human brains. A typical neuroscientist may be able to tell you in very great detail about some narrow facet of human brains, and may be able to tell you in the greatest detail about how to use some machine that is used to study brains. But the same neuroscientist may have failed to properly study the topic of human brains in a way that involves learning about every relevant thing you could about human brains. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you what happens when you remove half of a human brain, and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how reliably chemical synapses transmit nerve signals (action potentials), and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how quickly a brain electrically shuts down when the heart stops (reaching a state called asystole), and you may get an answer that is wrong. 

Part of the job of properly studying brains is to study very thoroughly all of the most impressive cases of high mental performance despite very high brain damage. Relatively few neuroscientists show signs of having studied such a topic. In order to properly study such a topic, you must study unusual medical case histories.  Very many of the most important and relevant medical case histories are recorded in books, newspapers and magazines. But can you ever recall reading of a neuroscientist searching newspapers for unusual case histories in neuroscience? I can never recall reading of such activity by a neuroscientist. 

Luckily there are some web sites that contain very many of the most relevant examples of such medical case histories that are relevant to the question of whether the human mind is the source of the mind and whether the human mind is the storage place of human memories. One of those sites is the very site you are reading.  In my series of posts labeled "High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage," which you can read here, I describe many of the most important case histories that are  relevant to the question of whether the human brain is the source of the mind (keep pressing Older Posts at the bottom right to read the whole series). Now let me provide another such case, one I learned about from searching old newspaper articles for a use of the phrase "half a brain." The 1976 case is one that you can read about using the link here. Below are some excerpts from the newspaper article.

We read of a young man named Bruce Lipstadt who had a hemispherectomy operation when he was five years old, an operation that removed the left half of his brain.  Operations of that type are only done when someone is being plagued by very severe seizures, and the seizures cannot be controlled by medication.  The operation was done because as a young boy Bruce was suffering from 10 to 12 seizures a day. 

We are told that despite having the left half of his brain surgically removed, Bruce can ride a bike, swim and play sports. We are told that Bruce got an A grade (the best grade) in a course on statistics at a university. We are told Bruce's speech is normal. We are told that "although not a genius, Bruce has superior intelligence." We are told that Bruce works as a traffic controller, and that next spring he will get a degree in sociology from a university. 

The 1976 newspaper article here gives us some more details on Bruce Lipstadt. We read that his IQ tests showed his verbal IQ to be 126, well above the average IQ of 100. We read this:

A verbal IQ of 126 in a subject who had the left half of his brain removed is a result that would seem to "make mincemeat" out of claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. One of the accounts above mentions an authority named Sugar. The Bruce Lipstadt case seems to be the same one mentioned in the scientific paper here co-authored by Oscar Sugar MD, one entitled "Development of above normal language and intelligence 21 years after left hemispherectomy."

The newspaper article here tells of a film about a man who had the left half of his brain removed, but who (five months after the operation) could still "sing, distinguish colors, and pass simple tests of reading, writing and arithmetic."

At the 2:59 mark in the Youtube.com video here, we get the table below, which shows some impressive intellectual achievements in patients who underwent a hemispherectomy operation to remove half of their brains:

We have some stunning results. All of these people with half a brain had some college studies. Two had achieved a two-year Associate's Degree. One had achieved a Master's Degree. The top row tells whether the left or the right half of the brain was removed.  The two rightmost columns give details for people who had the left half of their brain removed, both of which had some college studies, and both of which were employed. 

At the 5:03 mark in the video, we have the chart below. It shows the IQ of 7 subjects who had a hemispherectomy operation to remove half of their brains. The dots in yellow are people who had left half of the brain removed. Each column represents a particular type of IQ. The first column is full IQ. The second column is verbal IQ. The third column is performance IQ, something that does tests involving non-verbal tasks and motor tasks, with speed of completion affecting the score. We see that one of the subjects who had the left half of his brain removed had above-average verbal IQ. 

At the 8:07 mark in the video, we have a chart showing that one of the left hemispherectomy patients (who had the left half of the brain removed) had a way-above-average 130 score on reading comprehension. 

At the link here, you can read the very interesting paper "AN ENORMOUS CEREBRAL TUMOUR" by William E. Conroy M.D. We read of a patient F. H. who was observed in 1889. The patient had an operation to remove the tumor, but died soon thereafter. 

On page 179 we read that an autopsy was performed, and that after the tumor was removed, the left half of the brain was all but gone, being only the size of the palm of a hand:

On page 180 we read that this "enormous" tumor in the left half of the brain produced almost no mental effects. We read that the boy was "intelligent" and "expressed himself well" and "read much with enjoyment" until his eyesight failed. We read that the mental faculties were "not seriously impaired."  We read this:

On page 16 of an 1899 book J. Sanderson Christison, M.D.  states this: "And when we find that individuals have filled the business and social functions of life in the ordinary way, who were either destitute of a corpus callosum (see page 65) or had but little more than half a brain (see page 62), it is evident that external features are not necessarily of fundamental significance." 

On page 47 Dr. Christison says this:

"Dr. E. W. Taylor reports a man, 36 years of age, with extensive destruction of the left frontal lobe of the brain, and yet, says Dr. Taylor: 'When I last saw him the whole impression was that of a clear-headed vigorous man of exceptional intellect, but neurasthenic. A few days before his death he was filling a responsible position, and making decisions of importance with accuracy and judgment.' "

On pages 58-59 Christison says this:

"Dr. Charles Phelps reports a man who died at the age of 25 years with a large abscess in the middle area of the left cerebral hemisphere, while a large proportion of both hemispheres was either softened or invaded with punctate hemorrhages. Yet Dr. Phelps reports that this man 'had absolute integrity of all his mental faculties and special senses without either having aberration or decadence, and was cheerful and slept well.' "

On the same page 59 Christison says this:

"Drs. J. J. Putnam and M. H. Richardson report a business-man, 30 years of age, whose entire left cerebral hemisphere (except the occipital lobe and the lower portions of the frontal and temporal lobes) was occupied by a diseased growth, 'which everywhere compressed the adjoining brain tissues and to a great extent destroyed them,'  and yet in this man 'no notable mental changes were observable.'  'His mind was clear and he read and understood with pleasure, and enjoyed the society of his family and friends,' and although 'he dragged his right leg he walked well, going to church and back half a mile off, and he drove his horse to town eight miles away, four days before his death.' "

On page 61 Dr. Christison says this:

"Dr. W. B. Haddon reports a man, 21 years of age, with an enormous tumor occupying the left cerebral hemisphere, and severely compressing adjacent structures. Yet, although he occasionally had an epileptic fit and stammered slightly from childhood, he had no paralysis. He was somewhat opinionated, but evinced no moral perversion. At the time of his death (in a fit) he was a clerk in the Steward's office of St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and a few days later he would have entered the government examination for a second grade certificate in perspective and drawing, branches in which he was pronounced by experts to be exceptionally proficient."

On page 62 Dr. Christison says this:

 "Andral reports a man who died at the age of 28 years with the whole of his right cerebral hemisphere so completely atrophied that its covering membrane (pia mater) formed a cyst in which there was not a trace of brain tissue. The floor of the cyst was formed by the optic thalamus, the corpus striatum, and the parts on a level with these two bodies. Yet, says Andral, this man  'had received a good education, had a good memory, and exhibited as much intelligence as most men' (19)."