Incorrectly Describing 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, 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 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 (requiring brain surgery) that is profitable for medical device manufacturers and neurosurgeons, but of questionable worth for the sick, given potential side effects. The request for the huge handout (many millions of government funding) sounds like a request for many millions in "corporate welfare." 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. 

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. 

Getting Billions, They Boasted They Would Get by 2025 a "Comprehensive Mechanistic Understanding of Mental Function"

 In recent years the two largest brain research projects have been a big US project launched in 2013 called the BRAIN Initiative, and a big European Union project launched in 2013 called the Human Brain Project. The BRAIN Initiative has received billions in funding, but has failed to fulfill the boasts it made about what it would do by the year 2025. 

More than seven years ago, the leaders of the BRAIN Initiative produced a document filled with hubris, one boasting about the grand and glorious things the project would achieve by the year 2025. The document was called Brain 2025: A Scientific Vision, and was offered at one of the project's two main web sites. You can read the document at the link here, and after going to that page you need to press on a + button (next to "Expand accordion content") to get the whole text. 

The “scientific vision” laid out in the document is largely an ideological vision, based on the unbelievable 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, did 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 “ 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.

But despite this one candid confession, the document was a writing of enormous hubris. The authors boasted that by the year 2025, the BRAIN Initiative would figure out how minds work. The document stated, "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.” Notice how enormous is the predictive conceit of that statement, which sounds like a delusion of grandeur. The authors did not merely claim that they would "shed light" on how minds work, or that they would "get clues" as to how minds work. They boasted that their project would produce a  "comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function." Making a boast as big as the sky. the authors predicted that their project would tell us how brains produce minds and their phenomena. 

What has been the result of the BRAIN Initiative? No great breakthroughs have occurred. The results (to use English slang) are "peanuts" or "chickenfeed." 

On the page here , we get a summary of the BRAIN Initiative's achievements in 2024.  None of it sounds like an achievement relevant to whether brains make minds, except for the claim that there was developed a " brain-computer interface that can convert brain waves into speech with minimal training."  We have a link to the page here, which makes the same claim. The claim is unfounded. The pages are referring to the study "Representation of internal speech by single neurons in human supramarginal gyrus." My post here explains why the study is not actually a demonstration of a "brain-computer interface that can convert brain waves into speech." 

What's going on in the study is a reading of brain waves during very rapid switching between "speak it" instructions and "think it" instructions, with no care being taken to prevent subjects from speaking during the very short "think it" periods lasting only a few seconds.  We should assume that during many of the claimed "internal speech" intervals there were actually "audible speech" events, because of a failure of subjects to follow a very hard-to-perform protocol, one seemingly designed to produce such "failure to follow instructions" events.  Under such an assumption, the results can easily be explained, without assuming that there was occurring "converting of brain waves into speech." The second of the BRAIN Initiative pages given above boasts that "For one of the two participants, the BCI [brain-computer interface] could decode several words of their inner dialogue with 79% accuracy during an online task." These are meager tiny-sample-size results easily explained by chance or by assuming a difference in muscle movements that produce different types of brain waves, with supposed "inner dialogue" events often being verbal speaking events, as users failed to follow perfectly the hard-to-follow instructions involving rapid switching between speech and pure thinking. 

On the same BRAIN Initiative page we have another similar boast of a "brain-computer interface."  It is a reference to a paper which makes no claim  of picking up an "inner dialogue" involving no muscle movements. Instead some patient with a speech problem had electrodes implanted in his brain, and some system is picking up his attempts to speak different words. Such an attempt can produce limited success mainly because different types of speech efforts (involving slightly different muscle movements) may produce different types of EEG waves. Muscle movements or attempted muscle movements show up very noticeably in EEG brain wave readings; and distinctive types of muscle movements corresponding to particular speech sounds (phonemes) may produce distinctive blips in EEG readings. 

Studies like this (hailed as examples of "mind reading" from brains) typically involve a variety of shady tricks, such as getting inputs from more than just brain wave inputs, such as inputs from eye tracking devices, which make it easy to determine what word or picture on a screen someone is focusing on. 

The reality is that the BRAIN Initiative has failed to produce any results backing up in any weighty way claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. You cannot actually detect what someone is thinking from analyzing mere brain waves. Studies claiming to do such a thing typically involve various types of dubious methodology and objectionable techniques.  A well-designed, fairly conducted and well-analyzed study will always show a failure to detect from brain waves alone what someone is thinking.

These were additional unfulfilled boasts of the document entitled Brain 2025: A Scientific Vision:

• "We expect to discover new forms of neural coding as exciting as the discovery of place cells, and new forms of neural dynamics that underlie neural computations." So-called "place cells" were never actually discovered. The claim that they were discovered is one of the many groundless triumphal legends of neuroscientists, who have a high tendency to repeat "old wives' tales" of the belief community they belong to. Read my post here for a debunking of claims that "place cells" were ever observed  All that happened was that scientists observed some cells, and claimed that some cells were more active when some rats were in certain places. The studies were never examples of robust science, because they were guilty of various methodological sins such as using way-too-small study group sizes. No actual new form of neural coding was ever discovered by the BRAIN Initiative or any other scientific project or scientific study. And no one ever discovered "neural dynamics that underlie neural computations."
• "Through deepened knowledge of how our brains actually work, we will understand ourselves differently, treat disease more incisively, educate our children more effectively, practice law and governance with greater insight, and develop more understanding of others whose brains have been molded in different circumstances." No such bonanza of benefits resulted from the BRAIN Initiative. Neuroscience has done nothing to improve the education of children, and done nothing to improve the practice of law or government.
• "We must understand how circuits give rise to dynamic and integrated patterns of brain activity, and how these activity patterns contribute to normal and abnormal brain functions. Our expectation is that this approach will answer the deepest, most difficult questions about how the brain works, providing the basis for optimizing the health of the normal brain and inspiring novel therapies for brain disorders." The BRAIN Initiative wasted billions floundering around in this dead end, but did not answer any of the "most difficult questions about how the brain works," or any of the "most difficult questions about how the mind works."  Scientists still have no credible tale to tell of how a brain could think, imagine, instantly learn or instantly recall. 
• " We expect The BRAIN Initiative® to develop new biological reagents, possibly including genetically-modified strains of rodents, fish, invertebrates, and non-human primates; recombinant viruses targeted to different brain cell types in different species; genetically-encoded indicators of different forms of neural activity; and genetic tools for modulating neuronal activity."  Here the scientists (sounding like eugenics enthusiasts) fall into Frankenstein folly by boasting about how they will monkey with the genes of various organisms, including rodents and primates. The hubris involved here should provoke the gravest concerns.  And anyone familiar with the very substantive suspicions that the COVID-19 virus might have arose from a lab leak should shudder at the proposed gene fiddling. 

The Biggest Brain Projects Are Still Failing to Support Prevailing Brain Dogmas

In a December 2020 post I examined the failure of the two biggest brain research projects to back up claims commonly made about the brain, such as the claim that the brain produces the mind and the claim that brains store memories. Let us now look at how one of those two biggest brain research programs (the Human Brain Project) is still failing to substantiate such claims. The Human Brain Project is a billion-dollar European research project. 

The page here of the Human Brain Project web site is entitled "Highlights and Achievements," and presumably lists the biggest accomplishments of the Human Brain Project. Let's take a look at the items listed at the top of the page, in the year 2021 section.  The first five items merely discuss technology innovations, not anything involving new findings about the brain.  The sixth item is merely an interview with a professor who talks about no specific research findings of the Human Brain Project, and who says that the project has "become a truly enabling endeavor," which is the kind of vague praise that people give when they don't have much in the way of specific achievements to discuss.  Then we have an item merely talking about how humans have some brain cell types not found in mice.  

The next item is entitled "Controlling brain states with a ray of light." We have a statement of never-substantiated neuroscientist dogma:  "The brain presents different states depending on the communication between billions of neurons, and this network is the basis of all our perceptions, memories, and behaviors."  But the page discussing this ray of light research mentions nothing that sounds important.  We merely hear of some light being sent into a brain, with some transition occurring, although the only transition claimed is an awakening from sleep: "This new chemically-engineered tool allowed to induce and investigate in detail, in a controlled and non-invasive way, the transitions of brain from sleep- to awake-like states using direct illumination." Not very impressive, given that we have already long known of a tool for inducing a transition from sleep to awake-like states: the humble alarm clock.

The next item merely mentions work on some robot.  The item after that has the title "EBRAINS powers brain simulations to give insight into consciousness and its disorders." The page discussing this research mentions no progress in understanding how consciousness occurs. It merely mentions some project reading brain waves during normal consciousness and sleep. We have a quote making it sound as if unconsciousness always involves less complex brain waves:

"We can see that unconsciousness is not simply a matter of a loss of brain activity,” Massimini says. “It’s not necessarily weaker. But it is a lot less complex.” 

This statement is only half-true. Brain waves are less complex for patients under anesthesia. But the most complex brain waves are those seen during grand mal seizures (also called tonic-clonic seizures), and during such seizures people are typically unconscious. An EEG reading during a grand mal seizures resembles a seismograph reading during an earthquake. 

The next item is entitled "HBP-researchers find new approach for Energy-Efficient AI Applications," which obviously involves no progress in cognitive neuroscience.  The item after that merely involves brain surgery, not cognitive neuroscience.  The next item merely is something pertaining to spinal cord surgery. 

We then see an item of little significance, merely something about some new technique for modeling dendrites. The item after that is the claim "A new means of neuronal communication discovered in the human brain." The claim is unjustified, being based solely on a paper failing to prevent robust evidence. 

The paper is the paper "Long-range phase synchronization of high-frequency oscillations in human cortex."  The claim of a synchronization effect is not well established.  The paper looked for correlations after analyzing brain wave readings from fewer than 100 people.  A paper like this would only be credible if (a) it was a pre-registered study that declared before any data was gathered a hypothesis to be tested, how the data would be gathered and how the data would be analyzed, and (b) the paper discussed a thorough blinding protocol that was followed.  But there is no mention of any pre-registration of this study, and the paper never mentions any blinding protocol (failing to use the word "blind" in its text).  

So what was going on? Apparently the authors got some EEG readings, and were then absolutely free to analyze the data in any way they wanted, being free to slice and dice the data until they found something they could call "synchronization."  We should have very little confidence in a study following such a method.  Given a body of data and freedom to analyze it any of 1001 ways, it is all too easy to find "synchronization" that is no real effect. For example, if I can compare the wins and losses of sports teams with the ups and downs of stock markets, options markets and bond markets, I could probably find  a little something I could claim as "synchronization." 

While the Human Brain Project site has bragged that "a new means of neuronal communication" has been discovered, the scientific paper behind this claim does not even sound very confident of such a thing, merely saying that some brain oscillations "may be synchronized between widely distributed brain regions." Also, neuron communication does not mean that neurons make our minds or store our memories. 

The last item on the Human Brain Project's list of 2021 highlights is merely a discussion of some paper claiming similarities in the brains of birds and mammals.  We read a claim that "the brains of birds and mammals look surprisingly similar in their organization." This is not at all true, and bird brains look very different from human brains. 

Judging from the Human Brain Project's list of 2021 highlights, the lavishly funded Human Brain Project is not making any progress in verifying the main dogmas of cognitive neuroscientists, the claim that the brain is the source of the human mind, and the claim that brains store memories.  Similarly, we find no support for such dogmas in a recent article entitled "The Human Brain Project: six achievements of Europe’s largest neuroscience programme."

Here are the six achievments listed:

• "Human brain atlas":  We read about merely fancy descriptions of parts of the brain. 
• "Synapses in the hippocampus:" We read that "researchers have published detailed 3D-maps of around 25,000 synapses – electrical and chemical signals between brain cells – in the human hippocampus." Such a result does not seem so impressive when you consider that the brain is believed to contain trillions of synapses. Also, you don't explain mental phenomena such as understanding and memory by making maps of synapses or maps of neurons. 
• "Robot hands":  Obviously this has nothing to do with verifying the claims of cognitive neuroscientists.
• "A neuro-inspired computer":  The computer described is not anything like a computer having the characteristics of the brain. If you ever built such a computer, it would never work to process data reliably and at high speeds. In digital computers electrical signals travel with 100% reliability, but in the cortex of the brain a signal will only pass across a synapse with a likelihood of 50% or less. Computers have coordinate systems and indexing systems allowing the computer to instantly find the location of some stored data, but brains have no such things. 
• "Virtual epileptic patient":  This has nothing to do with verifying the claims of cognitive neuroscientists.
• "Scientific output":  We merely hear a mention that 1497 papers cite the Human Brain Project. 

In the year 2020 section of the "Highlights and Achievements" page of the Human Brain Project, you won't find anything that substantiates the main dogmas about brains taught by neuroscientists. My December 2020 post here discusses the items in that section (as well as the 2019, 2018 and 2017 sections), and explains why they fail to support claims such as the claim that brain make minds and the claim that brains store memories. 

The Human Brain Project is making no progress in supporting claims such as the claim that brains make minds and the claim that brains store memories because such claims are not correct.  But what about the other big brain project, the US-based BRAIN Initiative? In my December 2020 post I examined the failure of that project (as well as the Human Brain Project) to back up claims commonly made about the brain, such as the claim that the brain produces the mind and the claim that brains store memories.  Were there any big results for the BRAIN Initiative in 2021?

Apparently not, judging from the page here which lists 2021 highlights for the BRAIN Initiative.  There is some discussion of brain mapping that has not yet done anything to back up the main dogmas of neuroscience. We see only two stories relevant to whether brains make minds:

• A story entitled "Neuroprothesis restores words to man with paralysis."
• A story entitled "Reading Minds with Ultrasound: A Less-Invasive Technique to Decode the Brain's Intentions."

The first story discusses some man who had a stroke leading to brain stem damage causing him to lose the power of speech. Electrodes were planted in his head, to look for some correlation between motor cortex brain activity and attempts of the man to say one of 50 different words. A system was developed wherein the man's attempts to speak can be matched to one of the 50 words.  This merely shows that the brain has a role in the muscle movements related to speech.  It does not prove that the ideas for what to say arise from the brain. 

The story about "reading minds with ultrasound" has a title that is misleading clickbait. The corresponding study was merely done with monkeys.  What's going on is some obscure clear-as-mud business involving trying to predict which of two options (left or right) a monkey will take, based on reading brain states a few seconds before the movement. A good rule of thumb for experimental science is to ignore all studies that did not use at least 15 subjects per study group.  The main results for this study involve experiments on only a single monkey. The study (which shows no sign of using a blinding protocol) is not reliable evidence for any ability to read minds with ultrasound. 

It appears that neither the Human Brain Project in Europe nor the BRAIN Initiative in the US is making progress in supporting claims such as the claim that brains make minds and the claim that brains store memories.  Such progress will never be made because the brain is not the source of our mind, and our brains do not store memories. To find reasons justifying these statements, read the other posts on this blog. 

In today's science news, we have the results of a project to test the reproducibility of cancer research.  A paper reports little success in reproducing results.  We hear that a large fraction of scientists simply refused to respond to queries from fellow scientists trying to reproduce the results, which is just what we would expect if a significant fraction of published research was fraudulent or defective. Here is a very worrying quote from the abstract:

"We conducted the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology to investigate the replicability of preclinical research in cancer biology....However, the various barriers and challenges we encountered while designing and conducting the experiments meant that we were only able to repeat 50 experiments from 23 papers. Here we report these barriers and challenges. First, many original papers failed to report key descriptive and inferential statistics: the data needed to compute effect sizes and conduct power analyses was publicly accessible for just 4 of 193 experiments. Moreover, despite contacting the authors of the original papers, we were unable to obtain these data for 68% of the experiments. Second, none of the 193 experiments were described in sufficient detail in the original paper to enable us to design protocols to repeat the experiments, so we had to seek clarifications from the original authors. While authors were extremely or very helpful for 41% of experiments, they were minimally helpful for 9% of experiments, and not at all helpful (or did not respond to us) for 32% of experiments."

Can you imagine a more damning statistic about the work quality of today's biological researchers, the fact that "none of the 193 experiments were described in sufficient detail in the original paper to enable us to design protocols to repeat the experiments"?

In a separate paper, the researchers found that "the median effect size in the replications was 85% smaller than the median effect size in the original experiments, and 92% of replication effect sizes were smaller than the original," which suggests a high degree of unreliability in biomedical research.