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. 

"Thousands of Participants Are Needed for Accurate Results," But Most Brain Scan Studies Don't Even Use Dozens

For many years neuroscientists have been claiming important results about brains and minds, after doing brain imaging experiments using very small sample sizes.  For example, we may read headlines saying that some particular region of the brain is more active during some type of mental event,  and the total number of subjects who had their brains scanned will usually be smaller than 15. A new press release from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities announces results which indicate that such small-sample correlation-seeking brain imaging experiments are utterly unreliable.  The headline of the press release is "Brain studies show thousands of participants are needed for accurate results."

We read this:

"Scientists rely on brain-wide association studies to measure brain structure and function—using MRI brain scans—and link them to complex characteristics such as personality, behavior, cognition, neurological conditions and mental illness. New research published March 16, 2022 in Nature from the University of Minnesota and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis...shows that most published brain-wide association studies are performed with too few participants to yield reliable findings."

The abstract of the paper in the science journal Nature can be read here. The paper is entitled, "Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals." 

The press release tells us this:

"The study used publicly available data sets—involving a total of nearly 50,000 participants—to analyze a range of sample sizes and found:

• Brain-wide association studies need thousands of individuals to achieve higher reproducibility. Typical brain-wide association studies enroll just a few dozen people.
• So-called 'underpowered' studies are susceptible to uncovering strong but misleading associations by chance while missing real but weaker associations. 
• Routinely underpowered brain-wide association studies result in a surplus of strong yet irreproducible findings."

The claim that a typical brain scanning experimental study uses "a few dozen" people is probably an overestimate. Brain imaging studies touted in the press seem to typically involve fewer than 15 subjects. 

The press release tells us that the conclusions above are based on some very heavy number crunching using databases that store brain scans of a large number of people, including in many cases data on what they were doing or thinking while being scanned, what kind of mental characteristics or health history the people had, and what kind of genes the people had.  The largest such database was the UK Biobank, which according to page 5 of the document here includes "resting-state functional MRI measures changes in blood oxygenation associated with intrinsic brain activity (i.e., in the absence of an explicit task or sensory stimulus)," as well as "task-functional MRI" which "uses the same measurement technique as resting-state fMRI, while the subject performs a particular task or experiences a sensory stimulus." (The task was mainly something called the Hariri faces/shapes “emotion” task.)  Another large database used was a Human Connectome Project database including "task-evoked fMRI" brain scans of people while they were doing things involving working memory, gambling, language, social cognition, relational processing and emotional processing (as mentioned on page 36 of the document here).  Another large database used was an Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) database that included fMRI scans while subjects performed tasks such as a Monetary Incentive Delay task. a Stop Signal task and an "n-back" or "nBack" task (as described here). 

In the press release we read this:

"To identify problems with brain-wide association studies, the research team began by accessing the three largest neuroimaging data sets: the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (11,874 participants), the Human Connectome Project (1,200 participants) and the UK Biobank (35,375 participants). Then, they analyzed the data sets for correlations between brain features and a range of demographic, cognitive, mental health and behavioral measures, using subsets of various sizes. Using separate subsets, they attempted to replicate any identified correlations. In total, they ran billions of analyses, supported by the MIDB Informatics Group and the powerful computing resources of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. The researchers found that brain-behavior correlations identified using a sample size of 25—the median sample size in published papers—usually failed to replicate in a separate sample.  As the sample size grew into the thousands, correlations became more likely to be reproduced. Robust reproducibility is critical for today’s clinical research. Senior author Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University, says the findings reflect a systemic, structural problem with studies that are designed to find correlations between two complex things, such as the brain and behavior."

What this study very strongly indicates is that the vast majority of brain imaging studies trying to correlate brains and mental states or mental activity have misled us by producing false alarms. The study indicates that such brain imaging studies have not merely been guilty of some slight shortfall, but have been guilty of a hundred-fold shortfall (the difference between about 20 and "thousands" being a difference of a hundred times).  It's as bad as if someone told you he produced a score of 1000 on his SAT test, but really only produced a score of 10. 

The study described above was led by neuroscientist Scott Marek. An article on the study in the journal Nature says this:

“ 'There’s a lot of investigators who have committed their careers to doing the kind of science that this paper says is basically junk,' says Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers. 'It really forces a rethink.' ”

The New Scientist article on the Marek study is behind a paywall, but at least I can show its headline:

For many years we have been scammed and the US federal government has been scammed by neuroscientists doing ridiculously low-powered brain imaging studies looking for correlations between brains and minds.  For many years our experimental neuroscientists doing small-sample brain imaging studies (looking for correlations between brain states and mental states) have been playing a game of "sham, scam, thank you Sam," the Sam being Uncle Sam who provided the dollars for such worthless studies producing only false alarms. This is a racket, but since it is a nice little source of dishonest income and easy work for professors, the racket will probably long continue. 

The US government seems to be incredibly poor at recognizing bad performance by biology authorities.  In the New York Times there was recently an opinion article with the headline "How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from COVID-19." Without naming any names of the bumbling officials guilty of the bungled US response to COVID-19, we get some startling comparisons between competent responses in small countries and incompetent responses in the US. For example, we are told that Taiwan has suffered only 853 COVID-19 deaths, and that "if the United States had suffered a similar death rate, we would have lost about 12,000 people, instead of nearly a million."  Because the US government seems to be extremely poor at recognizing bad performance by biology authorities. we will probably continue to see the "sham, scam, thank you Sam" researchers bilking the government by doing worthless federally-funded small-sample brain imaging studies producing only  false alarms. 

One of the quotes above tells us that correlations reported with a sample size of 25 "usually failed to replicate in a separate sample," but that "as the sample size grew into the thousands, correlations became more likely to be reproduced." Does this mean that strong correlations were found between brains and cognitive activity or cognitive states as long as you used samples of thousands? No. The Nature article on the Marek study tells us this:

"Researchers measure correlation strength using a metric called r, for which a value of 1 means a perfect correlation and 0 none at all. The strongest reliable correlations Marek and Dosenbach’s team found had an r of 0.16, and the median was 0.01."  

So even when data on thousands of subjects was used, no strong or medium correlations were found, and the median correlation was a negligible 0.01.  A medium-strength correlation has an r of about .5, and a strong correlation has an r of about .7.  The results discussed above are consistent with the idea that the brain is not the source of the human mind, and is not the storage place of human memories.  Under such an idea, we would expect there to be no strong correlations between brain states and unemotional mental activity such as calm thinking or calm recall. 

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.