Brain-Zapping Neuroscientist Experimenters Play "Keep Fiddling With Convoluted Models"

 A recent paper claims to have increased altruistic behavior by brain-zapping. It is a paper entitled "Augmentation of frontoparietal gamma-band phase coupling enhances human altruistic behavior" which you can read here. A BBC article describes the experiment:

"Scientists have discovered how to make people less selfish - at least temporarily - by stimulating two areas of their brain. In a new study carried out at the University of Zurich, 44 volunteers were asked to decide how to split an amount of money between themselves and an anonymous partner.

During the experiment, an electrical current was applied to the frontal and parietal areas of the brain - situated at the front and towards the back. When these areas were stimulated at the same time, the participants gave away more money."

Now, you might expect that at this point in the post I will chime in my very common complaint about neuroscientists using ridiculously too-small study group sizes. But unlike the great majority of cognitive neuroscience experiments, this experiment had a fairly decent size of 44 subjects. My main complaint is the experimenters fiddling with what they call "models" in a way that can be described as "keep torturing the data until it confesses."

We read of three analytic models used by the experimenters, which they describe as examples of "post hoc analysis." Presumably these were not models created before the experiments were done, but models of analysis created after gathering data, by scientists looking for evidence of some desired effect. We read of a Model 1 (M1) that is described in the screen shot below from the paper:

There is no clear reason stated why anyone should accept these weird equations being a correct analysis of whether the subjects were acting in an altruistic way. What's going on in this model is actually far more complicated, because we read other passages of statistical gobbledygook describing how the model is computed, such as this little section which sounds like "keep torturing the data until it confesses":

The experiments also came up with Model 2, and a much more convoluted Model 3 (M3), part of which is shown in the screen shot below from the paper:

The mention of "50 multiple starting  points" in one of the passages shown above makes it sound like really 50+ models were tried, rather than just 3. Just because we have a mention of a Model 1 (M1), a Model 2 (M2), and a Model 3 (M3), that's no reason to think that only three models were tried. 

We read that one of these models was declared to be the "winning model." This judgment of one model winning over the other apparently occurred because one model produced results with higher statistical significance. This "keep torturing the data until it confesses" way of doing science is profoundly dysfunctional. An intelligent way to proceed would be (1) do a pre-registered study or "registered report" in which experimenters commit themselves (before gathering any data) to using one and only one way of analyzing data -- a simple and straightforward method -- while justifying that method of data analysis; (2) publish whatever results are produced from that analysis method, regardless of whether a mere null result is produced. 

We read the following chilling statement in the paper: "As we stimulated each participant with an electric current intensity in line with his/her tolerance level for the stimulation currents tested before the experiment runs, the peak-to-peak current intensity for different participants varied between 2.4 and 4 mA." So this was apparently no minimal brain zapping that was occurring, but some level of zapping approaching the subject's "tolerance level," which apparently was somehow determined by some previous "push-them-to-near-their-limits" deal finding out how much brain zapping the subjects could take or would allow. For these absurd machinations in which the student's health may well have been endangered, each student was paid a "chump change" amount of only about 60 dollars, along with some "bonuses" that probably were just as measly. 

Nothing has been done here that produces any robust evidence that altruism can be altered by brain zapping.  What has mainly gone on is that students have had their health risked by brain zapping done in a "keep torturing the data until it confesses" methodological mess that fails to follow good standards of doing a neuroscience experiment. 

No, Brains Have Nothing Like a Large Language Model (LLM)

Quanta Magazine is a widely-read online magazine with slick graphics. On topics of science the magazine again and again is guilty of the most glaring failures. Quanta Magazine often assigns its online articles about great biology mysteries (involving riddles a thousand miles over the heads of PhDs) to writers who lack even a bachelor's degree in biology, and who may also lack any history of writing very much about biology. Often it will assign such articles to be written by people identified as "writing interns."  The articles at Quanta Magazine often contain misleading prose, groundless boasts or glaring falsehoods. I discuss some examples of such poor journalism in my posts here and here and here and here.

The writers at Quanta Magazine often sound like the most credulous pushovers for scientists making dubious boasts. They often seem like the science journalists depicted below:

A recent  example of a puff-piece article in Quanta Magazine is its fawning article entitled "The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language." The article title is a very misleading one. It is not brains that parse language. It is people who parse language. Parsing language (interpreting what someone meant upon hearing or reading something) is an example of a very high-level mental faculty.  Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how a brain could produce such a faculty. 

The puff piece article is written by someone identified as a "writer and filmmaker," who has written many articles at the Quanta Magazine dealing with topics related to AI and technology, but almost no articles at the site relating to psychology or neuroscience.  What we get is an article devoted to glorifying neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko. You can tell what a "going gaga" scientist glorification affair is occurring by the fact that the article has five huge photos of Fedorenko, each of which fills up my computer monitor. 

We have this extremely misleading statement by the neuroscientist, not matching anything ever found in a brain:

" 'You can think of the language network as a set of pointers,'  Fedorenko said. 'It’s like a map, and it tells you where in the brain you can find different kinds of meaning. It’s basically a glorified parser that helps us put the pieces together — and then all the thinking and interesting stuff happens outside of [its] boundaries.' ”

The brain has no maps, and it has no pointers. I know pointers well, having used them extensively when I was a C programmer early in my programming career. A pointer is a variable that stores the address where some data is stored. Brains have no addresses, and nothing corresponding to a programming variable. So in a brain there can be nothing like a pointer. 

The article has a reference to a scientific paper by Fedorenko, one entitled "The language network as a natural kind within the broader landscape of the human brain." The paper says, "In this Review, we discuss brain areas that are specific to language —what we refer to as the language network — and position them in relation to perception, motor planning and cognition (Fig. 1)." There are no regions in the brain "specific to language" in the sense of being able to parse language. 

The paper announces that it will back up such claims largely by appealing to brain scan studies, saying, "We primarily draw on fMRI data from studies that have relied on the individual-subject functional localization approach14,19 (Box 1), which was essential in clarifying the distinctions discussed.." We then have in Figure 1 an extremely dubious visual showing five brains. We have some "function localization" claims:

• One brain visual has a small fraction of it colored blue, and this is labeled as the "perception" area of the brain. 
• Another brain visual has a very small fraction of it colored red, and we are told that is the "motor planning" area of the brain. 
• Another brain visual has five parts of it colored purple, and we are told that this is the "language" areas of the brain. 
• Another brain visual has quite a few parts of it colored green, and we are told that this is the "knowledge and reasoning" areas of the brain. 
• Another brain visual has quite a few parts of it colored green, and we are told that this is the "intended meaning" areas of the brain. 

People have been making these kind of functional localization claims about the brain for almost 200 years, and almost always the claims have been very dubious. For example, below is an illustration from the beginning of the 1834 book A System of Phrenology by George Combe. Notice how the brain areas have little numbers next to them, with the bottom legend explaining the claims made about localization of function in the brain. 

What basis does Fedorenko have for the brain function area maps in her paper, Figure 2, one rather reminding you of the phrenology image above? She says her basis is brain scan data.  The Supplementary Data part of the paper promises that if you click on a link you will get the data that was used to generate the brain function area maps. Following the links takes you to a little page that is almost worthless for inspecting data, as it involves a .zip file consisting of files in an .nii format that the average person will be unable to load or read. Consequently it is all but impossible for anyone to check the evidence basis for Fedorenko's brain function area maps, which should not be regarded as reliable. Neuroscientists dramatically disagree with each other when they produce such brain function area maps, which typically fail to have a sound evidence basis. 

A figure on page 294 of the paper  gives us the bar chart below: 

The purple bars at left are probably incorrect

The scale on the left shows us that the bars refer to fMRI percent signal changes in different regions of the brain during different activities. You should note well that the largest bars show a variation of only 2%. For almost all of the activities listed, the percent signal change is less than 1%. On average the change in brain signal strength is merely about 1 part in 200. A change that small is no real sign of brains working harder during some cognitive activity. We might expect that mere chance variations would produce differences that small. 

Except for the two purple bars on the left-most edge, the diagram is consistent with what I have often stated on this blog. For example, in my post "Brain Imaging Shows No Appreciable Neural Correlates of Memory Activity," I quoted quite a few studies showing a variation of only  1 part in 200 when people had their brains scanned by fMRI scanners while they were doing various memory-related activities. I noted that so small a change fails to provide any good evidence of brains causing mental activities, as we might expect a 1 in 200 fluctuation in brain activity to occur by chance, even if brains don't make minds. 

But what about the purple bars on the left of the chart? What is the basis for the claim being made in the graph that during sentence comprehension there is up to a 2% change in brain signal strength? We fail to get a justification for the data shown. The references in the paper include some papers referring to sentence comprehension. But none of them seem to back up the claim above. Specifically:

• We have a reference to a paper "Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension." It makes no claim about percent signal changes during sentence comprehension. 
• There's a reference to a paper "Retrieval and Unification of Syntactic Structure in Sentence Comprehension: an fMRI Study Using Word-Category Ambiguity." It's behind a paywall, and its abstract makes no claim about percent signal changes. 
• There's a reference to a paper "The cortical language circuit: from auditory perception to sentence comprehension."  It's behind a paywall, and its abstract makes no claim about percent signal changes. 
• There's a reference to a paper "fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension." The paper does not make any claim about a percent signal change during sentence comprehension. 
• There's a reference to the paper "Sentence complexity and input modality effects in sentence comprehension: an fMRI study." It's a study involving only 20 subjects, and does not claim in the main body of its text to have detected any percent signal change of 1% of higher. But there is a footnote in which the authors say that after doing some dubious-sounding fiddling with the data they got some kind of 1% difference of some type. We cannot have much confidence in such claim, as it stated only in a footnote. 
• There's a reference to the paper "Form and Content: Dissociating Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Comprehension." It does not make a claim about a percent signal change. 
• There's a reference to a paper "Location of lesions in stroke patients with deficits in syntactic processing in sentence comprehension." We can ignore it, because the issue is how much normal brain signals change during sentence comprehension.
• There's a reference to a paper "Time course of semantic processes during sentence comprehension: an fMRI study." It does not make a claim about a percent signal change. 

Rather than relying on the references Fedorenko has given, we can follow the alternate approach of doing a Google image search using the phrase " 'percent signal change' + ' sentence comprehension' ." This gives us papers such as these:

• The paper here involving sentence comprehension indicates a percent signal change of less than 1 part in 200 (less than half of a percent). 
• The paper here ("Neural correlates of syntactic movement: converging evidence from two fMRI experiments") reports a relatively large percent signal change of about 1 part in 100 for people listening to sentences. But the study group sizes are so small (involving only 11 subjects for one experiments, and 10 subjects for another experiment) that the paper cannot be counted as good evidence for anything. 
• The very low-quality paper here ("Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning") co-authored by Fedorenko must be disregarded because it reported a "percent signal change" based on EEG readings rather than fMRI readings, because it used a sample size of only 6 epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes, and also because of the unreliability of looking for percent signal changes in the brain waves of seizure-prone patients, whose brains produce all kinds of unpredictable EEG spikes. 
• The paper here ("Top-down and bottom-up contributions to understanding sentences describing objects in motion")  used an almost equally poor study group size of 12 subjects, and found a percent signal change of .05 percent, 1 part in 2000. 
• The paper here ("Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults") used one too-small study group size of 9 blind adults and another possibly halfway-adequate study group size of 22 control subjects with normal vision. Its Experiment 1 involving language processing found a percent signal change of less than .1 (less than 1 part in 1000) for the 22 control subjects. Another experiment involve language processing found a percent signal change of less than .5 (less than 1 part in 200) for the 22 control subjects.
• The paper here ("Brain activity associated with selective attention, divided attention and distraction") finds about a 1% percent signal change in the auditory cortex during language processing. But the study group size is an unimpressive 15 subjects. This auditory cortex region of the brain is not part of the "language processing" area claimed by Fedorenko. In her paper she refers to some regions of the brain and says, "These areas are distinct from the language network as well as from general-purpose sensory and motor areas, such as the primary auditory or primary motor cortex," apparently indicating that what she thinks is a "language network" in the brain is something outside of the auditory cortex. 

Typically there is no test/retest reliability when doing these little studies involving only 15 or 20 or 25 subjects. Robust evidence would only come from a much larger study group size. The New Scientist story below tells us that thousands of participants are needed for studies like these:

The purple bars on the graph shown above are very probably incorrect. Scientific papers documenting brain scanning during language comprehension do not show any robust evidence of a 1% or 2% change in brain activity during sentence comprehension. And there is no sound evidential basis for Fedorenko's diagram claiming to show the location of five language areas of the brain. 

As discussed here, a recent study indicated that 40% of MRI signals do not even correspond to brain activity, which further undermines the knowledge boasts that  Fedorenko has made, and provides another reason for disbelieving in the accuracy of her brain activity maps.  We read this: "Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) have found that an increased fMRI signal is associated with reduced brain activity in around 40% of cases. At the same time, they observed decreased fMRI signals in regions with elevated activity." This is the kind of finding that should make us disbelieve Fedorenko's fMRI-based claims of a brain "language network." 

Link

The puff piece article in Quanta has a "softball questions only" interview with Fedorenko in which she states this:

"There’s a core set of areas in adult brains that acts as an interconnected system for computing linguistic structure. They store the mappings between words and meanings, and rules for how to put words together. When you learn a language, that’s what you learn: You learn these mappings and the rules. And that allows us to use this 'code' in incredibly flexible ways."

There is no robust scientific basis for these imaginative claims. To the contrary, the most powerful microscopes have examined very much brain tissue from very many still-living people and very many very recently deceased people, and no one has found the slightest trace of any sentence, word or letter stored in a brain. 

Later on Fedorenko states, " Then the language network parses that, finding familiar chunks in the utterance and using them as pointers to stored representations of meaning." Excluding the merely genetic chemical representations in DNA, there is zero evidence for any such "stored representations of meaning" anywhere in the brain.  Later she kind of gives away the speculative nature of her claims, by saying "there may well be cells that respond to particular aspects of language."  Note the use of "there may well be" rather than "there are."   

Fedorenko offers as evidence for this claim the preprint "Modality-Specific and Amodal Language Processing by Single Neurons."  It is a "Jesus in my toast" exercise in noise-mining. Recordings of neuron firings were taken after 1400 invasive microwire electrodes had been implanted in the brains of 21 very sick patients with the worst types of epilepsy. The authors tried to find some neurons that fired more often when certain words were spoken. Because neurons fire between 1 and 200 times per second, any such exercise will always be able to find some neurons that fired more often when certain words were spoken. It is misleading to call such a thing "selectivity" as the paper did. Similarly, if I set up a computer program to try to correlate the passing of cars outside my house and the speaking of words on my TV set, and let the program run long enough, I will probably be able to find that certain words were spoken more commonly on my TV set when a car passed in front of my house.  That would be mere silly noise-mining, and that is all that is going on in this preprint, which fails to provide any decent evidence of any neuron responses to language different from what we would expect from chance variations, giving 1400 microwires implanted in brains. 

Noise-mining studies like this raise grave moral concerns about the reckless research endangerment of very sick epilepsy patients.  The sickest of epilepsy patients often have electrodes implanted for evaluation of where surgery should be done to reduce their symptoms. But such electrodes are usually not the microwire electrodes used for experiments like this. The deep implanting of such microwire electrodes in brains (70 microwires per patient for this study) has serious risks that are not medically justified, such as a risk of brain bleeding.  We should doubt any claim to have got any adequate degree of "informed consent" from the seizure-racked people who have these kind of deep microwire electrode implants. 

A scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." In other words, there is no medical justification for implanting microelectrodes or microwires in the brains of epilepsy patients. Complications from the insertions of such electrodes may include death, with two deaths reported here. I consider the exploitation and endangerment of sickest epilepsy patients in these type of poorly designed noise-mining experiments to be a serious moral scandal. 

Does it work like this?

For much more on the topic of why most subjects in neuroscience experiments do not understand the risks they are taking, read my post here. Epilepsy patients requiring surgery are often those who cannot read well (because of learning delays caused by their very frequent seizures), and who will not well-understand any jargon-filled form they are asked to sign. Typically neuroscientists doing electrode implant experiments with epilepsy patients fail to provide in their papers the informed consent form used, and also fail to describe whether special measures were taken to make sure those getting the microwire electrode implants really understood the risks of participating in an experiment of this type. 

We should laugh at Fedorenko's answer when she is asked whether there is an LLM (Large-Language Model) inside the brain, and she replies "pretty much." Nothing like that exists in the brain. An LLM or Large Language Model is a gigantic structure of data, computer programming software and data processing software built after some big server farm (consisting of very many individual computers) crunches data gobbled up by crawling the Internet, scooping up the contents of millions of web pages. That does not correspond to anything in a human brain. 

The idea of a language-parsing ability in a brain seems implausible when you consider that human brain anatomy has not changed in more than 20,000 years, but the main human languages (such as English) are less than 3000 years old. 

It is commonly claimed that the left half of the brain is needed for language. But if you read my series of posts labeled "loss of left half of brain," using the link here, you will find many cases that defy such a dogma.  For example, you will read of a case described like this: "He exhibited no lack of intelligence, yet after his death it was discovered that his left brain was practically destroyed and replaced by a watery substance." And you will read of how Beth Usher could still tell all of her "knock-knock" jokes just after the left  half of her brain had been removed to treat intractable seizures. You will read that on page 109 of a paper we read of three other cases of the removal of the left half of the brain, and we read that "speech and verbal comprehension were present immediately after left hemispherectomy in all three cases." The same post describes good verbal comprehension in patient E.C. after the left half of his brain was surgically removed. 

In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this:

"Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....Although there have been major concerns about loss of language after left hemispherectomy, all eleven of these children have regained virtually normal language....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."

The Reckless Foolishness of Brain-Scanning Healthy Babies in Neuroscience Experiments

 A recent article in Scientific American by neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies.  In a previous post, I documented the untruth of the article's claims that two people could not form memories because of damage to their hippocampus. Let us now look at other aspects of the article that are just as dubious and misleading. 

Turk-Browne makes this untrue claim: "Scientists were able to retrieve an otherwise forgotten memory by stimulating neurons in the hippocampus that had been active during an early experience." His only support for this untrue claim is a link to an interview with neuroscientist Tomas Ryan. In the interview Ryan claims, "We found out we could optically stimulate the engrams for forgotten memories -- and the memories were recalled." In the text of the interview that statement by Ryan has a link to Ryan's very low-quality paper "Engram Cells Retain Memory Under Retrograde Amnesia." That is a junk science paper guilty of several examples of bad research practices, such as the use of an unreliable method of trying to judge recall in rodents (the worthless "freezing behavior" method"), and also the use of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 8 mice or 10 mice. Contrary to the groundless boasts of Turk-Browne and Ryan, no evidence was produced by experiments of this type that a forgotten memory can be artificially reactivated.  

What goes on in poorly designed experiments of this type is that mice are brain-zapped using light stimulation (optogenetics), and scientists claim the mice are "freezing in fear" because they are recalling a memory of a fearful experience, one "artificially activated" by the optogenetic light stimulation. But it is known that such optogenetic stimulation by itself causes "freezing behavior." A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing 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).”

So no actual evidence is being produced of an artificial evocation of a memory stored in a brain when you use optogenetic stimulation of a brain region. All that is going on is that mice are allegedly becoming more immobile while they are brain-zapped, which does not tell us anything about memory. I say "allegedly" because there are no standards when it comes to judging whether mice were more immobile when exposed to some stimulus, with the reports of immobility typically being subjective, unreliable ratings by observers who did not follow a blinding protocol and who are free to choose any time span for judging immobility (30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, two minutes or three minutes), whichever time span best seems to support a claim of "higher freezing behavior." 

I later read a claim in the Scientific American article that shocked me. It was this statement: "My lab has been on a decade long quixotic adventure to study awake infants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a form of brain imaging that can measure activity from regions deep in the brain such as the hippocampus." When we examine the history of MRI scans, we see a history of overconfidence, and authorities dogmatically asserting that "MRI scans are perfectly safe," when they did not actually know whether they were perfectly safe. The 2009 study here ("Genotoxic effects of 3 T magnetic resonance imaging in cultured human lymphocytes") cautions about the use of a high-intensity("3T and above") MRI, and states that "potential health risks are implied in the MRI and especially HF MRI environment due to high-static magnetic  fields, fast gradient magnetic fields, and strong radiofrequency electromagnetic fields," also noting that "these results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human  lymphocytes," referring to effects  that may cause cancer. The experiment discussed below used just such a 3 T MRI scanner. 

There is a rule-of-thumb about things that may increase a person's risk of cancer. The rule is that the younger a person is, the more likely some possibly carcinogenic effect is to produce cancer in someone.  Some particular stimulus might give you a 1% greater chance of cancer per year. But if you are 75 years, that is very unlikely to cause cancer in you. Conversely, if you are ten years old, that stimulus might have a very substantial chance or likelihood of producing cancer in you, if it increases your chance of getting cancer by 1% per year. 

So the rule in medicine is: take the greatest caution to avoid exposing children to any possible cancer risk. We should then be horrified to hear of some neuroscientist subjecting infants to unnecessary fMRI scans. There is not merely a substantial cancer risk from fMRI scans to infants. There are also other risks. Less than 30 days ago someone was killed by an fMRI machine after being magnetically sucked into the machine.  In 2001 a six-year-old boy was killed by an fMRI machine after its powerful magnets caused an oxygen cannister to hit his head. 

Historical headlines of MRI deaths in the past

Turk-Browne tells us that he has conducted 400 fMRI sessions, making this sound like 400 experimental sessions with infants. None of the parents who allowed this should have agreed to allow such MRI scans on their infant children, unless there was a medical necessity for such work. Subjecting infants to potentially hazardous experiments sounds like  neuroscience research gone far astray, an example of morally reckless inanity.  

Turk-Browne makes an unfounded boast, claiming "A team at my lab led by Tristan Yates...used this method to discover that the infant hippocampus can store memories beginning around one year of age." The claim is untrue. The claim has a link to the very low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne.  You can read the paper here. The paper provides not the slightest evidence of any such thing as an encoding or storage of memory in the hippocampus or anywhere else. The study group sizes are only 13, too small for any reliable result to be claimed. 

The authors of the paper try to make use of an analysis of a "subsequent memory effect." That is an unreliable neuroscience method that is usually pure pareidolia. It works like this: you scan someone's brain when he is being exposed to some stimulus, and also scan the person's brain when that person is asked to recall that stimulus. (For example, you might scan a person's brain while he is looking at some word pair he is asked to memorize, and then scan the same person's brain when he is asked to recall the second word, given only the first.) Then a neuroscientist looks for some region of the brain that showed "superior activation" both during the exposure to the stimulus, and the recall of the stimulus. This is an example of noise-mining. Regions of the brain randomly undergo tiny fluctuations in activity. So anyone analyzing brain scans can always find some tiny little region that was, say, 1% more active during the exposure to the visual stimulus and the later recall of the stimulus. We would expect you to be able to find such regions even if brains do not store memories. Similarly, if I eagerly analyze rain puddles in Chicago when the New England Patriots are playing football and rain puddles in Chicago when the Kansas City Chiefs are playing football, I may be able to find some little part of Chicago where there was an increased number of rain puddles during both of these types of games. But that does nothing to show that such football games have any causal relation to rain puddles in Chicago. 

The paper "Identifying Causal Subsequent Memory Effects" reported that "we are unable to identify any signal that reliably predicts subsequent memory after adjusting for confounding variables, bringing into doubt the causal status of these effects." In other words, when properly analyzed in the fullest way, there was no evidence for any "subsequent memory effect." 

Any paper claiming a "subsequent memory effect" with any credibility would have to meet various rigorous standards:

(1) The paper would have to be a pre-registered paper dedicated to trying to confirm some very specific hypothesis related to a subsequent memory effect. 

(2) There would have to be a rigorous blinding protocol, to prevent some deal in which the scientists were guilty of "seeing what you are hoping to see." 

(3) The subjects would have to be old enough to follow instructions, so that you could reliably tell what seconds were the learning period (or exposure-to-stimulus) and what seconds were the recall-of-stimulus period. 

(4) Adequate study groups (probably of at least 30 subjects per study group) would be needed. 

(5) A sample size calculation would need to be done to show that the study had used a study group size large enough to produce a high statistical power such as 80%.

None of these things occurred in the low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne. There was no pre-registration of a hypothesis to be tested. No substantial blinding protocol was followed, but merely a very limited level of blinding subverted by rater suggestions (as described below), with apparently no blinding occurring for the brain scan analysis. The paper has no discussion of a detailed blinding protocol. The study group sizes were only 13. The subjects were not old enough to follow instructions, being mere babies. No sample size calculation was done.

 Turk-Browne and his colleagues attempt to derive some "subsequent memory effect" through some bizarre method in which they are trying to judge which stimulus a baby was looking at, and trying to guess whether a baby remembered a previously seen photo, based on which he looked at. It's methodological fumbling.  You can't reliably tell which of two photos a baby is looking at, nor does which photo a baby looks at tell you anything about what a baby is recalling.  

We read in the Supplemental Information document that judgments about which directions babies were looking in were made by human raters.  We read this description of the nonsensical procedure:

"Human coders labeled frames of the video recordings of infant gaze during the encoding and test trials as: looking center, right of center, left of center, off-screen (blinking or looking away), or undetected (out of the camera’s field of view or otherwise not visible, such as being blocked by the infant’s arm). During encoding trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking at center' because there was only one image on the screen at center. During test trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking left or right' because there were two images, left and right of center, respectively."

 Instead of simply judging objectively about which direction the babies were looking at, these "human coders" were pushed to judge in a particular way, like some baseball umpire getting a message in his earphone telling him "that was probably a strike" or "that was probably a ball." These instructions amount to a form of bias injection, and they mean none of the data about which direction the babies were looking at is reliable. Since none of that data is reliable, none of the claimed data about a "subsequent memory effect" is reliable. 

We read in the Supplemental Information file about shady statistical fooling around which sounds like "keep torturing the data until it confesses" shenanigans. Here is only a small part of the impossible-to-justify convoluted rigmarole that went on:

"We used nonparametric bootstrap resampling to test for statistical significance. Specifically, we resampled participants for the contrast of interest with replacement 1000 times and recalculated the average for each iteration. The P value was quantified as the proportion of iterations with the opposite sign of the original subsequent memory effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. This analysis was first performed across the full sample, then separately in median splits of lower and higher average familiarity preference groups and younger and older infant age groups. We similarly quantified age-group differences by: resampling participants from among the younger and older infants, respectively, with replacement; calculating the mean value for each age group; and then subtracting the younger group mean from the older group mean. Again, the P value was the proportion of 1000 iterations that were of the opposite sign as the original group difference, doubled for a two-tailed test. Finally, we tested for a continuous age effect by resampling participants with replacement and recalculating the Spearman’s rank correlation between the subsequent memory effect and age in months over the sampled bivariate data pairs. Again, the P value was calculated as the proportion of resampled coefficients with the opposite sign as the original age effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. In exploratory whole-brain analyses, we performed nonparametric group statistics using the randomise function in FSL."

In the Scientific American article Turk-Browne speaks clearly about his ridiculous methodology when he says this: "If the infant looked longer at the photograph they had seen before, we labeled that image as remembered; otherwise, it was forgotten." That's an absurd procedure. You can't tell whether a baby remembered something by whether he looked longer at a picture on the left or the right, and human raters typically cannot even reliably tell which of two photos placed in front of him a baby is looking longer at. When later in the Scientific American article Turk-Browne claims that "the hippocampus was more active when infants viewed images that they seemed to remember," he is making a groundless statement based on his defective methodology, which provides no reliable data on what infants remembered in his experiments. 

The idea of "familiarity preference" made in the paper (the assumption that babies would be more likely to look at a photo they had seen before) is an idea the exact opposite of the "novelty preference" assumption in many mouse experiments done by neuroscientists, which assume that a rodent will be more likely to explore some compartment they have not explored before. The authors confess "we did not observe a familiarity preference at the group level," which is a confession that helps show how misguided the methods and design of the study was. In other words, judging from the whole data set gathered, babies do not have any tendency to look more at a photo they have seen before. This comes as no surprise to me, having co-raised academically high-scoring twin daughters who never paid any attention to anything on the TV screen until they were 20 months old or older. Figure 2 of the paper is laughable, being data gathered from only a single subject. 

The whole experiment is just a horrible-methodology mess of reckless infant endangerment inanity. Nothing has been learned about human memory from this nonsense. What has mainly happened is that some infants have been senselessly put at risk for the sake of a junk science paper. What percent (if any) of the babies endangered here will end up getting cancer because of their needless involvement in this methodological nonsense, because of the genotoxic effects of 3T MRI scanners mentioned in the scientific paper quoted above? We will not know for many years, if ever. The general rule of neuroscientists is  "scan them and forget them." Neuroscientists do not do long-term tracking of health problems arising over a lifetime from subjects who participated in experimental fMRI scanning.  

In the wikipedia.org article for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we read the troubling passage below:

"Genotoxic (i.e., potentially carcinogenic) effects of MRI scanning have been demonstrated in vivo and in vitro, leading a recent review to recommend 'a need for further studies and prudent use in order to avoid unnecessary examinations, according to the precautionary principle'."

A 2011 paper different from the 2009 paper quoted above states this:

"We observed a significant increase in the frequency of single-strand DNA breaks following exposure to a 3 T MRI...These results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human lymphocytes."

A more recent year 2024 study ("Evaluation of the Biological Effects of Exposures to Magnetic Resonance Imaging on Single-Strand DNA: An In-vivo Study") found similar results, finding that MRI scanners only half as powerful as 3T scanners can produce genotoxic effects.  It reported this:

"The DNA single-strand breaks were significant for all tested parameters in both MRI 1.5 T (p<0.01) and 3.0 T (p<0.001)....The percentage of cells destroyed in the group exposed to 3.0 T MRI was increased to 12.65 ± 1.0 after 10 minutes of exposure."

The supplemental information of the "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants" paper discussed above mentions an average MRI exposure time of 8 minutes using a 3T MRI scanner. Given what is reported in the year 2024 study quoted above, we have every reason to fear that genotoxic effects and cell damage may have occurred in the infants senselessly involved in this poorly designed study. 

A paper tells us the following about the newer twice-as-powerful

3T MRI machines that have been replacing the older 1.5T MRI

machines, suggesting their magnetic fields are much stronger than

the strength needed to lift a car:

"The main magnetic field of a 3T system is 60,000 times

 the earth's magnet field. The strength of electromagnets

 used to pick up cars in junk yards is about the field strength 

of MRI systems with field strengths from 1.5-2.0T.

 It is strong enough to pull fork-lift tires off of machinery,

 pull heavy-duty floor buffers and mop buckets into

 the bore of the magnet, pull stretchers across the room

 and turn oxygen bottles into flying projectiles reaching

 speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour."   

I strongly advise all parents never to let their children participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless a doctor has told them that the brain scan is medically advisable solely for the health of the child.  I advise adults not to participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless they have read something that gives them warrant for believing that the experimenters are following best experimental practices (as experimental neuroscientists rarely do), and that there will not be a very high chance that the adults will be undergoing unnecessary health risks for the sake of some "bad practices" poorly designed "fishing expedition" experiment that does not advance human understanding.  If a neuroscientist looking for research subjects tells you that brain scans are perfectly safe, remember that many neuroscientists often dogmatically make claims that are unproven or doubtful, and often pretend to know things they do not actually know (see the posts of this site for very many examples). 

I also strongly advise anyone who participated in any brain scanning experiment to permanently keep very careful records of their participation, to find out and write down the name of the scientific paper corresponding to the study, to write down and keep the names of any scientists or helpers they were involved with, to permanently keep a copy of any forms they signed, and to keep a careful log of any health problems experienced by the person who had the brain scan.  Such information may be useful should such a person decide to file a lawsuit. 

The CIA's Long-Running MK-ULTRA Mind Control Program Failed, Because Brains Don't Make Minds

The story of the MK-ULTRA project is one of the sickest stories in the history of abusive science. In the 1950's there began a CIA project called MK-ULTRA. The project was all based on materialist notions of the mind. Making the erroneous assumption that the mind is merely the product of the brain and its chemical outputs, scientists attempted to find or produce chemicals that could control a person's mind. One ambition of the project was to find some chemical potion that could "break down a person's mind," so that, for example, a dedicated Communist might first have his mind "broken down," and then be converted into a capitalist or an anti-Communist. Another ambition of the project was to discover some "truth serum" that would cause a subject to confess any secrets he had sworn to keep. Another ambition of the project was to find some kind of amnesia drug that would cause someone to forget secret things he had recently learned, without destroying his memory entirely. 

The project was a dismal failure. None of its goals was achieved. While the project was operating, innumerable lives were disrupted or destroyed. The project is described in the Washington Post column below, written by the leading journalist Jack Anderson:

A page on the CIA web site tells us this about MK-ULTRA:

"MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it supposedly used United States citizens as unwitting test subjects...The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.  Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a 'cover story.' On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said: The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign'....At least one death, that of Dr. Frank Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense.' "

Later in the same document we get these tidbits:

• "In 1964, the project was renamed MK-SEARCII. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control."
• The MK-ULTRA project was interested in finding "materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use,"  "a material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning,"  "substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public," "materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness," 
  and "substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception."
• "The MK-ULTRA director was granted six percent of the CIA 'operating budget in 1953, without oversight or accounting." This presumably resulted in many millions of dollars of funding. 
• "LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent."
• "Volunteers were given LSD for 77 consecutive days."
• " CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Owen Cameron did experiments that "consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions." 
• " Run by TSS chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the program came to include 149 separate animal and human behavior modification projects, some conducted by Agency and Army researchers, but most involving one of 80 participating American and Canadian universities, hospitals, and research institutions operating under contracts that did not reveal Agency funding or associations."

The wikipedia.org article on Donald Owen Cameron is a portrait of a man who sunk into very dark depths of evil, after serving for two years as the president of the American Psychiatric Association.  Cameron devised sinister experimental programs of long-term mental torture, which had no useful results. The biography of Sidney Gottlieb is a portrait of a biochemist who sunk into depths of evil.  That biography of Gottlieb says, "Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective." 

Nothing useful came out of all the many years of reckless highly-funded experiments performed as part of the MK-ULTRA project. No one found any chemical way to control a mind, nor did anyone find any chemical way to induce amnesia or produce a truth serum.  The dismal failure of the project makes sense after you have studied the very many powerful reasons (discussed in the posts of this blog) for thinking the human mind cannot be the product of the brain, and that brains cannot be a storage place for human memories. Also, the very deep involvement of US universities in this sinister project (over many years) is another reason why we should question the credibility of biology pronouncements coming from such universities.