Neuroscientists Keep Writing Papers Bluffing Us About Memory Encoding

 " 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. " -- "BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision," document co-authored by many scientists (link). 

If we are to believe in the claim that brains store human memories, we must have a credible account of four things: encoding, neural storage of very old memories, the instantaneous formation of memories, and the instantaneous retrieval of memories. The theory that human memories are stored in the brain fails in regard to each of these things.

There exists no plausible theory as to how a brain could store memories lasting for 50 years, but we know humans can remember many things for that long. The most popular idea of brain memory storage claims that memories are stored in synapses, but the proteins in synapses have an average lifetime of less than two weeks, meaning such a theory falls short by a factor of 1000 when it comes to explaining memories that persist for 50 years. As for memory retrieval, there is no theory explaining how humans could possibly recall instantly things they learned many years ago, and haven't thought about in years. 

You may hear the name of some obscure historical or cultural figure you learned about decades ago, and haven't heard about or thought about since that time. You may then instantly recall something about that person. But if that memory was stored somewhere in your brain, how could you instantly find the exact little location where that memory was? Doing that (for example, instantly finding a memory in storage spot 834,220 out of 1,200,000) would be like instantly finding a needle in a mountain-sized haystack. If a brain had an indexing system, or a coordinate system, or a neuron numbering system, there might be a faint hope for explaining instantaneous memory retrieval; but the brain has no such things. As for the instantaneous formation of memories, there is no theory that can account for it in a brain. The prevailing theory that memories are stored by synapse strengthening (which would involve protein synthesis requiring minutes) fails to account for memories that humans can form instantly.

When we consider the issue of memory encoding, we find a difficulty as great as the difficulties just discussed. Encoding is supposedly some translation that occurs so that a memory can be physically stored in a brain, so that it might last for years. The problem is that human memories include incredibly diverse types of things, and we have no idea how most of these things could be stored as neural states. Consider only a few of the types of things that can be stored in a human memory:

• Memories of daily experiences, such as what you were doing on some day
• Facts you learned in school, such as the fact that Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theater
• Sequences of numbers such as your social security number
• Sequences of words, such as the dialog an actor has to recite in a play
• Sequences of musical notes, such as the notes an opera singer has to sing
• Abstract concepts that you have learned
• Memories of particular non-visual sensations such as sounds, food tastes, smells, pain, and physical pleasure
• Memories of how to do physical things, such as how to ride a bicycle
• Memories of how you felt at emotional moments of your life
• Rules and principles, such as “look both ways before crossing the street”
• Memories of visual information, such as what a particular person's face looks like

How could all of these very different types of information ever be translated into neural states so that a brain could store them?

Our neuroscientists have told us again and again that the brain does such an encoding, but there is no real evidence that any such thing takes place. What we have evidence for is merely evidence that humans remember things. If you are someone who believes that memories are physically stored in brains, then you may claim that memory encoding occurred at such and such a rate whenever you observe people learning something at such and such a rate. But merely observing evidence of learning or memory is not acquiring any actual evidence that encoding has occurred. There remains the possibility that our memories are not stored as neural states, the possibility that our repository of memory is some spiritual or psychic facility that is non-neural and non-biological.

Such a possibility should not seem remote when we consider that there is no workable theory as to how learned knowledge and experiences could be encoded so that they might be stored in a brain. No matter what theory we may create to account for the encoding of learned knowledge and episodic experience so that they can be stored in a brain, such a theory will always end up sounding ridiculous after we examine the theory in detail and consider its requirements and shortcomings. Let's look at some possibilities, and why they fail.

Theory #1: Direct writing of words and images

First, let's consider the simplest theory of encoding we can imagine – that a memory is stored in the brain so that it appears in a neural form pretty much as we see it in our minds. Under this theory, when you memorized some series of words, this would cause a sequence of microscopic little letters to become stored in your brain; and when you experienced some visual experience, this would get stored as some tiny little image in your brain. So, for example, under this theory, if someone memorized the sentence, “There may be green aliens in the center of the galaxy,” then after the person died, some scientist might examine that person's brain with an electron microscope, and actually find some tiny little words in some neurons, words that directly spelled out, “There may be green aliens in the center of the galaxy.” And under this theory, if someone was given a picture of a toy purple pony, and asked to memorize it, then after the person died, a scientist might be able to examine the person's brain under an electron microscope, and the scientist might say, “Aha, I see in his neurons a tiny little image of a toy purple pony.”

This theory may immediately provoke giggles, and it is rather easy to think of some reasons why it does not work. They are these:

1. If memory worked in such a way, we would surely have already discovered such easily-recognizable memory traces. But no such things have been seen, even though a great deal of human neural tissue has been examined at very high magnification. When we look at brain tissue at the highest magnification, we see no tiny little letters or tiny little images of animals, cars, and persons.
2. For a brain to be able to write words that we memorized in this type of direct manner, it would seem that the brain would need some very precise write mechanism, capable of forming the exact characters of the alphabet in brain tissue; but no such brain capability is known to exist.
3. It seems that if such a theory were true, recalling some words would be like reading. But recalling words is almost never like reading, and we don't see in our mind's eye some stream of letters as we recall some words we memorized.
4. For a brain to be able to read words that we memorized in this type of direct manner, it would seem that the brain would need some very precise reading mechanism, capable of reading the exact characters of the alphabet stored in very tiny letters written in brain tissue; but no such thing is known to exist. We don't have tiny little “micro-eyes” in our brains that might allow us to read tiny microscopic letters stored in our brains.
5. Alphabets of modern languages are relatively recent inventions. For example, the English alphabet is not many  thousands of years old. There has no been no change in brain structure for many thousands of years, and we can think of no  reason why brains would have some ability allowing it to write an alphabet that only came into existence centuries or a few thousand years ago, not many thousands of years ago. 

Theory #2: Brain storage of words and images using some unknown non-binary coding or translation protocol

Now, let's consider a different theory of memory encoding – the idea that instead of directly storing words and images (so that we could directly read the words and directly see the images), the brain uses some type of unknown coding or translation protocols. For example, it could conceivably be that words that we learn are somehow translated into proteins or chemicals or electrical states, using some as-of-yet undiscovered translation scheme.

For example, such a scheme might work a little like this:

Item	How the item might be represented
Letter “A”	Some particular neural arrangement of atoms, chemicals or electricity
Letter “B”	Some other neural arrangement of atoms, chemicals or electricity
Letter “C”	Some other neural  arrangement of atoms, chemicals or electricity

Such a scheme might work a little like the Morse code, in which particular letters are translated into some sequence of dots, dashes, or dots and dashes. Some particular arrangement of atoms, chemicals or electricity might work like a dot in the Morse code, and some other particular arrangement of atoms, chemicals or electricity might work like a dash in the Morse code.

Or there could be some higher-level translation system based on particular words rather than letters. For example, we can imagine something like this:

Item	How the item might be represented
Word “sun”	Some particular neural arrangement of atoms, chemicals, proteins or electricity
Word “man”	Some other neural arrangement of atoms, chemicals, proteins or electricity
Word “move”	Some other neural  arrangement of atoms, proteins chemicals or electricity

There is one giant problem with such a theory. All of the languages that we use are fairly recent innovations, having been created in only the last few percent of the time that humans have existed. For example, back in the Roman Empire people used Latin, but the English we use today has only been in use for less than 1200 years. The alphabet used for English is less than 1000 years old, and its alphabetic predecessor (the Latin alphabet) is only a few thousand years old. It is generally acknowledged even by Darwinism enthusiasts that very complex evolutionary innovations cannot arise in only a few centuries of time or a few thousand years. So we could never explain how the brain could naturally possess some elaborate translation system based on such a relatively recent innovation as the English language and the English alphabet.

Scientists strain our credulity whenever they talk about novel functional genes accidentally appearing even over the course of a million years. Think, then, on how much greater a problem there would be in explaining how hundreds of novel functional genes could have appeared in less than 3000 years, to perform some translation operation involving characters and words that have existed for less than 3000 years. To assume such a thing would be to assume evolution working thousands of times faster than the rate we would predict from known mutation rates.

There is also no evidence that any such great burst of genetic novelty has occurred. Although the half-life of DNA is 512 years, we have enough samples of human DNA from ancient Rome and ancient Egypt to know that there has been no big change in the DNA of humans during the past 3000 years. So it seems impossible that there could be any genetic capability (arising in the past few thousand years) that would allow humans to neurally store information using some encoding mechanism specifically tailored to the letters and words of the English language that have existed for less than 3000 years.

Another difficulty with the theory of encoding just mentioned is that if it existed, we would see big differences in the genes of people who spoke different languages. According to such a theory, we would expect that Chinese people would have one group of genes corresponding to proteins or RNA molecules needed to translate Chinese words into neural states, and that English speaking people would have some other quite different set of genes corresponding to proteins or RNA molecules needed to translate English words into neural states (particularly since the Chinese language and alphabet is so different from the English language and alphabet). But there exists no such difference in the genes of Chinese speaking people and English speaking people.

There is also the difficulty that there is no sign in the human genome that any such genes exist for performing such an elaborate operation of encoding human learned knowledge and episodic experience so that it can be stored in neurons or synapses (and there would need to be many hundreds or thousands of types of genes dedicated to performing such a task if it was done).

Theory #3: Binary writing of words and images

Now, let's consider a theory of memory encoding that perhaps the words we memorize and the images we remember are stored in binary format. We know that computers store information in binary format, so when it is suggested that the brain may use a similar format, this may sound reasonable to the average person (although it isn't, a brain being radically different from an electronic computer).

This possibility actually has all of the difficulties of the previous possibility. What goes on when your computer stores words in binary format is the following:

1. First individual letters in the words are converted into decimal numbers (such as 13, 19, and 23) using a particular translation table called the ASCII code.
2. Then, those numbers are converted from decimal to binary using a decimal-to-binary conversion routine.

So if we are to believe that the brain does binary encoding like a computer, we would need to believe that built into the brain on a low level is some type of translation scheme like the one below, a scheme in which letters are translated into decimal numbers.

ASCII table used by a computer to store encoded information

In addition, we would also have to believe that the brain has some kind of capability to translate the numbers in such a system into binary numbers. Alternately, we could believe that the brain has a scheme for directly translating characters into binary, but the overall complexity of such a translation mechanism would be every bit as great as a system in which characters are converted into decimal, and then into binary.

We have the following difficulties involved with such an idea:

1. If memory worked in such a way, we would surely have already discovered such easily-recognizable memory traces. We would have discovered tiny little traces in the brain that resemble binary coding. But no such things have been seen, even though a great deal of neural tissue has been examined at very high magnification.
2. For a brain to be able to write words that were memorized in this type of direct manner, it would seem that the brain would need some very precise write mechanism, capable of writing binary traces; but no such thing is known to exist.
3. For a brain to be able to read words that we memorized in this type of direct manner, it would seem that the brain would need some very precise reading mechanism, capable of reading in binary; but no such thing is known to exist.
4. Since the alphabets of human languages are only a few thousand years old, there would have been no time for the human body to have evolved some complex biological mechanism capable of converting specific alphabetic characters to binary.
5. We can imagine no way in which a brain could achieve the translation effect in which words are translated into binary. As far as we know, there is nothing anything like an ASCII table in your brain, nor is there anything like a facility for translating English letters directly into binary, nor is there anything like a facility for translating English letters into decimal, and then translating decimal numbers into binary. There are no genes in the genome that perform such tasks.

The Scientists Who Keep Falsely Talking About Memory Encoding and Memory Representations in Brains

The simple fact is that there is not the slightest evidence of memory encoding or memory representation in the human brain. So why it that we keep getting scientific papers claiming to have seen memory encoding or memory representation in the human brain? It's pretty much a "they're talking like they had what they need to have but don't have" kind of affair.  Something similar might be going on if some street beggar were to try to attract women by frequently using finance terms. So someone without $20 to his name might speak like this:  "I think that WEALTH MANAGEMENT is very important, and I am slowly BUILDING MY FORTUNE in a way that will give me a HUGE BONANZA OF WEALTH once my INVESTMENT PLANS are actualized."

But how can someone write a paper making frequent references to memory encoding and memory representation in the brain, even though there is no evidence that such things exist?  The visual below shows the general approach typically used. 

A key element is what can be called chance-mining. Chance-mining typically involves grandly trumpeting some little result that might easily be obtained by pure chance.  I can give an example of chance-mining. Suppose you are doing a study trying to prove what we may call "the Abracadabra Hypothesis," which you define as "the hypothesis that saying 'Abracadabra' before flipping a coin will increase the chance of a Heads result." Any test involving a sufficiently large sample size will fail to support this Abracadabra Hypothesis. That's because something called the Law of Large Numbers says that the more random trials you do, the more the result will tend to match the result expected by chance. But it is very easy to get a test result deviating from what is expected by chance, if you use a very small sample.  For example, it is easy to flip ten coins and get 6 or 7 Heads results, even though the expected chance result is 5.

So if you want to do a paper claiming to support the Abracadabra Hypothesis, you can try a test using a small number of coin flips such as only 10 or 20. If that fails, you can file the results in your file drawer, and start a new experiment, also using a small number of coin flips. Probably before long you will have some result you can claim as "statistically significant." Chance-mining like this misleads people, because it creates the impression that there is a causal relation or causal influence when there is none. Saying "Abracadabra" actually has no influence on the result of coin flips. 

Similar chance-mining occurs in quite a few neuroscience papers.  The papers may make quite a few references to neural encoding or neural representation, but they will not be backed up by references to well-designed studies using an adequate sample size.  Typically the paper will present some research that is utterly unreliable for multiple reasons, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes or unreliable techniques for trying to measure recall in rodents. 

A example of such a paper is the paper here, entitled "Ventral hippocampus neurons encode meal-related memory." The title is unjustified. No robust evidence has been provided of any neural encoding of memory. There are two gigantic flaws in the study:

(1) The study group size is way too small, consisting of only 5 animals. 

(2) No reliable method was used to measure memory performance in rodents. We read that a "foraging-related spatial memory task" apparatus was constructed to test memory in mice. We see a picture of a weird device that the paper does not name. This was not any well-established protocol for testing memory in mice. We fail to have any diagram explaining why such a device would reliably test memory in mice. 

What usually occurs in such papers claiming evidence of "memory encoding" or "memory representation" is that there will be a combination of two main sins, either one of which is to disqualify a paper as good evidence:

(1) Almost always there will be some study group size that is way too-small for any reliable evidence to be honestly claimed 

(2) Usually there will be a reliance on a completely unreliable measurement for estimating fear or recall in rodents, the method of trying to judge "freezing behavior." All papers relying on this method are junk science, for reasons I discuss here. 

What largely goes on in such poorly written science papers is pareidolia.  Pareidolia is what occurs when someone keeps scanning some stream of random data, looking for something he can call a representation. An example is a person who eagerly scans his toast every day, looking for some sign of a representation, and who one day announces he has found the face of Jesus in his toast, or maybe the face of the Virgin Mary, or maybe the face of his dead wife. 

The neuroscientist eagerly scanning brain scan data or brain wave data looking for something he can call a little bit of "representation" or "encoding" is someone who we can no more trust than someone eagerly scanning the clouds every day, looking for something that looks like the shape of an animal. 

An example from 2025 of a pure pareidolia paper is the junk science paper "Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries." We have scientists looking at EEG readings obtained in ten epilepsy patients while the patients watched movies.  Looking at the ever-changing line squiggles that are EEG readings, the authors claim to have seen "ripples" that they claim occur more often during "event boundaries." The claim that there are such "ripples" in the data is as much see-what-you-want-to-see pareidolia as the claim that there are particular points in movies that are "event boundaries." The supposed identification of these "ripples" occurred not by humans staring at the EEG readings, but by some computer program which is a black box of convoluted spaghetti code. Computer programming is the best friend of the scientist trying to see things that are not really there. You can run some computer program that is supposedly seeking some obscure thing in noisy data; and if the first analysis run fails, you can keep tweaking the code until it reports finding what you were hoping to find. 

No, Noise Miners, Neurons Don't Encode Words

Every year the journal Nature publishes many junk science neuroscience papers guilty of very bad examples of Questionable Research Practices. It is a huge mistake for anyone to think that the most prestigious journals such as Cell and Nature only publish high-quality neuroscience research. When it comes to neuroscience research, the standards of such "big name" journals are very low. The journal Nature also regularly publishes false-headline articles about neuroscience research, articles with some of the most misleading clickbait boasts to be found anywhere. Let us look at the latest example of a groundless boast the journal Nature is peddling. It is the unfounded  claim that someone discovered "neurons that encode words’ meaning."  The idea is nonsensical. No one has any idea of how a neuron could possibly encode the meaning of a word. 

In the Nature article peddling this boast, we have a subtitle of "For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word." Always distrust anyone claiming to have done something in the field of neuroscience "for the first time." What it generally means is some research making some boast that has not been reproduced by other scientists.  We read a description of what was going on:

"But Williams and his colleagues found a unique opportunity to look at how individual neurons encode language in real time. His group recruited 10 people about to undergo surgery for epilepsy, each of whom had had electrodes implanted in their brains to determine the source of their seizures. The electrodes allowed the researchers to record activity from around 300 neurons in each person’s prefrontal cortex.

As participants listened to multiple short sentences containing a total of around 450 words, the scientists recorded which neurons fired and when. Williams says that around two or three distinct neurons lit up for each word, although he points out that the team recorded only the activity of a tiny fraction of the prefrontal cortex’s billions of neurons."

This is noise-mining. Neurons in the brain fire continuously, at a rate between 1 time per second and 200 times per second. Anyone tracking the firing of 300 neurons while someone is listening to speech will be able to find a few neurons that seemed to fire more often when something was said. Similarly, if someone records the ups and downs of 300 stocks on the New York Stock exchange, and tries to correlate them with the occurrence of words coming from his television set showing an old movie, he will be able to find a few stocks that went up or down more often when some particular word was spoken. But that would be mere noise-mining. 

The diagram below is from the scientific paper here ("Neuronal firing rates diverge during REM and homogenize during non-REM").  The authors say that they sorted neuron rates into five quintiles. Evidently neurons fire in a fluctuating manner at a rate between  about 1 time per second (the top line) and about 100 times per second (the bottom line). This is just the kind of noisy, fluctuating data that noise-miners love to have. Anyone analyzing data so random and fluctuating can find some neurons that seem to fire more often when compared to some unrelated factor such as a word someone is hearing. 

The Nature article is promoting the paper "Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution." Looking at the paper, I quickly find much use of misleading language. We read this:

"We observed that many of the neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings. The selectivity or ‘tuning’ of neurons reflects the degree to which they respond to words denoting particular meanings (that is, words that belong to specific semantic domains)."

Never trust a physical scientist using the word "selectively" or "selection." We have a 160-year history of scientists using the word "selection" in a misleading way, which began with Charles Darwin coining the term "natural selection" to refer to a blind, mindless process that was not actually selection. "Selection" is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent. The neurons referred to above were in no sense selecting anything. It was merely allegedly found that some of these neurons were firing more often when certain words were spoken. This is exactly what we would expect to find by chance, given 300 random neurons with random firings that were compared to the playing of 450 random words. It is no evidence at all of either encoding or selection going on in neurons. All that's going on here is noise-mining.  You could find a similar result by having a computer program with voice recognition abilities compare words coming from one of your television sets with words spoken when some other TV in your home played some television series shown on another channel.  After data collection and automatic programmatic analysis, it would be found that some type of words might be heard more often on the second channel when some particular word was spoken on the first channel. There would be no causal relation involved, and the result would be meaningless noise-mining.  

To help facilitate their noise-mining, the authors of the paper have "greased the wheels" by introducing something they call "semantic domains." Since the authors were free to arbitrarily put words in whatever "semantic domains" they wished, this helped them to see what they were hoping to see. Throughout the paper, verbs and nouns are used in a misleading way. We hear of the "selection" and "selectivity" of neurons that were not selecting anything, and we hear the claim that "many neurons distinguished words from nonwords," although no evidence has been provided of any actual distinguishing or recognition.  What's going on is that the authors are merely crunching the random data of neuron firings, and correlating some cases of more frequent firings with the simultaneous occurrence of spoken words.  This is being passed off as neurons "distinguishing" something or "selecting" something.  Similar nonsense would be going on if I tracked the random ups and downs of 300 stocks, correlating such data with 400 words coming out of my TV set while an old movie played, and then said that certain stocks on the stock exchange "selected" or "distinguished" particular words. 

Our authors then move on to misusing the word "representations," a word that today's neuroscientists are constantly misusing, in cases where they have zero robust evidence that any such thing as a representation is occurring.  No evidence has been provided here of brains encoding words or recognizing words or selecting words or distinguishing words or representing. All that has gone on is noise-mining. 

A look at the programming code used for this experiment shows all kinds of arbitrary data fiddling going on, what smells like a byzantine rigmarole affair of "keep torturing the data until it confesses in the weakest voice."  Opening up the files using the link above, an experienced programmer like me can sniff many a sign of hard-to-justify programmatic convolutions going on, with the data being very frequently passed through all kinds of weird loops that are doing God-only-knows-what.  I very much doubt that any of the programmers of this code or any of the authors of the paper fully understand what was going on with these data manipulations. Graphs in the paper are based not on the original raw data gathered from brains, but the output after such data was programmatically manipulated in many a strange and arbitrary way.  

This experiment was based on nonsensical assumptions.  The brain has billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. There never was any reason to believe that studying the firing of any single neuron  during the hearing of words by subjects would produce any evidence that such a neuron encodes or recognizes or represents or is sensitive to any word. The idea that you would get meaningful evidence of such a thing from analyzing the firing of a few hundred randomly selected neurons (from a brain of billions of neurons) never made any sense, particularly given the extremely large random variations in the firings of noisy neurons.  

Normally, noise-mining is a harmless bit of nonsense. For example, someone may try to analyze the ups and downs of summer temperatures and windspeeds in coastal China and try to correlate them with the wins and losses of baseball teams in the United States, maybe finding one or two teams that seem to perform better when it is windy or warm in coastal China.  That's harmless nonsense. But in this case the authors may not merely have engaged in harmless nonsense.

A medical page here describes how electrodes are implanted to detect where seizures come from. It says this:

"We are going to place several (~10-15) electrodes into your brain. These electrodes are thin, floppy wires about the thickness of a spaghetti noodle."

But what is described by the "Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution" paper I am discussing is something vastly more than what is mentioned above: the implanting of a very large number of microelectrodes capable of recording the activity of individual neurons. Below is only a small part of the description of how the subjects seemed to undergo additional electrode implanting, with more than 900 microelectrodes being implanted into the brain (the "cortical ribbon" refers to the cortex of the brain):

"For the silicon microelectrode recordings, sterile Neuropixels probes31 (version 1.0-S, IMEC, ethylene oxide sterilized by BioSeal) were advanced into the cortical ribbon with a manipulator connected to a ROSA ONE Brain (Zimmer Biomet) robotic arm. The probes (width: 70 µm, length: 10 mm, thickness: 100 µm) consisted of 960 contact sites (384 preselected recording channels) that were laid out in a chequerboard pattern."

The news article in Nature says, "His group recruited ten people about to undergo surgery for epilepsy, each of whom had had electrodes implanted in their brains to determine the source of their seizures." But the scientific paper makes no mention of epilepsy or seizures. Instead it tells us that "All participants included in the study were scheduled to undergo planned awake intraoperative neurophysiology and single-neuronal recordings for deep brain stimulation targeting."  A table of the paper lists only patient diagnoses other than epilepsy: Parkinson's disease, essential tremor and cervical dystonia. Oops, it seems the journal Nature can't get its story straight. 

Deep brain stimulation is sometimes used for Parkinson's disease, although it is a risky technique of dubious value (the paper here reporting a 13% incidence of "serious adverse effects" with such a treatment). Also the meta-analysis here finds that using micro-electrodes to try to analyze places for surgery  does not improve surgical outcomes, telling us, "This meta-analysis shows that there is no difference in clinical outcome between a surgical technique with and without MER [Microelectrode recording]."  Deep-brain stimulation for Parkinson's typically involves targeting regions deep in the brain, regions other than the cortex: the thalamus, the subthalmic nucleus, and the globus pallidus. But the paper I am criticizing got data from cortex regions far away from such regions. It tells us, "Single-neuron recordings were obtained from the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex." 

We are told that decisions about the electrode insertions "were made independently of any study consideration," but you may reasonably doubt such a claim if the unspecified persons making such decisions were the same people benefiting from the publication of the paper. In the medical world there is a massive history of doctors claiming without much credibility to have made treatment decisions or recommendations "independently" of some financial or professional benefit they may derive from such recommendations or decisions. For example, innumerable doctors claimed (without much credibility) to have recommended opioid prescriptions "independently" of financial gain they got from such recommendations. Similarly, doctors at clinics with profitable fancy scanners may claim to recommend expensive scans "independently" of the doctor's  financial benefits from such scans (a claim we should doubt). And many doctors often recommend unnecessary surgery treatments profitable for them, and claim to have reached such recommendations "independently" of financial profits the doctors get from such treatment; but you should often be skeptical of such claims of decisions made independently of the doctor's financial benefits.  

We may wonder if the ten subjects each getting hundreds of microelectrode implants underwent very significant risk largely for the sake of a badly conceived experiment that did nothing to provide robust evidence about neurons and cognition. 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 in the brains of epilepsy patients.

Here is a quote from a scientific paper:

"The effects of penetrating microelectrode implantation on brain tissues according to the literature data...  are as follows:

1. Disruption of the blood–brain barrier (BBB);
2. Tissue deformation;
3. Scarring of the brain tissue around the implant, i.e., gliosis 
4. Chronic inflammation after microelectrode implantation;
5. Neuronal cells loss."

I strongly advise any people who participated in any brain scanning experiment or any neuroscience experiment involving electrode implants 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 very careful log of any health problems they ever have. Such information may be useful should such a person decide to file a lawsuit.

There is zero robust evidence of any kind of encoding going on in the brain other than the genetic coding that goes on DNA, which is merely low-level chemical coding in which amino acids are represented.  Any claims to the contrary will not hold up to careful scrutiny, and will typically be found to be appeals to poorly designed experiments engaging in Questionable Research Practices, experiments not producing results that were well-replicated. 

The structure of human neurons has not changed in many thousands of years. Conversely, words in a language have typically only been used for centuries. Words have meanings that often gradually change from decade to decade.  For example, the English word "chip" has multiple meanings, mostly meanings that arose relatively recently.  A person using the phrase "chip" may refer to a computer component, a plastic poker chip, or a potato chip, all human inventions of recent centuries. The English word "hack" now has a computer-related meaning it did not have when I was born, and the English word "bug" now has two meanings it did not have in 1930, one referring to a software defect and the other referring to electronic surveillance. The idea that neurons (with structures unchanged in 5000 years) encode human words (mostly less than thousands of years old and often with meanings only decades old) makes no sense.  For more on this, see my post "Young Age of Languages Contradicts Claims of Neural Storage of Linguistic Information." 

The encoding of words occurs in things such as dictionaries, which describe the multiple meanings of words. The encoding of a word is something far more complicated than merely a higher response rate. My eyebrows may raise if I am swimming and you shout, "Shark!" But that would not be a case of my eyebrows encoding the word "shark." And similarly, you would not show a neuron encoded a word if you gave data suggesting the neuron fired more often when the word was spoken.

Some actual encoding of words

Postscript: Another noise-mining paper ("Default mode network electrophysiological dynamics and causal role in creative thinking") fails to provide any robust evidence that brains produce creative thinking, but does provide more reasons for suspecting that patients are being put at risk for the sake of junk science papers.  We have another paper using too-small study group sizes (13 patients total, with study group sizes such as 9 and 10 subjects).  No blinding protocol was used, a necessity for any study like this to be taken seriously. The patients were intractable epilepsy patients due for brain surgery, but we are told  that "the electrodes  were selected based on anatomical and clinical considerations (not part of the suspected seizure onset zone)," We may wonder whether the patients had electrodes inserted other than what was necessary to determine where they should have surgery to help their seizures. We hear in the paper of brain-zapping as part of the experiment, which can produce seizures in epileptic patients. 15 subjects per study group is the minimum for any experimental study seeking correlation evidence, and for most effect sizes the required study group size is much higher (30 or more). A 2021 paper ("Increasing the statistical power of animal experiments with historical control data" by V. Bonapersona et. al. ) tells us, "For a common effect size of Hedge’s g= 0.5 (Welch’s independent samples t-test, α=0.05), ten animals per group would correspond to a statistical power of 18%, 30 animals per group to 48% power and 65 animals per group to 81% power."  80% statistical power is regarded as good, and 18% statistical power is very weak statistical power, with a high likelihood of a false alarm. Again we may sadly wonder how many very sick patients are put at risk for noise-mining junk science papers. 

Another recent paper senselessly endangering very sick epilepsy patients is the low-quality paper "Distinct neuronal populations in the human brain combine content and context," a very misleading title. We have microwire implants put in very sick epilepsy patients for the sake of a poorly designed with an insufficient study group size (only 16) to have any weight as evidence. The authors confess in their supplemental information that they failed to do a sample size calculation. We are told there was informed consent, but are not given no link to the document that was signed. No claim is made that the microwire implants were made only for medically necessary purposes. 

If The Brain Had a Memory Storage Code, We Would Have Found It Long Ago

One of the dogmas of modern biologists is that memories are stored in the brain. No one has ever produced any direct evidence establishing this claim, and there are many strong reasons for disbelieving it. One of these reasons is the lack of any plausible theory that explains how humans are able to instantly remember specific pieces of information when given some prompt such as the photo of someone's face or that person's name. Another reason is that there is no plausible theory that explains how humans could remember things for 50 years, such as humans can. The most popular theory of memory storage is that memories are stored in synapses, but we know that the proteins in synapses have short lifetimes, and they last for less than a month. No one has given a credible explanation of how memories could be stored for 50 years in synapses if there is such high protein turnover in synapses.

But despite these very grave difficulties, our neuroscientists keep telling us that our memories are stored in the brain. Neuroscientists do not claim that this alleged act of memory storage is some simple flow like the flow that occurs when you pour milk from your milk carton into your cereal bowl. Instead, neuroscientists claim that something called “encoding” occurs. We are told that the things we learn or experience are somehow translated into neural states, perhaps by some process that involves chemicals, electricity, or microscopic changes in the brain. But no neuroscientist has ever given anything resembling an exact description of how this encoding could occur.

The wikipedia.org article on “Encoding, memory” tells us that “The process of encoding is not yet well understood, however key advances have shed light on the nature of these mechanisms.” But no such advances have actually occurred. The article then mentions “the modification of neural synapses, modification of proteins, creation of new synapses, activation of gene expression and new protein synthesis.” But none of these things shed any light on how human experiences or learned concepts could ever be encoded as neural states, chemical states or electrical states. The wikipedia article in question gives us only bluffing and digressions, without doing anything to convince us that scientists have any understanding of how memories could be encoded as neural changes, chemical changes or electrical changes.

One reason for doubting that memories are encoded in brains is that such a thing would require for there to exist (still undiscovered) a set of encoding protocols so complex that they would be a miracle of design if they existed. Encoding always requires some set of translation rules. For example, human DNA uses a set of translation rules called the genetic code to encode information; American writers use the encoding protocols of the English language and the alphabet to encode information stored on paper; and computers use the encoding protocol known as the ASCII code to encode information stored in a computer. As argued here, it would seem that a brain could only store memories if it used a whole series of encoding protocols far more complex than the ASCII code or the genetic code; and the origin of so many sophisticated protocols would be impossible to naturally explain.

Consider only a few of the types of things that can be stored in a human memory:

• Memories of daily experiences, such as what you were doing on some day
• Facts you learned in school, such as the fact that Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theater
• Sequences of numbers such as your social security number
• Sequences of words, such as the dialog an actor has to recite in a play
• Sequences of musical notes, such as the notes an opera singer has to sing
• Abstract concepts that you have learned
• Memories of particular non-visual sensations such as sounds, food tastes, smells, pain, and physical pleasure
• Memories of how to do physical things, such as how to ride a bicycle
• Memories of how you felt at emotional moments of your life
• Rules and principles, such as “look both ways before crossing the street”
• Memories of visual information, such as what a particular person's face looks like

How could all of these very different types of information ever be translated into neural states or synapse states so that a brain could store them? If such encoding were to occur, it would be a miracle of complex design.  Very oddly, the same people who tell us (without any sound basis) that such an encoding occurs are the same people denying design in biological organisms. 

There is another very strong reason for doubting that memories are encoded in the brain: if the brain used a system of memory encoding, we would have already discovered direct evidence of such a code; but we have not discovered any such thing. Specifically:

1. If brains actually stored encoded information, we would see regularities and repetitions that would be signs of encoded information, such as we see in the nucleotide base pairs of DNA, where encoded information is stored; but we see no signs of any such repetitions or regularities that might be the hallmarks of encoded stored memories in the brain.
2. If brains actually stored encoded information, there would have to be many genes that support such encoding, such as the hundreds of genes that support the transfer RNA molecules needed to carry out the protein encoding used by DNA and the genetic code; but we see no signs of any such memory-encoding genes in the human genome.

Let me explain the first of these points. Encoded information has regularities and repetitions that allow someone to tell that it is encoded information. For example, before Europeans were able to read hieroglyphics, they were sure that it was some type of encoded information, because of the large amount of repetition of symbols. When scientists first started to unravel DNA, they quickly figured out it was some type of encoded information, because there was a very high amount of symbol repetition. If we were to get radio signals from intelligent extraterrestrials, it might be years before we would be able to decipher such signals. But soon after we received signals, we would at least be able to tell that they were from intelligent beings and the signals contained encoded information, because of the great number of regularities and repetitions we would see in the signals.

It therefore stands to reason that if some part of the brain (other than DNA) contained encoded information, we would be able to see physical evidence of such an encoding. When scanning neurons and synapses with our electron microscopes, we would see regularities and repetitions that would be the sign of encoded information. But we see no such thing. If you look here, you can see electron microscope photographs of tiny synapses smaller than a neuron. You will see no sign of anything that looks like encoded information. Advanced chemical analysis also have shown no signs of anything that had the regularities and repetitions that are the hallmarks of encoded information.

Some may claim that the brain has encoded memory information, but that it's just too tiny for us to see. Such a claim has little credibility. Scientists were able to discover the microscopic encoded information in DNA in the 1950's. Can we believe that 65 years later science and medical technology is not advanced enough to discover encoded memory information in the brain?

We know exactly what is in synapses, because we can view them with very high-resolution electron microscopes. Below we see a 2013 close-up electron microscope photograph of a synapse head, from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (link).  At the bottom we see a unit that has a length of 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter). 

There is no sign of any encoded information in such synapses.  We see none of the symbol repetition or token repetition that is a sign of encoded information. The little round things are balls of chemicals called vesicles.  The vesicles are almost all the same size and shape.  The vesicles are not stable, and travel across the dark line shown in the center of the photo (which is called a synaptic gap), as a nerve impulse travels.  No one has credibly proposed any method by which such vesicles could represent stable encoded information.  If we were to look at the same synapse head the next day, the arrangement of vesicles would be much different. Synapses bear no resemblance to any system for storing permanent learned information or long-term memories lasting for years.  Synapses no more resemble a system for storing encoded information than do the snow drifts outside of a house in Alaska. 

There is another place that we would expect to see a large sign of a neural code for memories if it existed. If such a thing existed, we would expect that there would be genes supporting such a facility. But no such genes have been found.

Let's consider a comparatively simple case of encoded information stored in the body, the case of the encoded information in DNA. DNA mainly consists of nucleotide base pairs, and particular combinations of such pairs represent particular amino acids. This very simple type of use of encoded information requires hundreds of genes, what are called tRNA genes. 

If human brains were to actually be translating thoughts and sensory experiences so that they can be stored as memory traces in the brain, such a gigantic job would require a huge number of genes – probably many times more than the 500 or so "tRNA" genes that are used for the very simple encoding job of translating DNA nucleotide base pairs into amino acids.  But we see no sign of any such memory encoding genes in the human genome.

There is a study that claims to have found possible evidence of memory encoding genes, but its methodology is ridiculous, and involved the absurd procedure of looking for weak correlations between a set of data extracted from one group of people and another set of data retrieved from an entirely different group of people. See the end of this post for reasons we can't take the study as good evidence of anything. There is not one single gene that a scientist can point to and say, “I am sure this gene is involved in memory encoding, and I can explain exactly how it works to help translate human knowledge or experience into engrams or memory traces.” But if human memories were actually stored in brains, there would have to be many hundreds or thousands of such genes.

The pie chart below shows human proteins by function:

This is a Wikipedia Commons file, and the page for the file gives the following table with the data used for the chart:

Function	Number of genes	Percent of genome
extracellular matrix protein	72	0.40%
protease	476	2.80%
cytoskeletal protein	441	2.60%
transporter	1098	6.40%
transmembrane receptor regulatory/adaptor protein	84	0.50%
transferase	1512	8.80%
oxidoreductase	550	3.20%
lyase	104	0.60%
cell adhesion molecule	93	0.50%
ligase	260	1.50%
nucleic acid binding	1466	8.50%
signaling molecule	961	5.60%
enzyme modulator	857	5.00%
viral protein	7	0.00%
calcium-binding protein	63	0.40%
defense/immunity protein	107	0.60%
hydrolase	454	2.60%
transfer/carrier protein	248	1.40%
membrane traffic protein	321	1.90%
phosphatase	230	1.30%
transcription factor	2067	12.00%
chaperone	130	0.80%
cell junction protein	67	0.40%
surfactant	15	0.10%
structural protein	280	1.60%
storage protein	15	0.10%
receptor	1076	6.30%
isomerase	94	0.50%
unclassified	4061	23.60%
Total	17209	100.00%

Notice that there is no mention at all of any such category as "memory encoding proteins," nor any mention of "memory storage proteins" nor any mention of "memory retrieval proteins."  The 15 proteins listed as "storage proteins" have nothing to do with memory storage. The wikipedia.org article on storage proteins describes them merely as "biological reserves of metal ions and amino acids." 

If human episodic memories and human learned knowledge were to be translated into brain states, such a marvel of translation would require a massive number of proteins dedicated to such a task. But no such proteins have been discovered or identified. 

Let's imagine a woman named Joan who is dating a man named Jack. Jack claims that he's one of the nation's most successful corn farmers.  But one day Joan notices something very suspicious. At Jack's home there are no signs of any of the things that Jack would need to have to be a successful corn farmer. Joan notices that Jack's home merely has a modest back yard, and does not have any large field for growing corn. Joan notices that Jack does not own a tractor for planting corn or any other piece of farming equipment,  and that in Jack's garage there are no signs of anything like food storage bins or seed sacks.  Joan should suspect that Jack is not telling the truth when he claims to be one of the nation's most successful corn farmer.  

Jack is similar to neuroscientists, and Jack's home and land is similar to the human brain.  The human brain does not have the things it would need to have if the neural memory storage claims made by neuroscientists are correct.  If it were true that the human brain stored memories, the human brain would need to have all of the following things:

• Some specialized physical biology in the brain capable of writing memories.
• Some specialized physical biology in the brain capable of reading memories.
• Some specialized physical biology in the brain capable of reliably storing memories for decades.
• Some specialized physical biology in the brain capable of retrieving memories instantly based on the most fragmentary hints.
• A huge number of proteins in the human body dedicated to accomplishing the incredibly difficult task of translating human episodic memories and human learned information into neural states or synapse states.

None of these things exist in the human brain. So the claims of today's neuroscientists are very much like the claims of Jack, claims that are contrary to the physical facts. Just as Jack's home bears no resemblance to a very successful corn farm, the human brain bears no resemblance to a device for permanently storing and instantly retrieving learned information. 

Postscript: Below are some quotes:

• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).