Don't Think It's a Theory of Brain Memory, When It's Just Vacuous Hand-Waving

 A very important skill in life is the ability to distinguish vacuous hand-waving when it happens. Vacuous hand-waving is when someone tries to make it sound like he understands something he does not understand. Such hand-waving is often characterized by empty phrases and the use of jargon used merely to create some impression of understanding. 

To illustrate the use of vacuous hand-waving. let's consider the question: how do you store patient's information at a doctor's office? We can distinguish the kind of talk we might get from a woman named Jane (who understands very well how it is done), and a man named John (who does not understand how it is done). Jane might give an answer like this:

Jane:  We store medical records the old-fashioned way, rather than doing everything by computers. We use a separate manila folder for each patient. The top edge of the folder has a blank slot. In that slot, you write the patient's name: last name, followed by a comma, followed by a first name. Whenever a new patient comes in for the first time, you have to take a blank manila folder, and write the person's name on the folder tab, last name first. You also have to get the patient to fill out one of our forms marked "New Patient Form." That form asks for the patient's name, phone number, email, health insurance type, health insurance number, and so forth. That "New Patient Form" must be put in the patient's folder. Once the patient has seen the doctor, the doctor puts his notes in the patient's folder. That way we can always know what happened with any particular patient. The new patient's folder is then added to our file shelf, and you have to be careful to put that folder, in the correct spot, using alphabetical order.  The folders are sorted in alphabetical order, by last name. But what happens if a patient comes in and says he has already visited the doctor? Then we have to retrieve his file from our file shelf.  That's easy to do, because all of the files on our file shelf are kept in alphabetical order. So once we have retrieved the patient's folder on the day he has an appointment, we give that patient's folder to the doctor, so he can add new notes to the file. Later that day, we file the patient's folder back in our file shelf, being careful to put it in the correct spot, so that alphabetical order is maintained."

It is clear from this very detailed answer that Jane is aware of an exact system for storing patient data at a doctor's office, and how such a system can meet all of the requirements for storing patient's data at that office.  The system involves no fancy technology, but at least it is clear from her answer that Jane knows exactly how the system works. But let's imagine a different answer from John, an example that is merely a case of vacuous hand waving. 

John:  "So how would you store patient's records in a medical office? That would have to be done very carefully. It would cause all kinds of problems if the data for two different patients were mixed up. It is clear that such an office would involve some type of literary specification that would allow the exact details of a patient's treatment to be preserved. The real explanation for how the storage would work is: paper accumulation. As more and more patients were seen, more and more pieces of paper would accumulate. But paper cannot be very easily copied.  So an alternative would be an electronic accumulation of data, that would allow rapid digital backups." 

Nothing in John's answer indicates that he actually understands the specifics of how you could store medical records at a doctor's office. John's answer is an example of vacuous hand-waving. It sounds like he has no understanding of basic issues such as how to create a way of storing a new patient's data, how to avoid getting the records of two patients mixed up, how to add new treatments notes for a particular patient, how to easily find the data for a particular patient, and so forth. Jane's answer shows that she knew the answers to such questions, but John's answer makes us doubt that he has any understanding of such matters. 

Now, how do neuroscientists sound when they speculate about how a brain might store or retrieve memories? Do they sound like Jane, or do they sound like John?  They always sound like John. Dictionary.com defines "hand waving" as "insubstantial words, arguments, gestures, or actions used in an attempt to explain or persuade." When neuroscientists attempt to explain memory by referring to the brain, they offer only the most hazy hand-waving. Typically what occurs is the repetition of empty slogans and catchphrases.  

For example, a neuroscientist may claim that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving. We have many examples of the storage of knowledge in human-made things such as books, drawings, computer files, messages, handwritten notes and electronic data.  Such knowledge storage never occurs through strengthening.  Instead what typically happens when knowledge is stored in books,  messages, notes and computer files is that there occurs a repetition of symbolic tokens by some kind of writing process, and the use of some encoding system in which certain combinations of symbolic tokens represent particular words, things or ideas.  That is not strengthening.  

To give another example of empty hazy hand-waving, a neuroscientist may vaguely claim that memories are formed by "the formation of synaptic patterns." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving.  It is possible to store information by the use of pattern repetitions. For example, you might consider each word in the English language as a pixel pattern, and then say that each use of the word "dog" in a printed book is a pattern repetition. But synapses do not form any recognizable repeating patterns. And if synapses did form such patterns, there would need to exist some synapse pattern reader to read and recognize such patterns; but no such thing exists.  Instead of being anything that could consist of stable repeating patterns, synapses are unstable "shifting sands" kind of things. Synapses are built from proteins that have an average lifetime of only two weeks or less.  The maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years) is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in a synapse. So synapses cannot be the storage place of memories that can last reliably for so long. 

Another example of the empty hand-waving of neuroscientists in regard to memory can be found in the paper here, entitled "Why not connectomics?" We have this example of conceptually empty hand-waving about memory storage:

"Brains can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer. The physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known, but it seems likely to us that they are embodied in the same way intrinsic behaviors (such as reflexes) are: that is, in the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells. In this view, experience alters connections between nerve cells to record a memory for later recall. Both the sensory experience that lays down a memory and its later recall are indeed trains of action potentials, but in-between, and persisting for long periods, is a stable physical structural entity that holds that memory. In this sense, a map of all the things the brain has put to memory is found in the structure—the connectional map."

The first sentence is groundless dogma. There is no evidence that brains "can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer."  There is merely the fact that humans can have experiences and learn skills that they remember for decades.  The beginning of the second sentence is a confession that there is no understanding of how such a brain storage of memories can happen. The authors confess that "the physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known,"  The claim that memories are stored by "the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells" is empty hand-waving, and the speculation stated is unbelievable. No one who has ever studied the connections between nerve cells (neurons) has ever seen anything like some symbolic pattern that could encode a record of human experiences or human learned skills or learned conceptual knowledge such as school learning.  The brain does not have any such thing as a connection pattern reader that could read and interpret such patterns if they existed. 

Another example of utterly vacuous hand-waving by a neuroscientist can be found on the page here, where we have a neuroscientist state, "That is what learning is – forming new connections between neurons that didn’t exist before." You do not explain a storage of information by imagining new synapses forming between neurons.  A forming of new synapses between neurons is a structural effect that would require many minutes or hours, but humans can learn new things instantly. If you hear from a police officer that your child or spouse or father has died, you do not have wait for new connections to form between neurons (which would take hours). Instead you instantly form a permanent new memory of that very important fact.  

I had a medical incident this Friday, from which I have recovered.  I reported to an emergency room and reported symptoms that a good physician should have been able to diagnosis and treat by the simple use of a particular liquid. My case was bungled by some physician who sent some completely unsuitable medication to my pharmacist. "You're being discharged" was used as a phrase meaning "we don't know what your issue is,  so get out of here." The people were all very nice, but I was reminded again how biomedical authorities may blunder.

Why Memory Reactivation Cannot Explain Memories Lasting Decades

Neuroscientists typically claim that memories are stored in synapses, but this claim makes no sense. Very long-term memories cannot be stored in synapses, because synapses don't last long enough. Below is a quote from a scientific paper:

"A quantitative value has been attached to the synaptic turnover rate by Stettler et al (2006), who examined the appearance and disappearance of axonal boutons in the intact visual cortex in monkeys.. and found the turnover rate to be 7% per week which would give the average synapse a lifetime of a little over 3 months."

You can read Stettler's paper here. A 2019 paper documents a 16-day examination of synapses, finding "the dataset contained n = 320 stable synapses, n = 163 eliminated synapses and n = 134 formed synapses."  That's about a 33% disappearance rate over a course of 16 days, suggesting an average synapse lifetime of less than three months.

You can google for “synaptic turnover rate” for more information. We cannot believe that synapses can store-long memories for 50 years if synapses only have an average lifetime of about 3 months. The paper here says the half-life of synapses is "from days to months."

Synapses often protrude out of bump-like structures on dendrites called dendritic spines. But those spines have lifetimes of less than 2 years.  Dendritic spines last no more than about a month in the hippocampus, and less than two years in the cortex. This study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus last for only about 30 days. This study found that dendritic spines in the hippocampus have a turnover of about 40% each 4 days. This 2002 study found that a subgroup of dendritic spines in the cortex of mice brains (the more long-lasting subgroup) have a half-life of only 120 days. A paper on dendritic spines in the neocortex says, "Spines that appear and persist are rare." While a 2009 paper tried to insinuate a link between dendritic spines and memory, its data showed how unstable dendritic spines are.  Speaking of dendritic spines in the cortex, the paper found that "most daily formed spines have an average lifetime of ~1.5 days and a small fraction have an average lifetime of ~1–2 months," and told us that the fraction of dendritic spines lasting for more than a year was less than 1 percent. A 2018 paper has a graph showing a 5-day "survival fraction" of only about 30% for dendritic spines in the cortex.  A 2014 paper found that only 3% of new spines in the cortex persist for more than 22 days. Speaking of dendritic spines, a 2007 paper says, "Most spines that appear in adult animals are transient, and the addition of stable spines and synapses is rare." A 2016 paper found a dendritic spine turnover rate in the neocortex of 4% every 2 days. A 2018 paper found only about 30% of new and existing dendritic spines in the cortex remaining after 16 days (Figure 4 in the paper). 

Furthermore, it is known that the proteins existing between the two knobs of the synapse (the very proteins involved in synapse strengthening) are very short-lived, having average lifetimes of no more than a few days. A graduate student studying memory states it like this:

"It’s long been thought that memories are maintained by the strengthening of synapses, but we know that the proteins involved in that strengthening are very unstable. They turn over on the scale of hours to, at most, a few days."

A scientific paper states the same thing:

"Experience-dependent behavioral memories can last a lifetime, whereas even a long-lived protein or mRNA molecule has a half-life of around 24 hrs. Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week."

The paper cited above also states this (page 6):

"The mutually opposing effects of LTP and LTD further add to the eventual disappearance of the memory maintained in the form of synaptic strengths. Successive events of LTP and LTD, occurring in diverse and unrelated contexts, counteract and overwrite each other and will, as time goes by, tend to obliterate old patterns of synaptic weights, covering them with layers of new ones. Once again, we are led to the conclusion that the pattern of synaptic strengths cannot be relied upon to preserve, for instance, childhood memories."

Research on the lifetime of synapse proteins is in the June 2018 paper “Local and global influences on protein turnover in neurons and glia.” The paper starts out by noting that one earlier 2010 study found that the average half-life of brain proteins was about 9 days, and that a 2013 study found that the average half-life of brain proteins was about 5 days. The study then notes in Figure 3 that the average half-life of a synapse protein is only about 5 days, and that all of the main types of brain proteins (such as nucleus, mitochondrion, etc.) have half-lives of 15 days or less.  The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days). 

The paper here states, "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights."

When you think about synapses, visualize the edge of a seashore. Just as writing in the sand is a completely unstable way to store information, long-term information cannot be held in synapses. The proteins in between the synapses are turning over very rapidly (lasting no longer than about a week), and the entire synapse is replaced every few months.

Well aware of some of the difficulties discussed above, neuroscientists sometimes speculate that maybe the idea of memory reactivation can explain how people can remember things for so long.  It is sometimes suggested that maybe a person can remember something for decades because he keeps reactivating the memory at periodic intervals, causing the old memory to be refreshed. So, for example:

• It might be that if an old man never thought of his first boyhood sweetheart, he might be unable to remember that person. But maybe every year that man thought of his boyhood sweetheart, causing the old memory to be periodically refreshed and reactivated. 
• It might be that if an old man never read again some fact he learned in high school such as the fact of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, he might have forgotten such a fact long ago. But maybe what happens is that every year the man reads some mention of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which causes the old memory to become refreshed and reactivated. 
• An old man might remember the meaning of rarely-used words he learned as a boy, because he continues to speak those words occasionally or occasionally reads the words or hears the words, causing his memory of their meaning to become refreshed or reactivated. 

However, this reactivation theory does not work to explain the marvel of the lifelong preservation of memories. The fact is that even without memory reactivation, people can remember things for decades (as long as 50 or 60 years), even trivial things. I will now cite personal observations and experimental data which shows the truth of my claim in the previous sentence. 

A scientific study by Harry Bahrick was entitled “Semantic memory content in permastore: Fifty years of memory for Spanish learned in school.” It showed that “large portions of the originally acquired information remain accessible for over 50 years in spite of the fact the information is not used or rehearsed.” The same researcher tested a large number of subjects to find out how well they could recall the faces of high school classmates, and found very substantial recall even with a group that had graduated 47 years ago. Bahrick reported the following:

"Subjects are able to identify about 90% of the names and faces of the names of their classes at graduation. The visual information is retained virtually unimpaired for at least 35 years...Free-recall probability does not diminish over 50 yr for names of classmates assigned to one or more of the Relationship Categories A through F."

The scientific paper "Extremely long-term memory and familiarity after 12 years" documents an ability of some people to remember trivial sensory experiences after many years, experiences they should have forgotten under neural theories of human memory. In 2016 the study authors rounded up 25 subjects who had been briefly exposed to some very forgettable images in a scientific experiment done between eight and fourteen years earlier: thumbnail-sized images such as a little drawing of a coffee cup and a little drawing of a hen.  The subjects were tested with a set of images, half of which were the original images, and half of which were decoy images designed to be similar to the original images. The subjects were asked to guess whether or not they had seen the images before, when they were tested many years earlier. The authors expected the subjects to make guesses no more accurate than chance. But they found that the subjects were able to guess with about 55% accuracy.  We read this:

"In this study we found that our group of test participants was able to recognize simple colored pictures seen for a few seconds between eight and 14 years earlier. Our best performer, who had been exposed to the pictures at most three times, was able to identify 15 pictures more than the 84 pictures expected by chance. Note that no instruction to learn the stimuli was ever given to the subjects, even at initial encoding, which makes this performance even more remarkable." 

While researching tests of very long-term memory, I found a 1989 scientific paper ("On the Course of Forgetting in Very Long-Term Memory") on an interesting experiment that tested people by asking which of four titles was an actual title of a TV show. All of the actual TV shows were ones that only ran for one year. This is a good technique for testing very old memories never reactivated, because in the 1970's and 1980's in the US if a TV show ran for only one year it would almost never be shown in other years, and there would tend to be no references to it in popular culture. (This was before services such as Netflix, which might allow a program running only one year to be re-watched by many.)  Here is an example of some of the questions asked to the experiment's subjects:

1974

 Which of the following was a T.V. show? (a) Mandrake, (b) Shipmates (c) Private Nelson, (d) Lucas Tanner 

1978

 Which of the following was a T.V. show? (a) Gaslight Alley, (b) Cutting Corners (c) Black Knight, (d) Kaz 

1981

 Which of the following was a T.V. show? (a) Dateline Miami, (b) The Conductor (c) Discovery, (d) McClaine 's Law 

In these tests the tested subjects (231 in all) scored as shown below (25% is the result expected by chance, if no recall occurred).

We see here a good retention of trivial information that was learned between 7 and 15 years ago, with people scoring about 60% correctly, much higher than the 25% expected by chance. There would have been no reactivation of this trivial information. In the 1970's and 1980's if a TV series ran only one year, it was almost never mentioned again in the press, and would not appear on TV again. 

In my case in late August, 2025 not only did I recall that Lucas Tanner was an old TV show, but I also recalled the name of the show's star (David Hartman), and that the show was about a teacher.  At the time I had not watched this 1974-1975  show or read or heard any mention of this show in the past 50 years, nor had I ever thought about the show in the past 50 years. Similarly, in November 2025 I was watching a video about unsuccessful TV shows from the year 1974. There was a mention of the TV show "Get Christie Love," which was cancelled after a single year. I recalled that the star was Teresa Graves. Graves basically had no presence in TV or movies after 1975, and in 1983 retired from show business. At the time I recalled her name (November 2025), I had not watched this 1974-1975  show or read or heard any mention of this show or Graves in the past 50 years, nor had I ever thought about the show or Graves in the past 50 years.

In a similar vein, in the year 2025 I was watching a video on the most unpopular TV shows of 1973-1974. As soon as they mentioned the show The New Perry Mason, I remembered the star of the show was Monte Markham.  The show ran for only 15 episodes, and was never run in repeats after 1974, with there being virtually no mentions of it in the press since about that year. When the video mentioned  the TV show Adam's Rib without showing any of its actors, I remembered that it starred Blythe Danner and a tall blonde person named Ken, who played Thomas Jefferson in the movie 1776. I remembered both of their faces well. I was right about all of those details. The male actor's name was Ken Howard.  The TV show Adam's Rib ran for only 13 episodes, and never ran in repeats after 1974. When the same video mentioned the TV show Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice, I remembered that one of the stars was a short red-haired actress with the last name of Gillette. I was correct. The show ran for only 12 episodes in 1973, and never was seen after then. 

Similarly, while watching in 2025 one of these videos about the least popular TV shows from long ago, I saw a screen merely listing a title of It's About Time, a series that ran from 1966 to 1967, and was never syndicated after then. I correctly remembered that the show was about astronauts who traveled back in time into the Stone Age. I also remembered the melody and most of the first two lines of the show's theme song, remembering that it went like this: "It's about time, it's about space, __ __ __ __ __ __ __ place." In 2025 I had an equally good recollection of the melody and lyrics of the theme song of the 1965 TV series Hank, cancelled after a single season. 

Similarly, while watching in 2025 one of these videos about the least successful TV shows of 1970, there was mention of a show about young people in the American Revolutionary War. I instantly remembered the show was called "The Young Rebels." The show was canceled after 15 episodes. I am rather sure that there was never any reactivation of any memory involving the show, the show being basically unmentioned since 1970. 

In December 2025 I had a dream of Meredith MacCrae, in which she stated, "Mark, this is Meredith MacCrae." After awaking, I lay in bed trying to place the name. Soon I recalled that she had been in the 1960's TV show Petticoat Junction, one I had not watched in more than 50 years (and probably not heard mentioned substantively in more than 50 years). An internet search confirmed my recollection. I had not thought of Meredith in more than 50 years, and the press hardly mentioned her after the early 1970's. 

A test an old person can try is to remember some street names in cities or towns he lived in very long ago. Trying this test I correctly remembered the street name of a school that my children last attended 16 years ago, in a small town we moved away from 16 years ago. I had no sensory experiences refreshing the memory of this street name during the past 16 years, and I cannot recall ever thinking of the address in the past 16 years. Similarly, I remembered an avenue near my senior high school in a major city, an avenue with a name I have not remembered in about 50 years. 

So it simply is not true that to remember something for decades, you need  periodic reactivations every few years that recharge or reactivate a memory that won't last years without being strengthened.  You can learn trivial little things and remember them decades later, as much as 50 years later, even with no reactivations of the memory. 

An experience I had shortly before writing this post further showed this. Someone in my family had recently got a teapot, which caused me to recall the beginning of a children's song I had heard only a few times, only in a house I have not lived in for about 25 years. I remembered the first line: "I'm a little teapot, short and stout." I tried to remember the second line, but at first I could not. Later I remembered both of the first two lines of the song I had not heard or sung or remembered in about 25 years:

I'm a little teapot, short and stout

Here is my handle, here is my spout

In 2025 (as I noted at the end of the post here) I had a recollection which proved the ability of the mind to recall very old memories that have not been recalled in 50 years. For some reason I recalled a book I had read about 50 years ago, and never since: the science fiction book "Galaxies Like Grains of Sand" by Brian Aldiss. I remembered some lines from the book. I wrote them down on paper like this:

"The mirror of the past lies shattered. The fragments you hold in your hand."

After I wrote this recollection of something I had not read, thought of or heard quoted in fifty years, I borrowed the book on www.archive.org.  I see that the lines were these (almost exactly as I remembered them)

"The long mirror of the past is shattered...Only a few fragments are left, and these you hold in your hand." 

Below is a quote on the same topic from an earlier post discussing why brains cannot be the storage place of very old memories:

"I know for a fact that memories can persist for 50 years, without rehearsal. Recently I was trying to recall all kinds of details from my childhood, and recalled the names of persons I hadn't thought about for decades, as well as a Christmas incident I hadn't thought of for 50 years (I confirmed my recollection by asking my older brother about it). ...Upon looking through a list of old children shows from the 1960's, I saw the title 'Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har,' which ran from 1962 to 1963 (and was not syndicated in repeats, to the best of my knowledge). I then immediately sung part of the melody of the very catchy theme song, which I hadn't heard in 53 years. I then looked up a clip on a youtube.com, and verified that my recall was exactly correct."

One day in 2025 while lying in bed there strangely popped into my mind "out of nowhere" the name Toby Tyler, which I remembered was some circus movie I had seen as a child, in a theater. Looking up the name, I found it was the title of a circus movie that came out in 1960 (the title was Toby Tyler, or 10 Weeks With a Circus). I never saw the movie in a theater or on TV after 1960, and I never heard any mention of it on TV or in anything I ever read. Here we have an example of the remembering of a trivial memory from 65 years ago, a memory that was never reactivated after 1960. 

In late 2025 I was watching a Youtube.com video about the 10 least popular television shows of 1966.  I performed these wonders of memory recall relating to TV shows or TV personalities I have not seen or heard mentioned in about 60 years or more:

(1) Upon hearing the name of the 1966 TV show "Captain Nice" (canceled after a single season), I recalled its star was William Daniels. 

(2) Upon seeing an unlabeled photo of Judy Carne (an actress I have not seen on TV in 60 years and probably not heard mentioned in 60 years), I instantly identified her as Judy Carne. 

(3) Hearing mention of an "Occasional Wife" TV show I once watched in 1966, and seeing an unidentified image of its star, I first guessed the person's name as William Calley. Later (still having heard no mention of the star's name) I thought to myself something like, "No, I think it was maybe Michael Calley." The actor (who did no famous work after 1966) was named Michael Callen, a name identical to my final guess, except for a single character. 

Later I watched a YouTube video of the least popular TV shows of 1969. All of the shows mentioned were cancelled after one year or less, and none ever appeared in repeats after 1970. Hearing the name of the show "My World and Welcome To It," I remembered exactly the star was the obscure actor William Windom.  I also remembered that the main character's daughter would wear a noticeable orthodontic retainer.  The video soon confirmed that these 55-year-old memories were correct.  

In late 2025 I read an article claiming that the 1960's song "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" was the worst song of the 1960's. Before playing a video of the song, I tried to recall the song, which I had not heard or recalled in more than 30 years. I successfully recalled the lyrics and melody of the first line of the song ("Yummy, yummy, yummy I got love in my tummy"), and also recalled the lyrics and melody of the song's middle refrain ("Ooh, love to hold you, ooh, love to kiss you"). 

While watching some of the 2026 Olympics with my daughters, I told them about how the show "The Wide, Wide of Sports" was a fixture of Saturday afternoon television during my youth. I remembered some words from the opening of this show which ran for many years, and ended in 1998, without ever running in repeats after that year. The words were: "Spanning the globe...the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat." I was quite certain that these were the exact words used in the opening of this show that I had not seen in 28 years. A search for the show's opening on Youtube.com showed my memory was correct: those were the exact words. I also remembered (before watching the YouTube clip) that at the moment the narrator mentioned "the agony of defeat" there was a clip of a skier tumbling. Watching the clip confirmed this visual memory was correct. These was a memory I had not thought about or mentioned in more than 28 years.  

I do not in general have memory good enough to be called photographic. But in May 2026 one of my daughters showed me a photo of a building with a rooftop lawn, and this triggered the memory of a book illustration I had seen 61 years ago. It was an artist's depiction of a base on Mars. In my memory I could see the illustration almost as if the book illustration lay before me. I sharply recalled the image of buildings underneath a glass dome, with the buildings having lawns on their roofs. I even correctly recalled the book's author (Arthur C. Clarke) and the book's title ("The Exploration of Space").  Checking on www.archive.org, I found the illustration was just exactly as I remembered it. You can see the illustration here. I may have looked at the book in a library years after seeing the book as a boy, but when I had this recollection I had not seen the book in at least about 40 years. 

Collectively all of these examples in this post show it is false that remembering something for decades requires periodic reactivations of the memory. Many people can remember trivial things for 30, 40 or 50 years, without any reactivations of the memory. Such abilities cannot be explained through any credible theory of brain activity, given the very high molecular turnover and synaptic turnover in the brain. 

Postscript: Another type of memory test is one in which you are shown photos you have never seen of TV actresses or actors well-known only decades ago, and asked to identify them, with the photo typically being from many decades ago, before the person became famous. Trying that with the video here, I successfully identified head portrait photos I had never seen of Jacelyn Smith and Angela Lansbury, taken from long before they became famous. I haven't watched either of these actresses on TV in several decades. Shown a photo of Sharon Gless from quite a few decades ago, before her first acting success, I identified her as the co-star of "Cagney and Lacey," even though the show was discontinued in 1989, and I almost never watched it and never saw it in repeats, and cannot remember seeing any other acting work of Gless. Trying the similar video here, and shown a head portrait photo I had never seen of Penny Marshall at about age 20, about a decade before she became famous, and with a different hair color than she had in her successful TV show "Laverne and Shirley" (1976 to 1983), I correctly identified it as a photo of Penny Marshall (someone I have never watched on TV in decades). Ditto for her co-star Cindy Marshall. 

Trying the similar video here, and shown a head portrait I had never seen of Stefanie Powers from years before her first acting success, I correctly identified her as Stefanie Powers, also identifying her first major role as the lead role in "The Girl from U.N,C.L,E" in the 1960's (the show ran only for one season), as well as identifying her second series ("Hart to Hart") which ran from 1979 to 1984. I also recognized a portrait of Rhea Perlman dating from about 14 years before her first acting success. I haven't seen her in anything for several decades. I performed a similar recognition (using a "way before she became famous" photo) of Isabel Sanford, identifying her as the lead actress in the TV show "The Jeffersons," a show I rarely watched, which stopped running in 1985. 

In May 2026 while brushing my teeth, I tried to remember cartoon characters I had seen as a boy. One of the characters was one I remembered as "Deputy Dawg." I tried to remember what the character looked like. I remembered four different features of his appearance: that he was a dog with floppy ears, that he wore a hat, that he wore a vest, and that on his vest was a sheriff's star (or police officer's star). Doing a visual image search, I confirmed that all four of my appearance recollections were correct. I had also correctly remembered the character's name, with its unusual misspelling.  The character of Deputy Dawg appeared in a cartoon TV series between 1959 and 1964, a series with an audience target of small children.  There were repeats up until 1972, but I never would have seen the character on TV after about 1967, around the time I started to stop watching all cartoon TV shows. To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen the character anywhere after 1970.  The ability of me to remember so well the character's name and appearance shows that memories can stay accurate for 50+ years, without any reactivations.  

Similarly, in 2026 I started to watch on youtube.com the opening credit sequence of the TV series Room 222, a series I had watched many times in my youth. The series ended in 1974, and I can never recall seeing it in repeats.  Before seeing the appearance of Karen Valentine in the opening credit sequence, I tried to remember what that looked like. I slowly and dimly remembered that the opening credit sequence showed her in a doorway, smiling broadly. My recollection of a sequence I had not seen in more than 50 years was correct. In the sequence she smiles broadly while standing for a moment in the entrance doorway of a bus. 

Similarly, in 2026 I saw a color TV scene (from the rather recent TV series Heroes) in which someone was holding a diamond. Very strangely this caused me to remember a black-and-white fictional TV scene I have not seen or thought of in more than 60 years, a scene in which Superman crushed a piece of coal to turn it into a diamond. A search on youtube.com confirmed that my recollection from 60+ years ago was correct. The scene is below. Clearly, memories never reactivated can persist for 60 years. 

In the year 2026 for some reason I decided to play on my computer a production of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor on youtube.com. I had not watched any opera by Donizetti in decades. After hearing a few notes of the love duet at the end of Act I, I stopped the video and recalled the full melody, which I have not heard or "played in my mind" for many years. As it was playing, I tried to remember what I could recall about Donizetti. I recalled correctly that he was the composer of Don Pasquale, an opera I last listened to more than 35 years ago. I correctly recalled that he was the composer of an opera about a love potion, one including the often sung aria Una Furtiva Lacrima. I failed to remember the Italian name of the opera, (L'Elisir d'Amore) but did correctly remember the English name of the opera (The Love Potion). I correctly recalled that the opera (which I had not seen or thought about in decades) had a scene in which a shady salesman (with a name beginning with "Dul") arrived in a kind of covered wagon. I recalled some elements of the plot. I also recalled a conversation I had more than 38 years ago with a woman I met on only one day, with the topic being the love potion opera by Donizetti. I also recalled a soprano I had once met more than 38 years ago, who said that the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor was one of her strongest roles. These were mostly accurate recollections of things I had not thought about or remembered for decades, and things I had not been reminded of in decades. 

Newspaper Accounts of Memory Marvels (Part 2)

 The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be memorized and things can be recalled. There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human memory performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability and capacity of the best cases of human mental performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to ever do, or humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  In part 1 of this post, I gave many newspaper clips giving examples of such exceptional human memory performance. Let us now look at some more of such newspaper clips. 

Below is part of an 1886 newspaper that describes what seems like what is now called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also called hyperthymesia. 

The account can be read below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85032490/1886-09-02/ed-1/seq-7/

The source of the account below is the W. D. Henkle January, 1871 article here, "Remarkable Cases of Memory," which documents the abilities of Daniel McCartney in very great detail, giving transcripts of interviews with him. I will have a post on this case in the next few months. 

On the same 1886 page shown above we can read the account below, which tells of a man with an extraordinary ability to remember architectural details. The case reminds you of the modern case of Stephen Wiltshire:

Later on the same page, we read of these memory marvels. The reference to "almost the whole of Horace, Virgil, Homer, Cicero and Livy" refers to a set of books with a totality of many thousands of pages. The Aeneid referred to is a book of 9883 lines. 

 

The reference to Porson is a reference to Richard Porson (1759 -1808). A web page says this about him:

"Their author [Porson] gives the impression of knowing every page of the Christian fathers [e.g. Augustine, Aquinas] as if they were indexed and capable of flashing up before him on a computer screen whenever needed. And in a manner of speaking they were. Anecdotes from several different sources attest to what we should nowadays call his photographic memory, and to that memory was committed not only classical and post-classical Greek and Latin literature but a wealth of English and some French literature as well, to which his own writings contain a host of often fleeting allusions."

Another web page says this about Richard Porson:

"It was here that his uncanny powers of memory came into full voice: one person heard him declaim an ode of Pindar in Greek, and then a whole act of Samuel Foote’s farce The Mayor of Garratt (1763), each without error. ...Porson could be presented briefly with a book, read a couple of pages from memory, and then do so backwards – almost without error."

We read in one of the pages cited above a reference to Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti (17 September 1774 – 15 March 1849), who was famed for his ability to speak more than 30 different languages.  Of course, any such ability would require the most prodigious memory very far beyond that of the average person. 

A 1905 news article tells of a man who only developed amazing powers of memory after a severe brain injury (the man was named J. A. Bottle, or W. J. M. Bottle, but used a stage name of Datas):

You can read the full story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058130/1905-11-27/ed-1/seq-1/

The newspaper account here describes the same person. We read that this man widely called a "human encyclopedia" actually suffered a head injury before his stage career began:

This type of acquisition of previously absent mental powers after a traumatic injury (inexplicable under the idea that brains make minds) is sometimes called acquired savant syndrome. At the link here is an article giving another example: " At age ten, Orlando Serrell was struck on the left side of his head with a baseball; he is able to clearly remember the weather and details about his personal activities for every day since that accident (Hughes 2010, 149)." 

A 1913 newspaper article tells us of a case of a man with photographic memory:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87078082/1913-08-19/ed-1/seq-3/

The same article makes the statements below. We have a reference to "the whole of Tacitus," which means The Annals consisting of more than 500 pages each having about 400 words each, and also additional works consisting of hundreds of other pages. The reference to the Metaphysics of Aristotle refers to a book of more than 300 pages, each with about 400 words.  The Aeneid referred to has 9883 lines. The Iliad referred to has 15,693 lines. 

The account below appeared in 1905:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94056446/1905-06-02/ed-1/seq-4/

Below is an obituary of the prodigy called Blind Tom. The reported ability to replay any composition after having heard it only once is an ability known to exist in today's world, having been demonstrated repeatedly by Derek Paravicini. 

You can read the full account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86090233/1908-07-09/ed-1/seq-8/

Large Neuron Groups Cannot Be Sequentially Traversed, So Brains Cannot Store Complex Learned Information

 Humans store information in many different ways, but there is a common element in almost every way that data is stored and retrieved: the element of sequential traversal. Sequential traversal means some proceeding from a current reading position to the next reading position. 

Sequential Traversal: A Crucial Aspect of Most Types of Information Retrieval

Let us look at some examples of how sequential traversal is going on in various types of information storage and information retrieval. A simple example is a book. A book is physically arranged in a way to allow a sequential traversal of its words, On a particular page, we see letters and words arranged in a particular sequence, so that the reader can read from the top left of a page to the bottom right of the page. The reader turns the pages to go from a page on the right to the next page, which is another type of sequential traversal.  The arrangement that allows sequential traversal is a crucial aspect allowing the book's information to be read.  A book would be unreadable if all of it words were just lying as tiny scraps of paper in a heap in a can the size of a large trash can. Under such an arrangement, there could be no sequential traversal, and reading the book would be impossible. 

A web page also depends crucially on sequential traversal.  When you go to a web page you see words arranged in a sequential order. You read the web page as someone would read a page of a book, from the top left to the bottom right. If the words on the page were in some random order, you could not read the page. 

Sequential traversal is also a key element of movies. When you see a movie in a movie theater, you are seeing a series of individual photos (called frames) which are sequentially displayed at a rate of 24 photos or frames per second. The physical design of the roll of film and the film projector guarantee that the frames of the movie are displayed in a particular sequential order.  There occurs sequential traversal at a steady rate, from the time the movie begins to the time the movie ends. 

Something very similar is going on when a video is displayed on a computer. The video actually consists of a series of photos, with the total number of photos being equal to about the length of the video in seconds multiplied by 24. You can use a utility such as ffmpeg to extract all of the individual photos that make up a video. When you press the Play button to play a video, there occurs sequential traversal from the beginning of the video to the end. You can stop the sequential traversal by pressing the Pause button. 

When you watch something on television, it is usually an affair of sequential traversal.  A typical TV show that is not "live" is made from a tape that is a series of photos collected by a TV camera photographing at about 24 times per second.  When a TV station plays a program at a scheduled date, a stored series of images and sounds is sequentially traversed and broadcast.  

When you access some TV show "on demand," the same sequential traversal is occurring. A live TV broadcast may not involve such a sequential traversal. There may be a continuous stream of images and sounds directly from some TV camera, without the data ever being first stored and then sequentially retrieved. But if such a broadcast is never taped, then it does not qualify as a retrieval of stored information. So such live TV broadcasts do not discredit my claim that almost all retrieval of stored information requires sequential traversal. 

On your computer you may retrieve particular documents and images. When that happens, it is very much a case of sequential traversal. When you retrieve from the hard drive of your computer some text document that you or someone else wrote, your computer finds some particular start position, and then sequentially traverses until the end of the document is reached. When you retrieve some image from your computer, something similar goes on. Typically the computer reads from some starting position on the hard drive, and then sequentially traverses the file, reading a stream of pixels, until the end of the file is reached. Rather than displaying that stream of pixels as a single line (something that would be too long to fit on your computer screen), you see the long series of pixels displayed using a rule such as "when you have filled up a line of 400 pixels, move down one line, and to the left edge, and then resume writing pixels from there." 

Sequential traversal also occurs in the retrieval of musical information.  The now-outdated technology of vinyl records used sequential traversal. To play a 33 rpm album from beginning to end, you would place the needle on a spot near the edge of the album, and the record player would rotate around and around in a circle. Sequential traversal would occur until the end of the album was reached. 

Sequential traversal would also occur when cassette tapes were played. The tape would be placed in a machine that would cause the tape to slowly move, and as that happened the tape would be sequentially traversed. 

In a live music performance such as the performance of a symphony or opera, there also occurs sequential traversal. A musical score is printed in a book or publication placed in front of musicians, and the musicians sequentially traverse such a manuscript, acting like readers of a book, and turning the pages. 

Sequential traversal was a key aspect of the videotapes that were used for decades to store television shows. A VCR tape would be wound like the thread wound around a spool.  As the tape played, the units at the center of the tape would be rotated, causing a sequential traversal of the tape in front of some reading unit. Once a tape had been played to its end, someone would need to rewind to its beginning so that the tape be watched again. So stores renting videotapes had a slogan of "be kind and rewind."

In the world of computer programming, the retrieval of data almost everywhere requires sequential traversal. For example:

(1) A basic type of data structure in computer programming is an array, which has all data stored in a contiguous series  Such a structure is sequentially traversed through operations such as "for" loops, which move sequentially from the first position in the array to the last position in the array. 

(2) Another very common data structure in computer programming is called a linked list. The data in a linked list may be discontinuous, with the data scattered around in different positions.  But each position must have a particular position.  The data in a linked list is sequentially traversed by using a programming loop. Even though the data is scattered, the whole list can be retrieved because each node in the list has the address of the next node in the list. 

In the world of biology, we know for sure of one case in which data is retrieved: the case of DNA. A DNA molecule has a linear structure that allows sequential retrieval, a structure that has been compared to a spiral staircase.  We know that when data is read from a DNA molecule, it is very much a case of sequential traversal, moving in one direction from one position in the molecule to another position further down the line in the same direction. 

Can we think of any kind of data storage and retrieval that does not involve sequential traversal?  There are a few. For example, a painter can paint a picture in a way that does not involve sequential traversal. Rather than moving in a "top to down, and left to right" manner, an artist can fill in features of the painting in a random order. And when someone looks at the picture, he can take it all in a single glance, rather than scanning the picture from top to bottom.  But cases such as these (involving data storage and retrieval without sequential traversal) are relatively rare compared to cases of data storage and retrieval using sequential traversal; and such cases involving no sequential traversal require very specific tools such as paint, a paintbrush and a canvas, tools that are not available in the brain. 

Why Large Neuron Groups Cannot Be Sequentially Traversed

So now that we have seen that almost all data storage and retrieval involves sequential traversal, we should consider the very important question: does the human brain have any physical architecture that might allow complex learned information to be stored and retrieved using sequential traversal?  The answer is: no, it does not. 

I could schematically depict a set of neurons with a visual like the one below. The little circles represent individual neurons. The diagram greatly understates the number of connections between individual neurons. It has been estimated that the average neuron has a synaptic connection to about 1000 other neurons. 

Consider the recall of sequential information. Imagine you are trying to recall a series of words. We might imagine that individual parts of the sequence are stored in individual neurons – perhaps something a little like the schematic visual below. 

But how could you recall the sequence in its correct order? Nerve cells are scattered throughout three dimensional space, with each neuron having many connections to other neurons (about 1000, according to many estimates). If information were stored in nerve cells, there would seem to be no way for a sequence to be stored in a way that would allow a sequential recall involving a long series, such as happens when an actor playing Hamlet recalls all of his many lines in the correct order. We can't imagine the brain simply going from one neuron to the “next” neuron to retrieve a sequence of information. This is because neurons don't exist in chains in which a particular neuron has a “next” neuron. Each neuron is connected to very many other neurons.

Below we see a map of Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.

 

Once your car gets on Dupont Circle, there is no “next” place to go. You've reached an interchange in which there are 10 roads feeding out of the circular interchange. Similarly, in the photos below we see neurons. Each one of the parts coming out of the nerve cell is a path that can be traversed from this nerve cell. Such an arrangement should not offer any support for storing a sequence of information such as the lines in a play or the notes in a song. There's no “next” route leading from one neuron to the next neuron. Every neuron is like Dupont Circle, except that there are even more paths leading out of the typical neuron.

Here are some shots from the page here (part of the site here) which allows you to rotate in 3D some neurons that had their structure mapped. We see in the first image seven dendrites branching out from the body of a neuron; and those dendrites each branch out into multiple branches, so that there is a connection between each neuron and many other neurons. 

With such an arrangement there is no possibility of sequential traversal across a long sequence of neurons. There's no “next” route leading from one neuron to the next neuron. There are very many pathways leading from each neuron to some other neuron.  A neuron will typically have 5-7 main dendrites leading out of it, but those each branch out into many other other branches, as illustrated below, with very many of those dendrites connecting to other neurons. 

As I indicated before, for a sequential traversal to occur, it is not necessary for there to be a traversal of storage positions that are contiguous in space. There are data structures such as linked lists that allow long series to be sequentially retrieved even though the data may be in scattered positions that are not physically contiguous.  But such data structures not requiring contiguous positioning absolutely require that the scattered data elements have addresses. And there are no addresses in the brain. Neurons do not have neuron numbers or position coordinates or anything like addresses. Therefore you cannot have in the brain anything like a linked list that can be sequentially traversed to retrieve information from a series of neurons that are not contiguous. Linked lists require addresses for each of the nodes in the list, but neurons have no addresses. 

We can imagine a structure of some brain of an extraterrestrial creature, one that might support sequential traversal. Such an extraterrestrial's brain might have very many chains like the one below, with the circles being something like cells or neurons. The chains might be very long. It might then be possible for stored information to be sequentially traversed, by some process by which a cursor or reading unit travels along the chain. 

This is NOT how neurons are arranged in the brain

But the human has no such structure. Instead of each neuron having a single "next neuron" as the next link in a chain pointing in one direction, every neuron has very many "next neurons" located in all different directions, as the photos above suggest. Under such an arrangement there can be no sequential traversal. 

There is another reason why large groups of neurons cannot be sequentially traversed.  Sequential traversal requires some type of physical movement action that causes a particular position to temporarily become the current position. But in a brain no such thing can happen. There is no possibility of any neuron becoming the "current neuron" in an act of sequential traversal. 

Below is a table showing some of the ways in which the current reading position changes in devices in which sequential traversal occurs:

Type of sequential traversal device	What causes the current reading position to change	Is this cause microscopic?
33 RPM vinyl record and a record player	The record rotates in a circle, causing the needle's position to change	No
Cassette audio tape and cassette player	The spools of the tape player turn around in a circle, causing the part of the tape next to the reader to change continually	No
Video tape and VCR	The spools of the tape player turn around in a circle, causing the part of the tape next to the reader to change continually	No
Book	The reader's eyes move left to right, and to the next line when the end of each line is reached. Also the reader uses his finger to turn the page when the end of a page is reached.	No
Movie and film projector	The film projector causes the film spool to turn in a circle, which causes the part of the film next to the light to continually change	No
Computer hard drive	The hard drive rotates in a circle, and also the read/write head may move to a different position	No
DNA	During DNA transcription, part of the DNA is sequentially traversed by a complex RNA polymerase enzyme, and copied into an RNA transcript molecule. As the RNA polymerase molecule moves along the linear chain of the DNA molecule, the current reading position changes.	Yes

Could anything like this be happening in the brain? Nothing like the first six things mentioned can be happening in the brain, because the brain has no moving parts except for microscopic molecular parts. Could anything like the last row be happening in the brain? No sign of any such thing can be found. 

We can start to imagine the beginnings of how such a thing might work. We can imagine that there is some "reader molecule" comparable to RNA polymerase, one that has the job of traversing neurons to read some particular learned information, such as the opening lines of Shakespeare's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. We can imagine that such a molecule might gather more and more information as it traverses a group of neurons. But no such molecule has been found. If it existed, it would have been discovered about the same time that RNA polymerase was discovered, around 1959. 

And there are several reasons why such a reader molecule traversing many neurons cannot exist. The first reason involves the "no next neuron" issue discussed above. The RNA polymerase molecule can gather a longer and longer RNA transcript as it reads more and more of a part of DNA. The RNA polymerase molecule can find the next spot to move by simply moving further in the same direction, moving farther down the chain. But given the physical structure of neurons, as suggested in the photos above,  nothing similar can happen. For each neuron there is no "next neuron." Every neuron is connected to very many other neurons, supposedly something like 1000. So sequential traversal cannot occur to get a particular sequence of stored information. 

There is another "show stopper" here, the fact that synapses do not reliably transmit information. Tests have shown that synapses only transmit signals with a reliability of 50% or less. So a "reader molecule" trying to traverse a set of neurons to gather information would never be able to reliably extract information from some sequence of neurons. Whenever such a molecule reached a particular neuron, it would be like someone in the circular roundabout at  Dupont Circle (shown above) where are there ten different directions to go to. Except that it would be 100 times worse, because coming from  every neuron there would be a thousand different synaptic connections, each leading to different neurons, making it impossible to retrieve sequential information by sequential traversal. 

When I search for "average distance between neurons in micrometers," I get an answer of around 20-50 micrometers. When I search for "how far do neurotransmitters travel" I get an answer of "neurotransmitters travel a distance of tens to hundreds of micrometers." A neuroscience textbook says this:

"In contrast, the distance over which neurotransmitters act is miniscule. At many synapses, transmitters bind only to receptors on the postsynaptic cell that directly underlies the presynaptic terminal (Figure 6.2A); in such cases, the transmitter acts over distances less than a micrometer. Even when neurotransmitters diffuse locally to alter the electrical properties of multiple postsynaptic (and sometimes presynaptic) cells in the vicinity (Figure 6.2B), they act only over distances of tens to hundreds of micrometers."

It seems, therefore, that there is no complex molecule transmitted over any long sequence of neurons (such as twenty neurons), a reality that just gives another strong reason for thinking that neuron groups cannot be sequentially traversed in any way that could involve some retrieval of complex learned information. A person imagining some sequential traversal of neurons might vaguely say "the brain traverses" some sequence of neurons, but for that to be a physical reality there would need to be either a moving anatomical part that moves over such a line of neurons, or a complex molecule that moves over such a distance to gather up the sequence. The brain has no visible moving parts, and there seems to be no complex neurotransmitter molecule that ever travels across some long sequence of neurons. 

The facts force us to a shocking conclusion contrary to the unfounded dogmas of neuroscientists about what goes on in the brain. The facts of how neurons are organized in the brain force us to conclude: there cannot be any sequential traversal in the brain amounting to a retrieval of complex stored information. For example, when someone recalls the thirty word of the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, as many Americans can do, that cannot be happening through a retrieval of information stored in a brain. We cannot imagine any sequential traversal of neurons that would allow the retrieval of a long series of words. 

The conclusion reached here is consistent with the reality that no one has ever been able to retrieve any sequence of learned information by studying brain tissue. A large amount of brain tissue has been retrieved from living subjects who underwent brain operations. Such tissue is often normal, healthy brain tissue. For example, to treat severe epileptic seizures, large fractions of the brain may be removed, as much as half of a brain. No one microscopically studying such extracted brain tissue has ever found the slightest trace of learned information. No one has ever found a single word stored in a brain, nor has anyone ever found a single image of something someone saw by studying removed brain tissue. Besides removal of brain tissue from living patients, very many people agreed to donate their brains to medical science upon death. Very many brains of people who recently died have been studied. Such study has never retrieved a single word or a single image extracted from a brain. The utter failure of the microscopic investigation of brain tissue to produce any sign of learned information is consistent with what I have discussed in this post: that the brain has a type of physical architecture that should prevent the sequential traversal of learned information from ever occurring. 

People remember things, but there has never been any evidence that brains store the things that people remember. Everywhere the facts of neuroscience and the facts of human memory performance contradict the claim that the brain stores memories. One of these facts is the fact that humans can instantly acquire permanent new memories, as a person does when he learns of the death of one of his parents or sons or daughters. Such instant learning would be impossible if memory was a brain phenomenon, as all theories of brain learning appeal vaguely to processes such as synapse strengthening that occur only very slowly. Another example of those facts involves the short lifetimes of proteins in the brain. The average lifetime of proteins in the brain and its synapses is less than two weeks. Because of all the very high molecular turnover in the brain, you do not have the same synapses or the same dendritic spines that you had five years ago. But humans can reliably remember detailed memories acquired fifty or sixty years ago. A third example of such facts is the simple fact that humans can instantly recall many facts about a person as soon as they hear the name of such a person. Such instant recall should be impossible in a brain utterly lacking in addresses, indexes and sorting, the things that make instant recall possible using devices that humans build. 

So how did we ever get a community of experts claiming that the brain stores memories?  That is easily explained on sociological and psychological grounds. Around the year 1800, when very little was known about the brain, there arose in universities various types of belief communities populated by people passionately opposed to the idea of a human soul.  Such people founded neuroscience departments where "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" were required belief tenets.  During the two centuries since then, innumerable observations have contradicted such dogmas. But when a passionate belief community arises, it can continue to teach its dogmas as a kind of sacred creed that it is taboo to challenge. So for generation after generation the "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" tenets have been passed down from one generation to the next. 

When each new generation of neuroscience professor arises, it is not a case of the new generation independently reaching conclusions matching those of their professor predecessors. It is instead a case of a belief tradition being passed from one generation to the next, in an authoritarian "do not challenge the teachings of your teachers" fashion, similar to what goes on in organized religions when old belief traditions (often outdated ones) are passed on from one generation to the next. 

What happens is that neuroscientists are constantly making dogmatic claims that memories are stored in brains; but a search for ignorance confessions by neuroscientists on this topic will find many quotes that would never be made if such dogmatic claims were true. Here are some of these quotes by doctors and scientists, with links to the sources of such quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts' about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."  -- PhD thesis of a scientist, 2007 (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "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).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 
• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
•  "Very little is known about the underlying mechanisms for visual recognition memory."  -- two scientists (link). 
• "Conclusive evidence that specific long-term memory formation relies on dendritic growth and structural synaptic changes has proven elusive. Connectionist models of memory based on this hypothesis are confronted with the so-called plasticity stability dilemma or catastrophic interference. Other fundamental limitations of these models are the feature binding problem, the speed of learning, the capacity of the memory, the localisation in time of an event and the problem of spatio-temporal pattern generation."  -- Two scientists in 2022 (link). 
• "The mechanisms governing successful episodic memory formation, consolidation and retrieval remain elusive,"  - Bogdan Draganski, cognitive neuroscientist (link). 

I mentioned above the trivial case of being able to remember the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. It is a fact that humans can display sequential recall abilities hundreds of times greater than that, which makes the arguments stated above all the more weighty. For example:

• The mathematician Leonhard Euler could recite the entire Aeneid from beginning to end, a work of 9896 lines.  Another mathematician (Alexander Aitken) also memorized the whole Aeneid, and could recite the first 1000 digits of pi. 

• Between age 59 and age 67 a person memorized all 10,565 lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, recalling the entire work over a three-day period.

• The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas. According to the 1920 newspaper article here, he had so well-memorized 150 opera scores that he "never even glances at a score when conducting."

• A scientific paper says, "Rajan S. Mahadevan ...was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (McWhirter, 1983) for reciting pi to 31,811 places."  The newspaper article here tells us all about this person. The article notes that in 1987, Mahadevan's record was broken by Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan, who recited pi to 40,000 decimal places. 

• Salvatore Baccaloni memorized 168 opera roles. George Vogan de Arrezo memorized the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid (consisting of 9,896 lines). Aitken and JB  performed similar feats when they memorized epic poems of about 10,000 lines. Leste May Williams memorized 12,000 verses of the Bible, including the entire New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, which has only 63,719 words. The same feat of memorizing the New Testament was achieved by a male minister (Henry M. Halley).

• It is well known that many Muslim scholars have memorized the entire text of their holy book, a book with 6236 verses.