Goofs at the Brains Blog Site

 A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Let's look at some of the posts at the site:

• "Caitlan Mace: Vehicle Indeterminacy in Memory Neuroscience." The post starts out with a repetition of groundless boasts of neuroscientists about "memory engrams," with the author stating, "I draw on neuroscientific investigations of memory engrams, which are neural representations of memory that result from learning-induced changes, retain information about some fact, feature of the world, or past experience, and are used to retrieve that information for memory recall." All such claims are spurious and bogus, and are not backed up by any robust research. No one has ever discovered in a brain any such thing as a representation of a fact or anything anyone learned. Microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to produce a single sentence any one ever learned, and has also failed to produce a single word anyone ever learned, with there also never being any discovery of a single image anyone ever saw or a single pixel of any such image. Later the author makes this statement conflicting with her previous boast: "It remains unclear which kind of structure—molecules, synapses, or neural ensembles—performs a representational role in any case."  The correct answer is: there is no evidence that any of these things play any such role in representing something someone learned; and the failure to find such evidence is a very strong for believing that no representations of learned information exist in the brain. 
• "Self-Consciousness and 'Split'  Brains: The Objection from Unified Behavior." We have very bad misrepresentation from a writer who states, "In yesterday’s post I argued that a split-brain subject is not unitary qua thinker but is actually composed of two thinkers." Split-brain subjects are those who have two separated hemispheres of the brain. You can have such subjects by two ways. On one hand, quite a few people are born without any of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain (a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum). Then there are those born with such fibers, who undergo operations in which such fibers are severed, to prevent very bad seizures that are resistant to drug treatment. Contrary to the prediction of the claim that brains make minds, which predicts that split-brain patients should have two minds, such split-brain subjects have a single unified mind. Attempts by materialists to claim otherwise are one of the worst examples of deception by materialists. 
• "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5". In the 300+ posts at this blog supposedly dedicated to "the philosophy and science of mind," this is the only post mentioning out-of-body experiences in its title. We have no substantive discussion of the topic, but merely an attempt to gaslight the significant fraction of the population that has such experiences, by accusing them of "disorders of self-consciousness." The post has no evidence of any deep scholarship of this topic. The author makes a bad description of conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. 
• "Introduction" and "CFP: Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice." These are the only two posts that come up when I search for "near-death experience" at the Brains Blog site. The second post has only a mere mention of "near-death experience" as a bullet list of topics that will be discussed in some journal that is being promoted. The first post says nothing of any substance about near-death experience, other than the promise that in some book it will be shown that near-death "experiences are contingent on the brain." That is not true, because such experiences often occur during cardiac arrest when the brain is electrically shut down, in the state called asystole in which brain waves appear as flat lines. 

The topic of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are two of the most important topics that should be covered by any blog dealing philosophically with the brain and the mind. But we get nothing of any substance on these topics in the 300+ posts on this blog. 

The physical design of the blog is poor.  You cannot conveniently navigate its posts, unless you wish to do endless clicking on titles that are only followed by a few lines from the corresponding post. None of the posts is tagged. So you cannot conveniently examine all posts on a particular topic, unless you are willing to laboriously type in topic names in a search bar. 

Using the blog's search tool, I search for topics that should be discussed by a blog of this type that has been published since 2005, without getting any results. Specifically:

• A search for "clairvoyance" gives 0 results. 
• A search for "telepathy" gives 0 results, as does a search for "Ganzfeld" (a word that would be used by anyone decently discussing ESP research), as does a search for "extrasensory perception." 
• A search for "HSAM" gives 0 results, as does a search for "hyperthymesia."
• A search for "autistic savants" gives 0 results, as does a search for the most famous autistic savant, Kim Peek.
• A search for "psychical research" gives only one result, the gaslighting article mentioned above. 
• A search for "eidetic memory" gives 0 results, as does a search for "photographic memory."
• A search for "hemispherectomy" gives only one badly misinforming article, which does not mention hemispherectomy cases.
• A search for "near-death experience" gives only two results, neither mentioning near-death experiences in the title, and neither discussing the topic in any depth.
• A search for "hydrocephalus" produces 0 results, as does a search for "French civil servant," meaning that the blog is failing to discuss cases of loss of most of the brain but good mental performance.
• A search for "morphogenesis" produces 0 results (see here and here for why the topic is very relevant to the topic of how minds arise).
• A search for "terminal lucidity" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "synaptic delay" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "dendritic spines" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "Questionable Research Practices" (an epidemic in today's neuroscience research) produces only 1 result, which fails to discuss the topic decently. 
• A search for "protein turnover" produces 0 results, as does a search for "protein half-life" and "protein lifetime."

These are all topics that are very relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind." It seems that the experts long writing at the Brains Blog are failing to adequately study the things that they should be studying in order to have an intelligent philosophy of mind consistent with observations. 

What are some of the things a philosopher of mind should be doing? They include these:

• He should be constantly testing the claims that brains make minds,  by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be enumerating all of the mental powers that humans have, and be asking whether there are credible neuroscience explanations for each such power, expressed in the form of detailed theories "hitting all the bases," rather than just vacuous hand-waving catchphrases. 
• He should be constantly testing the claim that brains store memories, by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim, and observation failures that may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be critically examining the research output of today's neuroscientists, always asking whether best-practices are being followed, and looking for cases in which low-quality research is being produced because of the use of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measuring techniques. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to cases of exceptional human mental performance, cases in which people seem to remember better and recall better and think faster and calculate better than a brain could ever do. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports and experiments suggesting psychic phenomena and paranormal human mind abilities, reports suggesting humans have mental abilities that a brain could never allow. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports of experiences such as out-of-body experiences, reports we would never expect to occur if the brain is the source of the mind. 
• He should  be giving the deepest study to medical case histories involving loss of brain tissue or loss or half or more of the brain, to see whether they produce results expected under "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" assumptions, or whether they produce results not expected under such assumptions. 
• He should be making a very deep study of human biology and morphogenesis, to see whether there is a "failure to explain the origin of a human body" that is of great relevance to the discussion of whether there is a failure to explain the origin of a human mind.

I don't see much of these activities going on at the Brains Blog site. 

An Interview Leaves You With a "Neuroscientists Gone Wrong" Impression

 At a neuroscience web site with many a misleading article (www.thetransmitter.org), I see an interview with a neuroscientist who boasts that he will correct our misconceptions about the brain. But the neuroscientist starts making some false statements immediately. The interview is entitled "Romain Brette reveals fundamental flaws in commonly assumed neuroscience concepts."

Neuroscientist Romain Brette goes wrong immediately by claiming "Neurons are not components; they are living units, and this is how they should be treated."  Neurons are actually components. The dictionary defines a component as "a part or element of a larger whole." Neurons are components of the brain and components of the human body. 

Brette then soon commits another serious error by stating, "If you look inside a neuron, you will never find some stuff called information." That is dead wrong. Neurons do not have any memory information that anyone has been able to discover. The microscopic examination of brains has never yielded a single speck of information that anyone ever learned -- not a single word or even a single letter or number. But a neuron does have a very large body of information: the genetic information stored in DNA. Such DNA absolutely does have information, specifically information about which amino acids make up particular proteins used by your body. 

It is true that all kinds of false claims have been made about what is in DNA, such as the false claims that DNA stores a recipe, program or blueprint for building a human body But such false claims (debunked here) should not make us go to the erring extreme of denying that the DNA in cells has information. DNA emphatically does have very much information: low-level chemical information. 

Most absurdly, Brette claims that it is "impossible" that a neuron could contain information, which is as erroneous as claiming that it is impossible that a book could store information. 

An interviewer named Paul Middlebrooks then gives us the suggestion that we are being seriously misled by neuroscientists calling the brain a prediction machine. Middlebrooks says this:

"Brains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, no, and no. That's what Romain Brette says. That's his response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works." 

Later on in the interview, Brette makes this extremely false claim: "Nothing can contain information." 

But Brette does make some good points. He says that comparisons between computers and brains are invalid, for various reasons. For example, he says this:

"If you just look at a voltage trace of a neuron, it's fluctuating. It is not stable. People then talk about firing rates because they want to have stable quantities, but it's a cheat. Of course, if you measure anything, you get a number, but whatever it refers to is actually fluctuating. The next second, you get a different number. Intrinsically, it's a fluctuating system. It's not like a bit that you can write and then later on read several times."

Later Brette criticizes the talk of neuroscientists who confuse cognition with computation. He says this:

"Logical propositions are coded in the activity of the neuron. That was the assumption that, deep down, it's computation with smaller operations, small logical operations, and every kind of behavior is something like that. It's a theory, right? It just didn't turn out to be correct. It is basically a theory that cognition is made of computation."

Brette is referring here to the theory of computationalism, debunked in my four posts here. The theory commits two huge errors. The first is describing the brain as if it was something like a computer. The brain lacks almost all of the characteristics of a computer, as shown in the diagram below. The second error of computationalism is conflating computation with cognition. Cognition requires an understanding and conscious mind, and no computer is a mind. 

Later Brette makes this statement, which seems to complain of misleading language by his neuroscientist colleagues:

"It's kind of a mashup of different ideas that you find in the neuroscience literature. You have a mashup of classical computationalism when you say that you have mental representations that the brain computes and so on. You have connectionism where, in fact, not everything is symbols. Are there neural representations? Yes, sometimes, but sometimes they are not. I don't know. It's intermediate variables which don't necessarily represent something in particular. Then, you also have dynamical talk in neuroscience, but that is referred to in terms of computation. It's completely confusing."

The interview is promoting Brette's new book "The Brain, in Theory." Looking that book up on Amazon, I read this in the description of the book: "He [Brette] proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components." The brain as a community? That sounds as misguided as "the brain as a computer." 

If you look up the book on Amazon, you can read its beginning. I did that, and I was not very impressed by its first pages. Brette starts out (pages 2-3) by arguing that the brain cannot be like a computer, because computers are engineering, and Darwin said that organisms are just products of unguided natural processes, not results of deliberate purpose. How silly to be starting out your book on brains by saying that we must follow Darwin rather than starting out by appealing to the relevant physical facts about brains. You can debunk "the brain is a computer" idea easily enough without appealing to authority, by discussing the lack of similarity between brains and computers. 

Brette has a blog, and on that blog he states this: "A striking fact about mainstream theories of the brain is that they take their inspiration mostly from theoretical computer science and engineering theory ('codes', 'computation', 'algorithms', 'information' (in bits), etc.), while being largely ignorant of theoretical biology (e.g. theories of life, organisms and evolution), and even dismissive of biology (just 'implementation')." It seems that those outside of the neuroscience field are not the only ones saying much is amiss with neuroscientist theories of the brain. 

On the page here of his blog, Brette addresses the issue of reproduction, one which biologists have failed to credibly explain. Brette states this:

"One fundamental question is: how can a system produce a copy of itself? This question was famously addressed by von Neumann, who argued that the system must build a new copy from instructions, i.e., the genome is a representation of the organism. I have shown that this does not apply to living organisms and proposed an alternative (11). The alternative is that the parent system simply produces a new system that depends on the parent’s structure, but not necessarily a copy. Production becomes self-reproduction as iterated systems converge to a fixed point, in the absence of building instructions. The genome then acts as a transmissible constraint shaping development, not building instructions. In other words, biological reproduction is an emergent property."

Brette seems to realize that genomes have no instructions for building a body. Correct -- genomes do not even have instructions for how to build a cell or any of its organelles or any instructions on how to build protein complexes.  This is a gigantic clue about the fundamental nature of reality, one of two reasons why the origin of every human is a miracle beyond the explanation of today's science. Scientists cannot explain morphogenesis because DNA lacks any specification for how to build a body or any of its organs or cells. So scientists lack a credible account of how you physically arose. And they also lack an explanation for how you mentally arose, because of endless reasons (discussed at length at this site) why brains fail to explain minds and memory. 

A materialist does not escape that problem by making the nonsensical claim that "biological reproduction is an emergent property." A property is a simple characteristic of something, such as height, weight, mass, volume and so forth. For humans, biological reproduction is a nine-month process of the most enormous complexity. Calling that a "property" is as absurd as calling your life a property.

In one post of his blog, the neuroscientist  Brette confesses that "there is currently no convincing theory of consciousness." 

I watched on television recently a four-part series on the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The story of Chernobyl is a story of how overconfidence in experts led to massive numbers of people being poisoned by radioactivity. The Soviet Union haughtily thought of its nuclear scientists as being the greatest in the world. But the Chernobyl reactor had a terrible design flaw. Because of the flaw, when someone pressed a button that was supposed to shut down the reactor for a test, this caused the opposite result: a runaway increase in the nuclear reactions, causing a meltdown. 

Largely because of overconfidence in technoscientific experts, very many got poisoned by the meltdown at Chernobyl. And largely because of overconfidence in biology experts, the thinking of very many got poisoned, when they uncritically accepted unbelievable dogmas being peddled by brain specialists whose bungling has been as bad as those who designed the reactors of Chernobyl. We have a strong reason for suspecting that another case of bungling by technoscientific experts in Eurasia caused a disaster worse than Chernobyl. But amazingly, people keep bending their knees to authorities, and keep following the bad speech customs fostered by neuroscientists. And so, rather than making unobjectionable and indisputable claims such as "I had trouble remembering" or "I was thinking a little slowly," people make silly dogma-dripping statements  such as "my brain had trouble remembering" and "my brain was thinking slowly." 

Exhibit C That Neuroscientists Have No Understanding of How a Memory Could Form or Last in a Brain

 In 2020 on this site I published a post entitled "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Store a Memory." In 2023 I published on this site a post entitled "Exhibit B That Scientists Have No Understanding of a Physical Basis of Human Memory." Now it is time for Exhibit C on this topic. 

I recently discovered a web site called The Transmitter (www.thetransmitter.org) that mainly covers neuroscience research and neuroscience theory. When read in a critical manner, an article on the last site serves to powerfully remind us that neuroscientists lack any such thing as either a real theory of memory storage or a real theory of life-long memory persistence. When scientists speak on these topics, they offer only the flimsiest catchphrases, soundbites that have the weight of soap bubbles. 

The title of the article is "What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?" The reference to "static synapses" is a very misleading one. Everything we know about synapses tells us that a synapse is an unstable thing that cannot last for years.

We read a neuroscientist (Jason Shepherd) making these claims:

"The debate over how information is stored in the brain is often represented as one between two extremes. One viewpoint posits that learning induces changes in gene expression that ultimately alter the structure and function of specific synapses within the physical memory circuit, or engram. These molecular changes at the synapses can remain stable for the lifetime of the memory. The other viewpoint claims that information is represented not in a specific set of cells or synapses but rather across a loose set of cells and circuits that 'drift' over time."

The narrative of two rival theories is a false one. The situation is really "no theory at all" but merely empty, vacuous sound bites and slogans such as "synapse strengthening," which may differ from one speaker to the next. The claim above that "molecular changes at the synapses can remain stable for the lifetime of the memory" is something entirely contrary to fact. We know that human memories can persist for more than 50 years. Synapses, on the other hand, are "shifting sands" type of things that are dramatically unstable. The proteins that make up synapses have an average lifetime of less than 3 weeks.  Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, which are known to have short lifetimes, not lasting for years. Remarkably synapses are built of proteins which have an average lifetime about 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things. This discrepancy is one of very many reasons why the idea that memories are stored in synapses is one of the most nonsensical ideas that scientists have ever advanced. 

Notice well the utter emptiness of what is discussed as an alternative to the utterly-vacuous-by-itself idea that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." The alternative is presented as the idea that " information is represented not in a specific set of cells or synapses but rather across a loose set of cells and circuits that 'drift' over time." That's an utterly vague, vacuous, empty sound bite that is as much  of an empty soap bubble as the equally empty notion of "synapse strengthening." Not the slightest bit of weight is added by the next two sentences:

"In this view, the cells that initially encoded an experience are not the same set of cells that actually store the information. Indeed, the precise set of cells do not matter in this framework—the information for a specific memory is instead decoded from the computational space of firing patterns across a set of cells."

As some type of attempt to explain stable memories that can last for 50 years, this idea is as supremely goofy as the idea that memories that last for 50 years are stored in the "shifting sands" of synapses. The "firing patterns" in the brain are ever-changing. Trying to claim that stable memories are stored in "firing patterns" is as goofy as the claim that your tax records and childhood photos are stored in the wind patterns around your house. 

Shepherd gives us some "rival cases" paragraphs. Under a heading of "The case for memory engrams," he makes some untrue statements. He states this:

" In experiments that used this approach, light-sensitive receptors were expressed only in the cells active during learning. Shining a light to activate these cells days or even weeks after training resulted in the recall of a memory without any external experience or cue. This remarkable observation set the stage for the idea that 'engram' neurons that encode learning are sufficient to store and recall a memory."

No robust research of any such type ever occurred.  Shepherd is simply repeating a groundless achievement legend of neuroscientists. When you read the papers that claim to have done such things, you will always find that they were junk-science studies guilty of multiple types of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, and the use of unreliable techniques for attempting to judge recall in rodents, such as the unreliable method of trying to judge "freezing behavior."

Under the heading of "the representational drift perspective," Shepherd presents nothing in the way of any evidence. We get only the most roundabout hand-waving. 

Shepherd then asks eight neuroscientists for their opinions on the topic of memory storage by a brain. Shepherd follows a senseless procedure.  A good open question to ask would be something like this:

"Do you have a good, credible theory of how a brain could store memories, and how memories could persist a lifetime? If so, describe the best evidence for such a theory, and tell us how confident you are that such a theory is true."

And a good follow-up question would be questions like this:

• "Are there any physical factors in the brain that argue against such a theory? Explain how such a theory could really allow 50-year memory storage despite all the molecular and structural turnover in the brain."
• "Trying to be precise, and avoiding vague language, can you explain exactly how a detailed memory could be stored under such a theory? For example, exactly how could a brain store a page of text that someone had memorized, so that the person could retrieve that whole page?"
• "Under such a theory, how would it be possible for someone to instantly recall lots of relevant detailed information after seeing a single face or hearing a single name? For example, how could someone ever recite a paragraph describing the life of Abraham Lincoln after merely hearing his name? How could information about Lincoln stored in a brain ever be found quickly enough to allow instant recall?"

But Shepherd asks no such challenging questions to his eight neuroscientists. Instead he asks each of them the softest of softball questions. Each neuroscientist is asked these questions:

• "Is information stored in the brain at the level of cells (or circuits) or at the level of synapses?"
• "Can we reconcile observations that show distinct engram circuits seem to store memories versus observations that show the neuronal activity of these memory engram drifts?"
• "What experimental data would be helpful to reconcile these observations to help bring these theories together?"

The first question is a classic example of a stupid "either/or" question in which someone is asked to choose between two alternatives, neither of which is credible. The question is as stupid as asking, "Are UFOs spaceships from the planet Mars or spaceships from the planet Venus?" The second question is one with a false premise embedded within it. It is not true that there are "observations that show distinct engram circuits seem to store memories." Microscopic examination of brain tissue has never shown the slightest trace of anything anyone has learned or experienced. The third question is the type of question you might ask neuroscientists when they don't have any good evidence to back up their dogmas. Rather than asking them to tell about what evidence backs up their claims, you might ask them to fantasize about what type of future observations they might make that might back up their theories. 

None of the eight questioned neuroscientists has anything of any substance to offer in response to the questions. The first question at least offers an invitation for someone to start expounding about any theory he may have of neural memory storage. We get no impressive quotes in response to such a question. We get only the wobbliest hand-waving that makes the people giving the answers sound very empty-handed. 

• Andre Fenton of New York University has nothing of any substance to say. He says "information is not stored in any single element," and "it may not be practically possible to separate the process of storage from the access," both of which suggest that he has no understanding of how a brain could store a memory. People who understand how some type of information is stored do not say such things. 
• Loren Frank of the University of California gives us no impression that he understands how a brain could store a memory. He says, "It might be that changes in gene expression lead to changes in activity levels, although at the moment we really don’t understand the scope of these changes." He offers only the vaguest hand-waving, with a mention of the hippocampus. We have an example of the vaguest and most conceptually empty hand-waving in this statement by Frank: "Focusing on memories for the events of daily life, our current conception is that the events themselves drive activity across the brain, engaging specific neurons whose activity represents the various sights, sounds, smells and feelings that are part of the experience." 
• Kari Hoffman of Vanderbilt University also offers only the vaguest handwaving, an example being this statement: "I would submit that much of the heavy lifting is done at both the synaptic and circuit/ensemble level. Which levels dominate depends on factors such as memory type, when information was acquired and how it is integrated with the existing structures, themselves reflecting changes from earlier experiences. " Another statement by her indicates she has no real understanding on this topic: "That said, we may need to be careful in using the term 'these memories' or 'these memory engrams.'  Such terms suggest that experience creates biological bins to hold discrete memories, that memories exist as entities that are created 'de novo,' and that neural modifications must reside at only one level, all of which are positions that are not or may not be true." 
• Yingxi Lin of the University of Texas says, "It is, however, too early to say that those cells and synapses are sites of stored memory per se, as they may simply function to gain access to the memory."  She also says, " It is also possible that there aren’t specific sites for memory storage; cells and synapses may be part of a brain-wide code for memory expression." She seems to have no understanding of how a brain could store a memory. 
• Cian O'Donnell of Ulster University sounds like a weak scholar of neuroscience when he states, "The field has held synaptic plasticity up as the main mechanism for information storage in the brain for several decades now, and I haven’t heard any good reasons to start doubting it yet." There are very many such reasons, such as the fact that synapses are composed of proteins with very short lifetimes, the fact that synapses bear no resemblance to any system for writing or reading information, the fact that synapses do not reliably transmit information, and that synapses are connected to dendritic spines that are unstable and do not last for years. Nothing O'Donnell says makes him sound like anyone with an understanding of how a brain could store memories. 
• Timothy O'Leary of Cambridge University (not to be confused with the late Timothy Leary of Harvard) says nothing to inspire any confidence that he has any understanding of how a brain could store a memory. All he does is to reveal that he fell "hook, line and sinker" for bad neuroscience experiments using way-too-small study group sizes and the utterly unreliable technique of trying to judge recall by judging "freezing behavior." 
• Tomas Ryan of Trinity College also says  says nothing to inspire any confidence that he has any understanding of how a brain could store a memory. He engages in the emptiest of hand-waving when he says this: "It seems to me that the plausible level for the storage of long-term memories is in the topography of the connectome. So, the information is engraved through stable changes in the brain’s microanatomical circuit." The "connectome" he refers to is the collection of all synapses. But synapses are not stable, but the opposite of stable. So his claim makes no sense. 
• The last of the eight neuroscientists is Evan Schaffer of the School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He states this: "As a consequence, I don’t think information can be stored in cells or synapses in the hippocampus in a way that is stable over a lifetime. In other parts of the brain, this may not be the case." No, actually, there is no credible storage place for memories in the brain, either in the hippocampus or anywhere else. Not sounding like anyone who understands how a brain could store memories, Schaffer also sounds like a poor student of human mental performance. Most misleadingly, he tries to suggest that humans may not be able to remember things well for weeks. He says, "On a timescale of a few days, memories seem pretty stable. On a timescale of a few weeks, there’s less evidence for stability." To the contrary, there is abundant evidence that humans can very well remember things for decades. To give one of endless examples I could cite, every opera fan knows that various opera stars are able to perfectly remember over many years the very many notes and words that make up particular opera roles. Placido Domingo, for example, performed more than 150 opera roles, many of which required singing for hours on the stage, from memory. 

Finally in the article we have a summing up by Shepherd, who sounds just as empty-handed and theory-lacking as the eight experts he has interviewed. He says this:

"Finally, neuroscientists must do a better job of defining their terms. What is 'information,' and how is it 'represented' in the brain? What is an engram?"

The title of the article was "What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?" I re-read all of the answers to see whether anyone addressed the issue of how memories could last in a brain long enough to persist for decades. Not one of the eight neuroscientists even addressed the issue. Not one of them advanced any theory as to how memories could persist for decades. Not one of them advanced even a hypothesis about such a topic.  The issue of how memories could last for decades was simply ignored by the eight neuroscientists, none of whom had either a real theory of memory storage to advance, nor any theory of the life-long preservation of memory.  We certainly did not get any such thing when we got this piece of fantasy by Tomas Ryan:

"It seems to me that the plausible level for the storage of long-term memories is in the topography of the connectome. So, the information is engraved through stable changes in the brain’s microanatomical circuit." 

Engraved? No such engraving occurs in the brain. Nothing in a brain bears any resemblance to a system or component for writing learned information. There is zero evidence that anything bearing the slightest resemblance to engraving occurs in the brain. We see no "engraved" neurons, no "engraved" synapses, and no "engraved" dendritic spines.  Everything that has been learned about synapses shouts that a synapse cannot have any such thing as stable changes, in the sense of changes that last permanently for decades. The proteins that make up synapses have average lifetimes of less than a few weeks. And synapses are attached to dendritic spines that are known to have short lifetimes, dendritic spines that do not last for years. 

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. The same paper refers to another paper that "reported rates of [dendritic] spine eliminations in the order of 40% over an observation period of 4 days."  A paper studying the lifetimes of dendritic spines in the cortex states, "Under our experimental conditions, most spines that appear survive for at most a few days. Spines that appear and persist are rare." The rare persistence referred to was only a persistence of a few months. 

The 2023 paper here gives the graph below showing the decay rate of the volume of dendritic spines. It is obvious from the graph that they do not last for years, and mostly do not even last for six months. 

Page 278 of the same paper says, "Two-photon imaging in the Gan and Svoboda labs revealed that spines can be stable over extended periods of time in vivo but also display genesis (generation) and elimination (pruning) at a frequency of 1–4% per week." Something vanishing at a rate of 2% per week will be gone within a year. 

Below are some quotes by scientists and doctors who spoke candidly about brains and memory storage, rather than engaging in the kind of bluffing that went on from the people mentioned above:

• "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). 
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (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, cogntive neuroscientist (link). 
• " The mechanisms underlying the formation and management of the memory traces are still poorly understood." -- Three scientists in 2023 (link). 
• "The underlying electrophysiological processes underlying memory formation and retrieval in humans remains very poorly understood." --  A scientist in 2021 (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 

One Year Later, the Blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Still Sounds Evidence-Poor

 On March 7, 2025 I posted on this blog a post entitled "Examining the Evidence-Poor Blog Archive of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2020 to 2025," one you can read here. 

After reviewing all of the posts that sounded as if they might be relevant to "brains make minds" claims and "brains store memories" claims, I stated this:

"So examining all the posts on this [Cognitive Neuroscience Society] site from January 2020 to March 2025 that had headlines sounding like they might be some substantive evidence for 'brains make minds' and 'brains store memories' claims, I find no such substantive evidence. We have lots of cognitive neuroscientists claiming to know things they don't know. But a close look at their research always fails to find robust evidence in support of the dogmas that cognitive neuroscientists keep chanting."

It has now been one year since I wrote that post. Let us look at all the last year's posts on the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, to see whether anything in the past year should change our opinion about the blog being evidence-poor in regard to the main claims of cognitive neuroscientists. 

Here are all the posts the blog has published in the past year:

March 3, 2026: "From an Outsider to a Champion for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion." We have an interview with a neuroscientist LeDoux who is the author of a book with the dumb title "The Emotional Brain." It is not brains that are emotional, but people who are emotional. We have this ridiculous statement by the neuroscientist: "Eventually, I would write the book The Emotional Brain [one of several books written by LeDoux], which I think helped put emotion on the map." It is an example of the kind of senseless boasting that neuroscientists frequently engage in. Obviously emotions were "on the map" long before such a book was written.  The next statement by LeDoux is equally ridiculous, with him saying , "If you take a look at the study of consciousness, one thing that's missing is emotion." No, scholars of the human mind have always made human emotions one of the main objects of their study. Nothing that LeDoux says does anything to support claims that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

January 9, 2026: "Threading Together Attention Across Human Cognition."  We have an interview with neuroscientist Monica Rosenberg. She starts out by saying, "Brains are so commonplace in our lives that it’s easy to take them for granted, but when you stop to think about it, it’s absolutely remarkable that our minds emerge from electrified meat.” A more truthful sentence would be "it's absolutely unbelievable that our minds emerge from electrified meat." Rosenberg incorrectly states, "We have evidence that individual differences in features of brain activity, like functional connectome organization, can predict differences in behavior but we still don’t understand why." No such evidence exists, if by "differences in behavior" you mean the type of choices a person would make. Rosenberg makes unfounded boasts about things done by people she works with. She claims, "Ziwei Zhang, a PhD student in my lab, showed that dynamics of the same functional brain network predict when people are surprised as they do a learning task and watch basketball games." There's a link to the paper here, entitled "Brain network dynamics predict moments of surprise across contexts." It's not any good evidence for brains-making-minds. It is well known that particular type of emotions tend to produce distinctive muscle movements showing up as facial expressions; and particular types of muscle movements show up as distinctive blips in fMRI scans or EEG readings. 

December 16, 2025: "Taking Action Seriously in the Brain: Revealing the Role of Cognition in Motor Skills." We have an interview with a scientist studying the role of the brain in motor skills. He talks about "motor working memory" without clearly explaining what he means by that term. The idea of "working memory" has some substance in reference to a kind of "mental scratchpad" where you can remember a few things for a short time, without memorizing them. There is no brain understanding of how that works, and there is no part of the brain that corresponds to such a "mental scratchpad." The idea of a working memory involving motor skills is not one that has much substance. Motor skills such as learning to swim or ride a bicycle require repeated practice sessions. It is clear that brains have some involvement in muscle movement. But such a relation does nothing to show that your brain produces your mind. 

November 24, 2025: "50 Years of Busting Myths About Aging in the Brain." We have an interview with a neuroscientist Carol Barnes who studies aging in brains. Barnes makes this groundless claim: "For my PhD thesis, I was to build off work that had discovered the biological basis of memory, long-term potentiation (LTP)." No one has ever discovered any biological basis for memory. The claim that LTP is any such thing is a groundless legend of neuroscientists (as I discuss in my posts here). Utterly unable to account for memories that can last decades, LTP is a very short-lived change produced by artificial electrode stimulation. The very term "long-term potentiation" is a misleading one, as so-called LTP typically decays away with days or weeks. 

Barnes then proceeds to recite another groundless legend of neuroscientists, the legend that "place cells" were discovered. She says, "In my postdoctoral work with John O’Keefe, we looked at the first recordings from place cells in young and old rats." A look at O' Keefe's research on this topic will show that it was not robust research. Here is a quote from a previous post of mine:

"The 'place cells' papers of John O'Keefe that I have examined are papers that do not meet standards of good experimental science. An example of such a paper was the paper 'Hippocampal Place Units in the Freely Moving Rat: Why They Fire Where They Fire.'  For one thing, the study group size used (consisting of only four rats) was way too small for robust evidence to have been produced. 15 animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately convincing result in animal studies looking for correlations.  For another thing no blinding protocol was used. And the study was not a pre-registered study, but was apparently one of those studies in which an analyst is free to fish for whatever effect he may feel like finding after data has been collected, using any of innumerable possible analysis pipelines."

We have in the interview no claims by Barnes of any substance backing up claims that brains produce minds or that brains store memories. All of her main references to research are references to weak, unconvincing research. 

November 3, 2025: "Making the Brain Language Ready: A Journey of Discovery."   We have an interview with neuroscientist Peter Hagoort, who has tried to show some brain basis for language ability. Hagoort talks on and on, but fails to show any knowledge of how a brain could acquire a language or allow people to speak as rapidly as they do. He mentions aphasia. A person can have a stroke that prevents him from being able to speak, or damages his ability to speak. But that merely shows that when people speak they are using muscles; and no one doubts that brains have a strong connection to muscle activity. 

September 10, 2025: "The Lasting Cognitive Effect of Smell on Memory." We have an interview with a scientist doing research on smells and memory. Without giving any specifics, the scientist makes vague claims trying to suggest links between smells, brains and memory. About all we know on this topic is that particular smells can evoke particular memories. 

August 14, 2025: "Language in the Brain is More Than the Sum of Its Parts."  We read this: "In a new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bourguignon and Salvatore Lo Bue make a case for language as an emergent property of the brain." Such talk is very misleading. A property of something is some simple characteristic that can be expressed by a single number. For example, properties of a wooden cube include length, width, depth, height, color and weight, each of which can be expressed by a single number. Language is not a property, but a capability, an extremely impressive capability with many different aspects. So trying to explain language by describing it as a "property" is extremely erroneous. We hear from a neuroscientist named Bourguignon who says, "We argue for a broad, seemingly simplistic, yet unbiased, conception of language as 'any piece of information that can be verbalized.' " That is a senseless conception of language.  It sounds more simpleminded than "seemingly simplistic." Language is something gigantically more than "any piece of information."  Bourguignon confesses that "the very notion that language cannot be pinpointed in a neatly delineated area or network of the brain will be surprising to some people, and unpalatable to others." That sounds like what we might find if brains cannot explain language. 

June 30, 2025: "Exploring Auditory Interconnectivity One Sound at a Time."  We have an interview with a neuroscientist studying the brain and hearing. Nothing discussed backs up "brains make minds" claims (as opposed to mere "brains are involved in hearing" claims). 

May 29, 2025: "How Was Your School Day?: Unpacking Free Recall in Young Children." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 21, 2025: "Moving Beyond Traditional Pathways in Cognitive Neuroscience." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 4 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

April 1, 2025: "How VR Technology is Changing the Game for Alzheimer’s Disease." The headline is incorrect. VR technology (virtual reality technology) is not "changing the game" in regard to Alzheimer's disease. We hear merely about some fancy virtual reality system used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease. The disease can be diagnosed through much simpler methods. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 3 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 31, 2025: "How Dreams, Novelty, and Emotions Can Shape Memories: Lessons from Smartphone Studies."  We have a discussion of some research involving memory, conducted with smartphones. It is pure psychology research. The authors claim connection between sleep and memory recall. But there's no discussion of any brain data, so the post does nothing to back up "brains store memories" claims. 

March 31, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 2 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 30, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 1 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

It would seem from the last year of posts at the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society that cognitive neuroscientists are not making any real progress in their attempts to provide evidence backing up claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. 

Postscript: A recent look at the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society leaves me very troubled. I read this about an experiment on a human, discussed at a conference of the society:

"What happens when you look at pictures while getting mildly electrocuted. Turns out shocks can shift when you think you saw the picture. Great science but rough day for participant in that study!"

Ah, our cognitive neuroscientists hard at work, delivering needless electrical shocks to human subjects, in experiments with study group sizes so small they do not qualify as trustworthy science.