Astray Authorities #6

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

The Guardian's Misleading Story on Near-Death Experiences

The British paper the Guardian recently gave us a junk story on the topic of near-death experiences. It pushed a groundless narrative that a neuroscientist named Jimo Borjigin has done something to help explain such experiences, which is not at all correct.  Borjigin's work on this topic started out with her 2013 paper with the misleading title "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." The paper makes a misleading use of the technical EEG terms "coherence" and "connectivity."

An EEG is a device for measuring brain waves, one requiring the attachment of multiple electrodes on the head. In the technical jargon of EEG analysts, "coherence" means some length of time in which you are getting the same type of brain waves from two different regions of the brain. The paper here states, "Coherence is one mathematical method that can be used to determine if two or more sensors, or brain regions, have similar neuronal oscillatory activity with each other."  There are different ways in which the term "connectivity" is used by neuroscientists. One of these ways is "structural connectivity" meaning the number of connections between brain cells. But, according to that paper, there's another way in which "connectivity" is used: "Functional connectivity identifies activity brain regions that have similar frequency, phase and/or amplitude of correlated activity." 

So given such speech customs, a neuroscientist analyzing the ups and downs of brain waves can claim "coherence" or "connectivity" as long as he sees any type of similarity between different regions of a brain giving the same kind of EEG readings. This is what the authors of the 2013 paper (including  Borjigin) did.  What they observed was simply the brain waves of rats quickly dying off to become a flat line. But because the brain waves from each regions quickly trailed off and died off in the same way, the authors have called this behavior "coherence" and "connectivity." 

While this may not be a very clear case of an outright lie (given the speech habits of EEG analysts), the title of the paper is misleading, because it creates a very false impression in the minds of 95% of the people who read it. 95% of the people reading a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" will think that some indication was found of increased cognitive activity in dying brains. The paper found no such thing.  The "coherence" and "connectivity" supposedly found was not a surge but merely a blip, and it did not involve anything like some surge of mental activity. Nothing whatsoever was found that can help to give a neural explanation for near-death experiences. In fact, there is every reason to think that at the time when this little blip of claimed "coherence" and "connectivity" occurred, all of the rats were unconscious. 

Figure 1 of the paper is shown below. We see EEG brain wave signals from rats who were injected with a chemical causing the heart to stop. 

Nothing impressive is seen. It's just what you would expect: brain signals trailing off and dying out very quickly after the heart stops. This data offers no justification for a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." An honest title of the paper would have been:  "Brain waves very quickly trail off and die out after hearts stop in rats." 

After this paper with a misleading title was published, we had innumerable misleading citations of it in the articles of materialist or mainstream writers, claiming or insinuating that the paper showed or suggested something it did not either show or suggest. An example was a National Geographic article with the misleading title "In Dying Brains, Signs of Heightened Consciousness." The 2013 "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" paper had not anything whatsoever to show "signs of heightened consciousness" in the dying rats it studied. Similarly, a 2017 Big Think article linked to the 2013 paper and claimed, "One 2013 study, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found that the rodents entered a hyper-alert state just before death." This claim is totally false, and the paper suggested nothing of the sort.  

The new Guardian story has a mention of this research, and gives us the untrue claim that Borjigin "discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen." No such thing was discovered, and the paper made no mention of either serotonin or dopamine.  The Guardian story then refers to another paper Borjigin co-authored, referring to a Patient One mentioned in that paper.  The 2023 paper discussed brain readings of coma patients in Michigan, USA who had their life-support systems turned off. 

I previously described this paper like this:

• "Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain." Here we have another misleading use of the word "surge" in a science paper headline, a paper co-authored by one of the researchers who authored the equally mistitled rat study "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain."  The paper merely describes a little brain activity in two people after a respirator was turned off, with no evidence of brain activity continuing for more than a few seconds after the heart has stopped. The lines on brain waves charts go up and down, and there are seven or so channels of brain waves (including a gamma channel); so at any second you can usually find some little line going up and call that a "surge," although at the same time other lines (representing other brain wave channels) will probably be going down. Using the term "surge" in the title of the paper was misleading, rather like  tracking the price of Microsoft, seeing it go up 2% at 2:00, and calling that a surge. The authors of the study did not even report a surge in gamma waves, one of the brain wave channels. Eager to get something they could call a surge, the authors got their little "surge" after some statistical fiddling with the signals, to get some statistical measure that only shows up after arbitrary analytics. Almost any random ten seconds of brain wave activity can be statistically analyzed to show a little "surge" somewhere, if you're willing to dredge up secondary statistical measures. Keep torturing the data, and it will confess as you wish.  Shamefully, the journal Science has an article on this paper with the misleading headline "Burst of brain activity during dying could explain life passing before your eyes"; and the Smithsonian site has an equally misleading click-bait headline of "Surging Brain Activity in Dying People May Be a Sign of Near-Death Experiences." There is no evidence that either of these two people had an experience of "life passing before their eyes" or anything like near-death experiences. The subjects were unconscious when the respirator was turned off, and there is no evidence of any consciousness. Unconscious people have gamma wave activity (the activity reported), and you have plenty of gamma activity while you are sleeping. No "neural correlates of the NDE" were reported by the paper. As two MDs point out in a commentary on this paper, "The researchers reported no evidence whatsoever that these brain activities were correlated with conscious experiences in those two patients—and no reason to compare these results with prospective NDE studies in patients who have survived a cardiac arrest."

But senselessly our Guardian article writer attempts to portray this research as shedding some light on near-death experiences.  We have a quote by Borjigin not matching anything reported in her scientific paper. "As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin tells the article writer.  That does not match any data reported in the scientific paper, which shows nothing special happening in the patient's brain as she died. In fact, see the first  visual below which plainly contradicts such a claim, showing this Patient One's brain waves trailing off into flat lines as her heart stopped.   "Hyperdrive" is a word used in science fiction, and is not a legitimate neuroscience word. We read, "Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life." This is a groundless and implausible speculation not supported by any evidence. 

As two MDs point out in a commentary on this paper, "The researchers reported no evidence whatsoever that these brain activities were correlated with conscious experiences in those two patients—and no reason to compare these results with prospective NDE studies in patients who have survived a cardiac arrest." There are no known neural correlates that are signs of near-death experiences, so no match  has been made to any such correlates.  So the belief attributed to Borjigin (about the patient having a near-death experience with particular features) is every bit as silly as someone looking at some EEG readouts of a dying patient and saying, "I believe she was having a vision of becoming the queen of Mars," when the patient never spoke a word. 

But that's how so many of our neuroscientists are these days.  It seems so many of them are so often squinting at data and claiming to see things that aren't really there, and jumping to conclusions without any warrant. It seems that our neuroscientists (members of a belief community with entrenched dogmas) tend to be very big People of Belief. A neuroscientist such as Borjigin believes without the slightest warrant that a silent dying patient had a near-death experience with particular features. And neuroscientists believe without any good warrant the "old wives' tales" stories of their conformist belief community, such as the claim that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking and imagination and ideas (disregarding a great wealth of evidence discussed in this site's posts that brains are too slow, noisy, unstable and unreliable to explain the wonders of human mental performance, and disregarding the failure of any microscopic examinations of brain tissue to ever find any trace of learned human knowledge). 

The Guardian article writer makes use of a little trick to fool readers into thinking that brain activity continues after the heart stops.  The trick is to discuss two cases when life support machines were turned off and brain activity continued for a tiny bit, and to try to insinuate that this means that brains keep working minutes after hearts stop, something that is not true. The article says, "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death."  No, that isn't true at all, because turning off a life support machine is not the same as stopping the heart. Both the heart and the brain may continue to work for a few minutes after a life support machine has been turned off. 

The evidence on this matter is crystal-clear: within 15 or 20 seconds after the heart has stopped, brain activity as measured by EEG dies away to become a flat line. In fact, if we look at the Supplemental Information document of Borjigin's paper on this Patient One, we get some information that very much contradicts what the quote above states (information which also shows the untruth of Borjigin's claim that this patient's brain was in "hyperdrive" as she died). 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of the paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  

The text below this visual tells us this about these stages that are labeled S5, S6, S7, S8, S9 and S10, using the term "bradycardia" which means lower-than-normal heart rate: 

"The pacemaker was automatically turned off (S5) and restarted from S6. S7 starts when rapid heartrate drop was seen which ended when pacemaker was turned off by clinical staff. S8 denotes the bradycardia period where RR interval (RRI) is longer than 5s. In S9, RRI is below 5s (partial heartrate recovery). S10 saw the reappearance of the P-waves and further recovery of heartrate. S11 ends at the last recorded heartbeat with periodical PAC-like ECG pattern."

The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S10 (when there was "further recovery of heartrate") and no brain activity at all at stage S11, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." The case of this Patient One thereby shows the  untruth of the Guardian writer's claim that "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death." To the contrary, the data on this Patient One showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. 

Below is the brain wave data on Patient Three, as displayed in Figure S1C of the supplemental information of the paper.  The blue lines are EEG brain wave readings, and the red line at bottom is an ECG heart activity reading. 

Below this visual is this description which refers to stages such as S5 and S6:

"In S5, heartrate was partially recovered. During this period, R-peak duration increased. P-waves became invisible. In S6, while heartrate was maintained at the same level as in S5, R-peak width returned to a normal level but still without visible P-waves. In S7, while heartrate saw further recovery (shortening of RRI), PR interval lengthening became evident on ECM. The PR-interval continued linear expansion in S8, which ended at the last recorded heartbeat."

The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S7 ("while heartrate saw further recovery") and no brain activity at all at stage S8, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." Like the case of Patient One, the case of this Patient Three thereby shows the  untruth of the Guardian writer's claim that "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death." To the contrary, the data on this Patient Three showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. The data of the supplemental information document tells the same story for Patient Two and Patient 4: none of the EEG lines of the four patients show significant brain electrical activity after the heart stopped beating. 

The data above is consistent with one of the main claims made by those arguing that near-death experiences are beyond any neural explanation: the claim that brain activity ceases within a few seconds after the heart starts beating during cardiac arrest. It is very baffling that Borjigin has given an interview with the Guardian trying to insinuate that the cases of such patients do anything to support any neural explanation for near-death explanation. We may reasonably ask: did Borjigin bother to study the data in the supplemental information of her paper, data that so clearly defies such insinuations?  And did the writer of the Guardian article bother to study such data, defying some of what he wrote?

Borjigin is quoted as making the statement, “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest." This claim is every bit as misleading as saying that the heart is very active when someone shoots a rifle bullet through it. The fact is that a heart will stop pumping when you shoot a rifle bullet through it,  and a brain will stop its electrical activity when the heart stops.  The charts above show how misleading Borjigin's quote is. Why were such charts (contradicting  Borjigin's claims) hidden away in the supplemental information attachment of Borjigin's paper? They should have been in the main text of the paper. 

One of the many misleading parts of the Guardian article is when the author attempts to insinuate that those interested in life after death (and believing in signs from the deceased) have lost interest in near-death experiences, an insinuation that is very untrue. Always expect misleading information in mainstream publication articles about paranormal phenomena. Always remember that the authors of such articles are very rarely careful scholars of the topics they are writing about. 

Near-death experiences are one of the strongest lines of evidence against claims that the brain is the source of the mind. Contrary to the predictions of such claims, when brains have shut down during cardiac arrest (showing only flat lines in their electrical activity), minds often have long, vivid experiences -- not merely some type of experience, but experiences that people routinely report being more vivid than regular life experiences.  And very vivid and detailed memories are formed. In near-death experiences people very commonly report perceiving their bodies from outside of their bodies, from meters away. There is no credible explanation of such reports under the assumption that the brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of your memories. Remarkably, the recent Guardian article is a very long article, and it kind of presents Borjigin's Patient One as its "star witness" for the claim that near-death experiences have a neural explanation. But as I show above, this is a farce, because the actual data of Patient One's death (shown in my second visual above) provides no support  for the claim that near-death experiences have a neural explanation, and strongly supports one of the pillars of the claim that such experiences have no neural explanation: the claim that brains shut down when hearts shut down or a few seconds later. 

A 2017 paper was "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death." That 2017 paper studied the brain waves of four humans who died in Ontario, Canada after their hearts stopped. These were patients different from the four Michigan, USA patients whose deaths were documented in the 2023 Borjigin paper described above. Referring to the 2013 paper co-authored by Borjigin, the 2017 paper stated, "We also did not observe any well-defined EEG states following the early cardiac arrest period as previously reported in rats." Of course -- brain electrical activity stops when the heart stops, or only a few seconds later. The paper points out that "one must be careful about false positive EEG signals from muscular and/or cardiac sources."  Motion and muscle activity shows up on EEG readouts, producing what are called motion artifacts. An involuntary muscle twitch (or a movement by a medical person of part of an unconscious body) a few seconds after death may show up as a blip on an EEG reading. Such a thing is no actual evidence of brain activity during conscious experience. A scientific paper commentary says, "Contamination of EEG recordings by muscle artifact is a well-recognized problem, especially in the high-frequency gamma range, leading to erroneous estimates of EEG spectral power and coherence  (Goncharova et al., 2003; Pope et al., 2009; Fitzgibbon et al., 2013)."  It is just such a false-alarm-prone gamma range that Borjigin's papers on this topic have been centered around. 

Below is Figure 3 from the paper.  In Patients 1, 2 and 3 there is no significant brain wave activity (as shown in the blue EEG lines) after the time point marked 0 (time of last heart beat).  In Patient 4 the EEG lines flatline at five seconds after the heart stopped, and there is about 15 seconds later merely a weak blip or two around the time 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stopped, but that dies away after a few seconds. 

In none of the eight patients graphed in these two papers do we have any substantive evidence of brains working for more than an instant after the patient's last heart beat. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia [heart stopping] without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric." meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this: 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

You can find quite a few additional papers asserting that brains flat-line very quickly after cardiac arrest by doing Google or Google Scholar searches for the phrase "EEG becomes isoelectric" or "EEG becomes iso-electric." 

Postscript: A recent scientific paper referring to EEG readings of brain waves states this: 

"The trajectory of EEG activity following cardiac arrest is both well defined and simple. It consists of an almost immediate decline in EEG power, which culminates in a state of isoelectricity [flatlining] within 20 s [seconds]." 

The paper refers to three studies "where gamma oscillations are essentially or mostly artifactual and non-functional biorhythms masquerading as authentic EEG signals," noting how such oscillations can be produced by muscle movements. The paper concludes by saying this about Borjigin's blips: "Regardless of what the electrogenesis of the gamma spikes ultimately turns out to be, it is highly unlikely that they could be responsible for generating an NDE [near-death experience]."

Traumatic Brain Injury Results Clashing With Prevailing Dogmas About Brains

I have at this site written quite a bit about the preservation of mind and memory after surgeries that removed large portions of the brain, sometimes half of the brain. Examples were my posts "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" and "Cases of High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage." There is another way to look for evidence of how sensitive the mind is to brain damage: we can look for cases of cognitive effects of traumatic brain injury (often referred to as TBI).  Every year we have many cases of traumatic brain injury or TBI that result from events such as accidental falls, traffic accidents, car crashes or people being shot in the head. 

Before discussing such cases, I will need to discuss how there are several reasons why we should assume that the cognitive effects of traumatic brain injuries are probably not as high as typically reported in scientific studies.

Confounding factor #1: the incentive of many to perform poorly on cognitive tests after a brain injury.  There is strong reason to suspect that in many cases people given cognitive tests after a traumatic brain injury may not be trying as hard as they can on the tests. Some of the subjects (such as those injured in a car accident either inside or outside of a vehicle or those who fell in a work accident) may have pending law suits or pending benefit applications, and may think that good performance in cognitive tests may reduce their chance of being rewarded lots of money in a law suit or through a benefit application.  There are three ways in which a person might receive money after a traumatic brain injury:

(1) The person might engage in a law suit against a car driver that results in a large settlement such as an award of $100,000 or more.

(2) A person might apply for benefits under the Worker's Compensation program that provides monthly payments to workers injured on the job. 

(3) A person might apply for disability benefits that can be provided by the Social Security Administration if a worker has been judged to be disabled. 

Given all of these possibilities for potential financial gain after having a traumatic brain injury, it would not be surprising if many people who have had traumatic brain injury do not try as hard as they can on tests of their cognitive abilities. Many people who have traumatic brain injury may think that getting a high score on a cognitive test might damage their ability to get future benefits or future settlement money. 

Indeed, in the paper "Noncredible Explanations of Noncredible Performance on Symptom Validity Tests" we read quite a bit about reasons for thinking that some of those tested after traumatic brain injury might not have been trying as hard as they could.  Here are some excerpts:

"Invalid test results from poor effort or deliberate underachievement do not occur only in groups where there is an obvious external incentive to appear cognitively impaired, such as those seeking financial compensation for cognitive impairment. Even in groups previously assumed to be highly motivated to do well, effort may be poor, leading to invalid test results....Neuropsychologists now know that, in many different contexts, effort can be low to a degree that is sufficient to invalidate test results, especially if there is an incentive to appear impaired (e.g., Chafetz, 2008; Chafetz, Prentkowski, & Rao, 2011; Flaro, Green, & Robertson, 2007; Sullivan, May, & Galbally, 2007)....For people with an incentive to appear impaired and who fail effort tests, the observed test scores typically underestimate actual ability to a marked degree (Fox, 2011; Green, 2007; Meyers et al., 2011; Stevens et al., 2008). In groups of disability claimants or compensation claimants, including those who were already receiving financial disability benefits, it was found that about 30% of cases were not making enough effort to produce valid test results, and in the MTBI group, the figure was roughly 40% (Green et al., 2001)."

There are techniques that can be used to help weed out "memory malingering" in memory tests of those with traumatic brain injury. One technique is to include some easy tests that almost no one fails, and look for failure in such tests, which might be an indication of lack of effort. Another technique is to take the same tests at different intervals, taking the best result at any interval as being the more reliable indication of memory performance. 

Confounding factor #2: selection bias in picking subjects having traumatic brain injury. We must wonder whether the scientists selecting the subjects for papers on traumatic brain injury have a bias in looking for subjects with particularly bad memory problems, because they are hoping to get a result that fits in with the expectations of their colleagues and peer reviewers of their papers. We should look for any confession by the paper authors that they selected patients who had reported memory problems, rather than selecting random patients with traumatic brain injury, regardless of how good their memory was. Any such confession means that the paper may not be telling us about what percentage of traumatic brain injury patients suffer from similar problems. Similarly, if scientists select for some study only people who are gay alcoholics, they may report a high alcoholism rate among gay people; but we won't learn from such a method what percentage of gay people are alcoholic. 

Confounding factor #3: the group of those with traumatic brain injury may be less intelligent and more forgetful than an average group of non-injured people of the same size. While traumatic brain injury often occurs for reasons beyond any person's control, very often such injury happen because of some causal factor that might have been avoided by someone of excellent intelligence and memory. For example, many traumatic brain injury cases occur to reckless or intoxicated drivers, to people who failed to use seat belts, or people who were walking in some dangerous way, to people who were not wearing helmets while bicycling or riding motorcycles, to people who recklessly jaywalked, and so forth. We therefore have a strong reason to suspect that the group of all people with traumatic brain injuries may have had a below-average intelligence or a below-average memory, or both. Accordingly, showing  a small difference in memory or intelligence between those with traumatic brain injury and those without injury does not necessarily show that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

Confounding factor #4: traumatic brain injury may degrade perception, muscle skills, eyesight and hearing skills without decreasing core intelligence and memory, in a way that causes lower scores on cognitive tests.  Cognitive tests are rarely pure measures of memory and intelligence. For example, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged vision ability that degrades his performance on paper-based cognitive tests.  Also, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged muscular ability that degrades his performance on any test requiring muscle skills such as filling in the right little circles on a test sheet. 

Confounding factor #5: incidents producing traumatic brain injury may increase apathy, depression or pain, resulting in lower scores on memory tests that are not caused by lower cognitive ability.  It is has often been reported that following a traumatic brain injury someone may experience pain, depression or an increased level of apathy. Such factors might tend to cause a person to perform more poorly on cognitive tests, for reasons other than cognitive deficits. 

Confounding factor #6: memory tests often involve subjective scores by analysts who may be biased towards giving negative scores to those with traumatic brain injury.  Some memory tests can be performed without any subjective analysis by an analyst. For example,  with the Famous Faces Test, a person either does or does not name the person shown in a photograph.  But in other widely used memory tests, there is a strong possibility of biased analysis. For example, there is an Autobiographical Memory Interview test in which an analyst rates how well a subject has performed when asked to recall incidents at various parts of his life.   But if an analyst knows that a subject has had traumatic brain injury, the analyst may be more prone to rate the subject's response poorly.  To avoid such a bias, a robust blinding protocol would be needed, so that the analyst cannot tell whether the subject had a brain injury.  But neuroscience experiments typically fail to use blinding protocols, and when they are used they are typically not robust protocols.  A robust blinding protocol for a memory test would be one in which analysts could not even see the people giving answers, as such people would often have physical signs of their injury. 

In light of these six confounding factors, under the hypothesis that the brain does not make the mind and does not store memories, we might still expect to see some modest differences in cognitive test scores between those with traumatic brain injuries and those without such differences.  But we should expect that the differences will usually not be terribly dramatic, and that differences might tend to show up sometimes and be absent in other cases.  Let us look at some scientific papers to see whether such an expectation is met. 

• The paper "Cognitive Impairment 3 Months After Moderate and Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Prospective Follow-Up Study" gives us the result of cognitive tests on people who had brain injuries as the result of events such as falls and traffic accidents.  In the Discussion section we read that after moderate Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), "most patients had a normal neuropsychological assessment," with no more than 1 score much below normal (or, to put it more technically, no more than 1 score below 1.5 standard deviations below the norm).  We read that "even after severe [brain] injury, normal performances were found in one third of patients." The authors say, "This was unexpected." We are told that the average total IQ score of 35 subjects with moderate traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 109, and the average total IQ score of 26 subjects with severe traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 103. 
• The paper "Neuropsychological functioning during the year
  following severe traumatic brain injury" studied cognitive functioning in 65 subjects who had severe brain damage, mostly after road traffic crashes. The patients were rated with a level of impairment of "mild" or "severe" on various measures, based on tests 6 months after the injury and 1 year after. Fewer than half of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in memory performance tests taken at the 1-year mark. Only 9% of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in one test of executive function at the 1-year mark, with a minority rated as having "severe" impairment in another test executive function at the 1-year mark. One test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 8% with a severe impairment, and another test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 28% with a severe impairment.  The average IQ of the brain-damaged subjects was 93, and we don't know whether this below-average result was caused by brain injury.  There is reason to suspect that the set of average people suffering from traffic accident brain damage may be slightly below average in IQ, given that those with higher IQ might tend to avoid such accidents. 
• The paper "Association of Traumatic Brain Injury With Dementia and Memory Decline in Older Adults in the United States" used a very large sample of 9,794 patients who had an assessment of traumatic brain injury.  The study says, "There was no significant relation between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness] and memory score or memory decline." We read this: "In a nationally representative prospective cohort of older adults free of dementia at baseline, we did not find evidence for any long-term associations between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness]  (of unknown frequency and severity) and risk of dementia over 14 years of follow-up. " We read that "similarly, decline in memory performance did not differ between participants with or without history of TBI with LOC." The authors state, "Our findings showing no association between TBI history with LOC and dementia are consistent with the results of several other recent studies looking at dementia, AD [Alzheimer's Disease], or AD biomarkers or neuropathology." 
•  The paper "Working memory after severe traumatic brain injury" tested 30 subjects who had almost all suffered brain damage due to high-velocity motor vehicle accidents. All of the patients had a post-traumatic amnesia (typically an inability to remember what happened a certain number of days before the accident). We are told that this post-traumatic amnesia lasted for at least seven days in all patients, and thar for 14 of 21 patients the post-traumatic amnesia lasted 30 days or more, "suggesting that the majority of patients sustained an extremely severe TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the difference in performance between these brain-injured patients and control subjects. For a "digit span" working memory test (Figure 1) and a "word span" working memory test (Figure 3), we see no major difference between the brain-damaged patients and control subjects. There is also no difference in a "Brown-Peterson task" test, when conducted with "no interference."  On some other tasks there is a substantial difference.  
• The paper "Working Memory after Traumatic Brain
  Injury in Children" tested working memory in eighty children with mild or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the performance of the brain-injured with controls, and the first two of the graphs show no appreciable difference in performance in two working memory tests, even when comparing the severe cases with control (uninjured cases).  
• The paper "Central executive system impairment in traumatic brain injury" is one that does not give us a random sample of patients with traumatic brain injury, because the paper tells us this about its 64 patients: "Patients were selected for participating in the study if they complained of lack of attention, poor
  memory or loss of efficiency in everyday life." Despite such a selection bias, Table III of the paper tells us that the majority of the subjects had "normal performance" in long-term memory acquisition, long-term memory storage, long-term memory delayed recall, sustained attention and short-term memory, with an average of about 60% of the subjects being normal in such areas.  
• The paper "Models of Exceptional Adaptation in
  Recovery After Traumatic Brain Injury: A Case Series" discusses nine cases of people who suffered severe brain injuries causing them to be in comas of between 2 and 17 days. All of them made remarkable recoveries. For example, a computer engineer suffering a 15 day coma after a severe crash injury went back to his high-tech job and "helped to plan a complete reorganization of his division." Another recovered from a 14-day coma after a high-speed crash, earning a 4.0 grade point average. 
• The paper "Working memory outcomes following traumatic
  brain injury in children: A systematic review with
  meta-analysis" presents no new experiments, but reviews existing papers on the topic. Using the acronym CE to mean "central executive," the paper says, "Further analyses revealed significant, moderate effect sizes for studies that utilized verbal CE tasks (k = 19, d = −0.56, 95% CI −0.71, −0.41, p < .001), but non-significant and small effect sizes for studies that utilized visuo-spatial CE tasks (k = 7, d = −0.26, 95% CI −0.60, 0.08, p = .13)." The paper notes that "Several studies, however, did not find deficits in CE [executive functions] in children and adolescents who had sustained TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper says, "The results of our meta-analysis, however, indicate that children with TBI do exhibit deficits, albeit small-to-moderate ones, in the PL[phonological loop] relative to controls, but not in the VSSP [visual-spatial sketchpad]." We read that "no relation was found between TBI severity and the two storage components," and that "In contrast to findings relating to the impact of TBI severity and to our expectations based on literature suggesting that the frontal lobes play a critical role in WM [working memory], no relationship was found between frontal injuries and WM [working memory] outcomes." 

These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is not the storage place of memories, and that the mind is not the product of the brain. We see some differences in the cognitive scores of those who had traumatic brain injury and those who did not. But the differences are not very dramatic; they have a kind of "sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't" nature; and the differences seem to be largely absent in a large fraction of the people with traumatic brain injury.  The reported differences can be mostly explained by the six confounding factors listed at the beginning of this post.

As for evidence of damage of episodic memories or learned information after traumatic brain injury, the evidence for it seems to be scant and anecdotal. In general, school-learned knowledge and knowledge of personal experiences seems to survive well after traumatic brain injury. It is sometimes reported that after a traumatic brain injury a person may forget what happened on the day of the injury or for a few days beforehand. It is often said in the literature that people have difficulty recalling only memories acquired a short time before the injury, not older memories. A 2018 paper ("Retrograde Autobiographical Memory From PTA Emergence to Six-Month Follow-Up in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury")

says this::

 "There is evidence to suggest that retrograde autobiographical memory deficits exist after severe TBI, although there have been no prospective studies of autobiographical memory in a representative sample of moderate to severe cases recruited from hospital admissions...The overwhelming focus on memory following TBI [traumatic brain injury] has been on anterograde amnesia, and there has been very little research on retrograde amnesia [people losing memories acquired before the injury]... A deficit in retrograde autobiographical memory performance among individuals with TBI has been found in a handful of studies." 

Judging from such lack of study, and such weak evidence, it would seem that people losing memories or knowledge after traumatic brain injury is not a very big problem.  The study quoted above tries to show evidence of memory difficulties in patients with traumatic brain injury, but finds only minor score differences between such patients and control subjects. The minor differences can easily be explained by referring to the six confounding factors listed at the top of this post. In this case the traumatic brain injury patients studied were all patients who had already been diagnosed as having post-traumatic amnesia of at least seven days, before they were tested. So the study tells us that patients with memory difficulties may have memory difficulties, but it does not tell us about what percentage of people with traumatic brain injuries have serious memory difficulties. Also, the study failed to use a robust blinding protocol. We are told that there were two analysts doing the memory tests (apparently only one blind to whether the subjects had brain injury), and that the scores given were based on a discussion between the two analysts.  That is not a robust blinding protocol, and knowledge of whether the subjects had a brain injury may have affected the ratings given in the memory tests. 

Claims that minds are produced by brains and claims that brains store memories are examples of belief traditions passed on from one generation to the next. The latest generation of college students to adopt such beliefs does not adopt them from a long unbiased independent study of the facts, but as an act of social conformity in which people believe as they are told to believe, like some Sunday school student trustingly accepting whatever belief tenets are taught to him. 

Postscript: The 1915 British Journal of Surgery paper "Gunshot Wounds of the Cranium: With Special Reference to the Brain" gives us short summaries of the outcomes of more than 100 persons who suffered gunshot wounds to the head. 62 of the cases are described as cases of "complete recovery," and most of these involved wounds to the brain. In most of these cases, we are simply given the phrase "complete recovery" as the outcome, with no other description. In some of the cases we are given more explicit statements specifically stating there was a complete mental recovery. For example:

"Case 34 w.-P.b.a. unknown; U,o. 10 weeks. Double frontal injury; Slaphylococcus aureirs ; apparently hopeless ; almost all external parts of both frontals smashed, and a great part removed at operation ; superior longitudinal sinus torn across ; muscle grafted ; tedious but smooth convalescence. Complete recovery, with good mental condition. "

Case 40.-P.b.a. unknown ; U.O. 13 weeks. Right frontal injury ; Siaphylo- coccus aureus ; both upper and lower jaws fractured ; large decompression ; bone and pus removed from brain. This case appeared hopeless, but made complete recovery in respect to his mental condition."

Page 13 of the document "Gunshot Wounds of the Head in 1940" tells us "the cases without initial loss of consciousness include three penetrating frontal lobe injuries."  This is contrary to the dogma that the frontal lobes are some source of consciousness.  The 1979 paper "Long-term outcome after severe head injury" studied hundreds of patients with very bad head injuries. The paper states, "This study was concerned with the severest acceleration head injuries, yet severe physical or mental disability were uncommon."

She Has Photographic Memory and Severe Unmanageable Epilepsy

The normal facts of human memory performance are sufficient to discredit claims that memory formation and memory recall are brain activities. There is not a neuroscientist who can credibly explain how a brain can store a detailed memory.  Nothing known to neuroscientists can explain how learned information or experiences could be translated into brain states or synapse states. Neuroscientists claim that memories are stored in synapses, but we know that the proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years).  We know the kind of things  (in products that humans manufacture) that make possible an instant retrieval of stored information: things such as sorting, addressing, indexing, and read/write heads.  The human brain has no such things.  Humans such as actors playing the role of Hamlet can recall large bodies of text with 100% accuracy, but such recall should be impossible using a brain in which each chemical synapses only transmits a signal with 50% accuracy or less.  Brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of human memory recall which can occur at blazing fast speeds with 100% accuracy. 

I discuss many cases of exceptional human memory in my posts here and here, cases of people with memory far beyond that of the average person. Every additional piece of evidence establishing extraordinary human memory abilities is an additional nail in the coffin of the doctrine that brains store memories. Given all the reasons for thinking the brain is too slow, noisy and unstable to account for human memory performance which can be very fast and very accurate, the credibility of the claim that brains store memories is inversely proportional to the highest observed speed, accuracy and depth of human memory performance. 

Therefore we should note well a case reported last year of a young woman with a very sick brain but memory so accurate it can be justly called photographic or near-photographic. The case is reported in the paper "The Possibility of Eidetic Memory in a Patient Report of Epileptogenic Zone in Right Temporo-Parietal-Occipital Cortex," authored by Brent M. Berry, Laura R. Miller, Meaghan Berns and  Michal Kucewicz.  Neuroscientists seem to like to make it as hard as possible for people to find out about cases of extraordinary human memory; and so they like to use the term "eidetic" (a word few people understand) rather than use easily-understandable terms such as "photographic" or "superhuman-seeming."  I will use the more easily-intelligible term "photographic memory" for this case, which, as we will see, is memory performance so good it is like having a photograph of 300 word pairs in your "mind's eye."

We read in the paper about a young woman once plagued by seizures:

"The patient did have a history of a fall from a bicycle at age 11 with a head injury without loss of consciousness but had about ten minutes of amnesia. The patient also had a history of depression, anxiety (for which patient was treated with citalopram and sertraline due to minimal interaction with anti-seizure medications), and bulimia, as well as osteoporosis. The patient began having events at age 6. These involved staring and inability to respond for 15 to 20 s, although she thought that she did not entirely lose awareness. These occurred about five to six times per day. She had an MRI head scan which was reportedly normal, but an EEG was reportedly abnormal. Based on an abnormal EEG and the description of her events, she was started on carbamazepine, and she stopped having these events which were diagnosed by a primary care physician to be focal seizures with impaired awareness."

We read that the seizure medicine had some limited success, although eventually the seizures returned.  We read, "At age 15, the patient had recurrent seizures with staring, sometimes with inability to respond and other times with preserved responsiveness."  Over the next eight years doctors switched her seizure medicine a few times, but the woman "continued to have events,"  We read that "At age 23, her seizures of the same type (staring with or without loss of awareness and with or without epigastric sensation lasting 10–60 s) started occurring much more frequently (up to every day or multiple per day)."  Seizures are like electrical storms in the brain. We read that around this age the young woman "continued to have seizures from a few times per week up to a few times per day."

As part of being thoroughly evaluated at age 24, the young woman had a variety of cognitive tests. The paper tells us that at age 19 the woman had her verbal IQ measured as 162, which is way, way higher than the average of 100.  We are told that the patient achieved superhuman-seeming performance on a memory test:

" This research protocol instead of using short word lists used 300 paired associates. Interestingly, the patient’s recall was at 99% (298 out of 300). The task itself involved being asked to study a list of word pairs and then were later cued with one word from each pair, selected at random. The patient was then instructed to vocalize the partner of each cue word."

You may realize how impressive this is by considering the result below involving 28 subjects doing a similar test:

"Twenty-eight participants with intracranial electrodes for seizure monitoring participated in a verbal paired-associates task (Fig.1A,B). Participants studied 216... word pairs and successfully recalled 34.8...words with a mean response time of 1908...ms."

Recalling 298 out of 300 words (99%) in a word-pair recall test is obviously memory performance very radically higher than recalling a mere 34 words out of 216 (which is merely 16%). 

We read this discussion of the most extraordinary memory performance by this female subject under a variety of tests:

"What was more interesting was that the patient was able to recite the paired words without the cue prompts (this was true for the vast majority of word pairs which the patient was able to recall with prompt). This was not a temporary or short-term memory phenomenon, as the patient was tested with similar length lists across the next 3 days and 7 days, obtaining results no less than 97% (Table 1, Scheme 2). The lists were randomly generated for each session using words from the same pool as the previous lists so that the memorization of default lists was not an issue. Extended testing beyond any of her neuropsychological clinical testing included PAL testing sessions four times (each made up of 12 word pairs encoded and then given a chance for retrieval repeated 25 times in what amounts to approximately a 45 min session). So, in total, the patient had four assessments of 300 word pairs each for 1200 word pairs on a single day. Researchers, after noticing remarkable performance, went off protocol and went beyond immediate short-term assessment to two more sessions of longer-term memory, asking the patient to simply write out the word pairs that she could remember from the immediate PAL session #1 (the first 300 word pairs). The patient was tested in this fashion 24 h later and then 168 h later. She was able to write out greater than 95% of the words in each session (see Table 1, Scheme 2). Given that this occurred inside the context of acute stress (surgery planning), the patient was also re-tested in a very similar fashion several months later after equilibration to her neurostimulator and had similar results (achieving greater than 97% on immediate assessment of massive word pair sets and greater than 95% on longer-term assessments involving writing out 300 words from one of the sessions on day 0)."

The paper gives us this chart of near-perfect performance in several types of memory tests:

The patient had her brain scanned during some of these tasks. Contrary to the neuroscience dogma that the left brain is more actively involved in language use, the brain scan showed that "No appreciable left cerebral language-related activation was seen with three of the four tasks."

Apparently the doctors were never able to get the young woman's seizures under control, because the abstract refers to her as someone with "medically refractory epilepsy."  That means epilepsy when you have seizures doctors cannot stop. A case such as this helps to discredit the dogma that the brain is the cause of human memory. If this dogma were true, there is only one  thing we should expect to occur in a patient with a very sick brain plagued by the "electrical storms" of seizures, and that is below normal or greatly inferior memory performance, not vastly superior memory performance. 

A story as interesting as this should have been the lead item on one day's Science News.  For many years I have studied the daily "Science News" feeds every day, and I never heard a word about this case, which I only discovered through a Google Scholar search using the phrase "eidetic memory." It seems that when scientists do studies that they claim support their dogmas, we hear all about such stories in our daily Science News feeds and in science magazines such as Quanta. But when scientists produce evidence that defies the prevailing dogmas of scientists, then we are unlikely to hear about such a study.

When neuroscientists want you to remember a case, they give some type of nickname or tag that allows a case name to be conveniently discussed.  So, for example,  if neuroscientists want you to remember a patient with initials of BT, they may refer repeatedly in their paper to "patient BT." But in this paper I have quoted, we have no identification that allows us to conveniently refer to the astonishing subject.  Since the main paper authors are from Minneapolis, Minnesota (in the United States),  we may presume the patient lives in Minnesota.  For lack of a letter phrase to describe this woman, let's call this woman the Minnesota Marvel.  Like the case of Mollie Fancher and the case of the French civil servant with almost no brain and other cases discussed here, the case of this Minnesota Marvel should be studied by  every neuroscientist. 

Wishing to portray the human mind as having powers that are only weak, some materialists deny the reality of photographic memory (also called eidetic memory), despite a wealth of evidence that it exists. 

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

Page 158 of the document here quotes a 19th century newspaper report told of a young girl (Ethel Carroll) with such exceptional memory for speech and music that it was like photographic memory : 

"The first time that the child showed her phenomenal gift was at the age of eleven months. At that time she was taken to see one of Hoyt's plays at the Macdonough Theatre. Upon returning to her home she surprised every one by repeating, word for word, one of the popular songs. From that time until now little Ethel has been a regular playgoer. Now, at the age of four, her memory has developed so remarkably that it is a common thing for her after seeing a new play to sing, without a mistake or the least sign of hesitation, song after song that she had never heard before. She can also repeat the lines of the play with wonderful correctness. The child has a retentive memory for names and dates. In spite of the fact that large numbers of people see her daily, drawn by curiosity, she never forgets the name of any one who is introduced to her, and can tell even the exact day when she first met them, though it may be months after. Recently her wonderful memory was put to a severe test at a concert recital in Oakland. After the performance she was asked if she remembered a certain recitation on the programme, remarkable alike for its length and peculiar phrasing. She had never heard it before, but with a confident smile and a certain enchanting carelessness of manner she recited the entire piece without a break."

A Biologist Calls "Orthodox Science" a "Religion" and "Belief System"

A recent Substack post by cell/molecular biologist Mike Klymkowsky is entitled "Orthodox Science as a (mostly good) religion." He states this:

"As it turns out, I found myself moving to another religion - science, particularly the scientific tradition that emerged in Europe, a tradition open to, and built upon the contributions of many peoples around the globe. The orthodox scientific gospel has been widely embraced and has served as the driver of technological advancement, including dramatic effects on many aspects of human well-being. 'Orthodox Science' embraces a belief system based on the assumption that we can understand the universe exclusively in naturalistic terms, there is no magic, no supernatural forces involved."

What Klymkowsky has called "Orthodox Science" is better described as Darwinist materialism.  It is a creed that is very popular among scientists (particularly biologists), but the creed is not actually science in the sense of facts established by observation.  The creed of Darwinist materialism can be stated like this:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

Although constantly marketed and branded simply as “science,” Darwinist materialism seems to involve a very large element of faith. In particular, it has never been proven that any one complex visible organism or any of its organs or appendages or cell types has ever appeared mainly because of so-called natural selection, or natural selection and random mutations. We can imagine no mathematically credible scenario under which so-called natural selection could produce the fine-tuned protein molecules upon which life depends. An average human protein molecule has a length of about 470 amino acids, and getting an arrangement of such amino acids by chance to produce the functionality of the protein molecule requires an arrangement with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 10 to the two-hundredth power (even if you assume only half of the amino acid sequence has to match the actual sequence of amino acids in the protein). It would seem that such "crippled by small changes" molecules cannot appear through any gradually rewarded "each step yields a benefit" kind of process, because half-versions or quarter-versions of such molecules are useless. Yet Darwinist materialism wishes us to accept natural selection as an explanation for most or almost all biology. Since there seems to be a very large article of faith here, it would seem that we should at least be calling Darwinist materialism a kind of faith-based ideology.

But would it be correct to go even farther, and brand Darwinist materialism as a kind of religion? A supporter of such a belief system would immediately dismiss such an idea as an absurdity. He would vigorously argue: religion is some belief in God, and Darwinist materialism does not entail that.

But such a definition of “religion” is too narrow. Let's consider Eastern religions. These include Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. There are certainly major forms of each of these religions that do not require any belief in a deity. One can be either an atheist or a theist, and still follow either Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. In a religion such as Buddhism, there are some sects that pray to some entity that might be called a deity or the equivalent of a deity, but there are other sects that do not do that. Consider also a modern American religion such as Scientology. Again we have a religion which does not have any belief in a deity at the core of its teachings. As a Scientologist, you can be either an atheist or a theist.

It seems, therefore, that defining religion as some belief in a deity or some system of worship is too narrow a definition of the word “religion.” Scholars have offered many conflicting definitions of “religion,” some of which are too narrow to cover some of the known religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We need a definition that seems to cover almost all cases of religious belief.  One such definition was given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Here is another rather similar definition: we can define a religion as  a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs. This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The idea that Darwinist materialism may be a religion should not seem unreasonable when we consider the activities of two young men, Rod and Bill. Rod decides to become a minister in a church. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented minister-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (parishioners), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Rod may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his church, contributing to things such as religion journals and theological books. If a heretic arises in his church to dispute the accepted teachings, Rod may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.

Bill, however, decides to become a professor of evolutionary biology. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented professor-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (university students), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Bill may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his scholastic tribe, contributing to things such as science journals and science books. If a heretic arises to dispute the accepted teachings, such as someone suggesting there may be purposeful design in living things, Bill may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.  Just as Rod has his miracle stories to tell, Bill has quite a few stories to tell that we might call "miracle stories," stories involving miracles of chance.

Given all these similarities, it seems both Bill and Rod are kind of spear-carriers for a particular belief tribe, products of a sociological structure that encourages regimentation of belief and strongly sanctions deviations from its orthodoxy of belief norms. In this light, the idea that Darwinist materialism may actually be a religion does not seem too far-fetched. Darwinist materialism has a sociological and authoritarian structure strongly resembling the sociological and authoritarian structure of a religion, with evolutionary biology professors and neuroscientists acting like some new priesthood, and members of the National Academy of Sciences or Nobel laureates having a higher authority (just as bishops or cardinals have a higher authority than priests).  The many similarities between scientific academia and the Roman Catholic church are discussed in my post "Why Scientific Academia Is Like an Organized Religion."

In the visual below, we see an authority figure. Is it a minister, a priest, or a scientist?  It's hard to guess, because they act in a such a similar way. 

It is true that the adherents of Darwinist materialism constantly try to brand their belief system as "science," and deny that such a system is a religion.  A religion which positions itself as "science" can be called a stealth religion or a surreptitious religion. 

In his article Mike Klymkowsky tries to "have it both ways." Not candid enough to simply confess that what people such as himself are preaching is a religion and not science,   Klymkowsky tries to get you to believe that it is both science and a religion.  In his article Klymkowsky makes some generalizations about contemporary science that are not correct.  For example, he states this:  "A key component of Scientific Orthodoxy is that its adherents are constrained to talk about observable objects and effects, and to produce models that generate unambiguous and numerically defined and verifiable predictions."  

No, there is no such tendency or constraint within mainstream scientific academia.  Physicists and cosmologists spend endless hours writing about dark matter, dark energy and primordial cosmic inflation, none of which have ever been observed.  Biologists spend endless hours writing about things such as Darwinian macroevolution and a neural storage of memories, which have not been observed. Small-scale changes in gene pools called microevolution have been observed, but no one has observed Darwinian macroevolution.  And no one has ever found a memory stored in a brain by microscopically examining brain tissue.  Theories such as dark matter, dark energy, Darwinism and the theory that brains make minds do not "generate unambiguous and numerically defined and verifiable predictions."   What Klymkowsky calls "Orthodox Science" is a mixture of well-established theories such as the kinetic theory of gases and the theory of gravitation (which do yield precise numerical predictions that match reality) and also quite a few other theories and beliefs that do not yield precise numerical predictions that have been verified, and have not been well-established by observations.  

Klymkowsky makes clear that his religion (which he calls "Orthodox Science") includes no moral component. He states this:

"The principles of Orthodox Science are also abandoned when its disciples start holding forth on moral or ethical issues. Ethics and morals are not part of the Orthodox Science system."

Darwinist materialism is a moral disaster. To properly understand how great a moral disaster it has been,  read my post "The Poisonous Effects of the 'Struggle for Life' Ideology." Darwinism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up many tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

(4) Darwinist materialism has often been taught by free-will denialists teaching the poisonous nonsense of determinism,  a doctrine that offered wrongdoers the idea that they were not to blame for their crimes. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have been centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts.  

If you do something that biology specialists such as  Klymkowsky almost always fail to do, which is to make a long and very diligent study of brain physical shortfalls, extraordinary medical case histories, human minds, human mental capabilities,  and human mental experiences ( in all their strange variety), you will find such a study tends to lead you towards the belief that mentally humans are a reality utterly beyond the explanations of biologists.  Reading the posts of this blog (and reading the long series of posts here while continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right) are a good way to get started on such a study. The person making such a study (and studies of additional topics such as cosmic fine-tuning) will tend to end up thinking that every human is a soul to be respected, a soul with some transcendent source.  The person failing to make such a study may be left trapped in the conformist enclaves  of Klymkowsky's morality-absent religion, where he may keep telling himself silly morally destructive claims such as that humans are "animals" as Klymkowsky claims, or that humans are mere aggregations of atoms.  We should not be surprised to learn about massive levels of dishonesty all over the place within the religion that Klymkowsky suggests has no place for morality.  You should not expect rigorous honesty from those saying that ethics and morality are not part of their religion. 

Klymkowsky tells us that "Orthodox Science holds, rather dogmatically, to a simple set of Popperian principles to guide the behavior of its acolytes...It presumes that its disciples are being honest when describing their observations, experiments, and interpretation...."  Conversely, in an interview  this week a physicist suggests such a presumption may be naive and unrealistic. He says this:

"We, as a community of scientists, are so obsessed with publishing papers — there is this mantra 'publish or perish,' and it is the number one thing that is taught to you, as a young scientist, that you must publish a lot in very high profile journals. And that is your number one goal in life. And what this is causing is an environment where scientific fraud can flourish unchecked. Because we are not doing our job, as scientists. We don’t have time to cross-check each other, we don’t have time to take our time, we don’t have time to be very slow and patient with our own research, because we are so focused with publishing as many papers as possible. So we have seen, over the past few years, an explosion in the rise of fraud. And different kinds of fraud. There is the outright fabrication — the creating of data out of whole cloth. And then there’s also what I call 'soft fraud' — lazy science, poorly done science. Massaging your results a little bit just so you can achieve a publishable result. That leads to a flooding of just junk, poorly done science."

In this site's posts you will find very many examples of such junk science, mainly produced by neuroscientists, who these days tend to have very poor research habits.