The Dubious Comments Under the Neuro-Nonsense Title

 Nautilus magazine is one of those slick "science information" sites where we sometimes get real science and other times get various assorted stuff that is not really science in the sense of being facts. In the latest version of the online magazine, we have an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman. The interview is found under the ludicrous title "Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day." While it is true that the proteins in the brain have such short lifetimes that an estimated 3% to 4% of your brain proteins are replaced every day, it is false that you are a different person every day.  The persistence and stability of an individual's personality, memory and identity despite such heavy turnover of brain proteins is one of many good reasons for thinking that your mind and memory are not brain effects.  If your brain was the source of your personhood, then given rapid brain protein turnover, you might then be a "different person every day."  But it is not that, and you are not that. 

In the interview, Eagleman claims, "When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain."  There is no evidence of such a thing.  The claimed evidence (mainly from badly-designed mouse experiments) has a variety of flaws which makes it far less than robust evidence.  No one has ever found a stored memory by examining tissue in a human brain. If the creation of a memory required "a physical change in the structure of the brain," then you could never instantly form a memory. But humans can instantly form permanent new memories.  If someone suddenly sticks a gun in your mouth, you will instantly form a new memory that you will remember the rest of your life. 

Eagleman states, "The brain builds an internal model of the world so it can predict what’s going to happen next."  There is no real evidence that such a thing happens in a brain, and no one has ever found any such thing in a brain.  No neuroscientist can give a coherent and convincing explanation of how a brain could either produce thoughts or predictions.  

Strangely, Eagleman seems to speak as if neurons are fighting each other inside our brains.  He refers to "this aggressive background of neurons fighting against one another." Funny, I can't remember the last time I felt like I was of "two minds" about anything.  In a similar dubious vein of military speculation, Eagleman then says, "my student Don Vaughn and I worked out a model showing that dreaming appears to be a way of keeping the visual cortex defended every night."  That sounds like one of the least plausible theories of dreaming I have ever heard.  Instead of fighting with each other, the cells in the human body show a glorious harmony in their interactions, displaying teamwork more impressive than that of a symphony orchestra or the construction crew of a skyscraper. 

Commendably, the interviewer asks a good question by asking Eagleman about hemispherectomy patients who show little cognitive damage from the removal of half of their brains. Eagleman offers no explanation for why this would occur if the kind of dogmas he teaches are true, other than the very weak statement that "what this means is that half the real estate disappears and yet the whole system figures out how to function." 

The interviewer then commendably says, "There is a backlash to this idea that everything in the mind is reducible to brain science," and asks Eagleman about that.  Eagleman states very incorrectly "that critique has no basis at all." To the contrary, it has a mountainously large basis, consisting of things like the huge amount of evidence discussed in the posts on this site, very much of which consists of papers authored by neuroscientists themselves.  Speaking briefly like a true-believer dogmatist, Eagleman says, "there's no doubt about this idea that you are your brain," but offers no real support for this claim other than making in the next sentence the strange claim that "Every single thing that happens in your life—your history, who you become, what you’ve seen—is stored in your brain."  

That is a claim that in the human brain there is a record of every single thing a human has experienced, a claim that very few neuroscientists have made.  If such a thing were true, it would not at all prove that "you are your brain," since your identity and self-hood and personality are a different thing than your memory.  Since neuroscientists have no credible theory of either memory encoding or long-term memory storage,  given a brain that replaces its proteins at a rate of about 3% per day, the more that humans remember and the longer that humans can remember, the less credible is the theory that memories are stored in brains.  So Eagleman is not helping his case at all by making the strange claim that the brain stores every experience a person has ever had. If people did retain memories of every thing they had ever experienced, it would be all the more harder to explain how that could possibly occur in a brain subject to such rapid turnover and replacement of its proteins. 

Eagleman offers one other little item trying to support his "you are your brain" claim, but it's paltry. He points out a neurotransmitter called dopamine can affect gambling behavior.  But, of course, that does nothing to show that you are your brain. When I had a very bad toothache long ago, it sure affected by behavior, but that didn't show that I am my teeth. And if you sprained your ankle, it would briefly affect your behavior, but it wouldn't show you are your foot. 

Asked about whether "one day we’ll be able to map all the neural connections in someone’s brain and know what kind of person that is," Eagleman says this will never happen in our lifetimes, but "maybe in 300 years, you could read out somebody’s brain."   But if a person believes that the brain stores memories and beliefs, he should be confident that such a thing will soon happen. If brains stored memories and beliefs, we actually should have been able  to read such memories and beliefs decades ago, about the time people were first reading DNA from cells. Maybe somewhere in the back of Eagleman's mind, he knows that neuroscientists are making zero progress in reading memories and beliefs from brains, and that is what caused his pessimistic estimate. 

Towards the end of the interview, Eagleman begins to contradict what he said earlier with such self-assurance. He states, "It appears that consciousness arises from the brain, but there is still a possibility of something else."  When the interviewer commendably follows up on this by saying, "perhaps not everything is generated by the brain" and "we might be tuning in to consciousness somewhere else," Eagleman answers by saying, "I’m not suggesting this is the case, but I am saying this is still a possibility in neuroscience that we have to consider."

So Eagleman ends up contradicting his previous claim that "there's no doubt about this idea that you are your brain."  After speaking like some supremely convinced dogmatist, he now seems to have lost his certitude, and seems to doubt his previous metaphysical claim that he said there was no doubt about.  He ends by saying this regarding a theory of consciousness:  "Not only do we not have a good theory, we don’t even know what a good theory would look like." But such a thought clashes with his claim that "there's no doubt about this idea that you are your brain."

Engrams Are Touted Like Phlogiston Was Once Touted

 Scientists were once very convinced that they had figured out how burning works.  They were convinced that things burn because inside them is a combustible element or material called phlogiston, and that during burning this combustible element is released. We now know that this once-cherished theory is entirely wrong.  Like the earlier scientists believing in an incorrect theory of phlogiston, many a neuroscientist believes in the dubious idea that there are engram cells that store memories.  There is no robust evidence for any such thing.  In the post here I discuss some of the very many reasons for rejecting such a theory of neural memory storage. In the post here I discuss some of the flaws in studies that claim to provide evidence for engrams. 

A recent MIT press release claims to have some new evidence for engrams, giving us the not-actually-correct headline "Neuroscientists discover a molecular mechanism that allows memories to form."  You might be impressed by hearing such an announcement from MIT, if you had not read my previous post entitled "Memory Experimenters Have Giant Claims but Low Statistical Power." In that post I examined many cases in which MIT had made impressive-sounding claims about memory research, which were based on studies that tended to be unconvincing because of their too-small study group sizes and low statistical power. It's the same old story in the latest study MIT is touting.  

Here are some phrases I quote from the paper, phrases indicating study group sizes or the number of animals showing some claimed effect:

"n = 3 mice"

"n = 30 mice"

"n = 15 mice"

"n = 3 biologically independent samples" 

"n = 4 mice"

"n = 4 mice"

"n = 4 mice"

"n = 4 mice"

"n = 4 mice"

Alas, we once again have from MIT a memory study that has failed to provide robust evidence. A general rule of thumb is that to get modestly persuasive results, you need to use at least 15 animals per study group.  In the latest MIT study, apparently either much smaller sizes were used for some study groups, or the claimed effects occurred in only a small fraction of the animals, such as 4 out of 15 or 4 out of 30.  In either case, the results are not compelling. My criticisms of such papers for using too-small study group sizes is partially based on the guideline in the paper "Effect size and statistical power in the rodent fear conditioning literature – A systematic review," which mentions an "estimated sample size to achieve 80% power considering typical effect sizes and variances (15 animals per group)," and says that only 12% of neuroscience experiments involving rodents and fear met such a standard. 

To help understand why results involving only four mice are not convincing, let us imagine a large group of 1000 astrologers scanning birth and death data, eagerly looking for spooky correlations.  They might look for things such as this:

• A match between a father's month of death and his son's month of birth
• A match between a father's month of death and his son's month of death
• A match between a father's month of birth and his son's month of birth
• A match between a father's month of birth and his son's month of death
• A match between a mother's month of death and her son's month of birth
• A match between a mother's month of death and her son's month of death
• A match between a mother's month of birth and her son's month of birth
• A match between a mother's month of birth and her son's month of death

Now, if one of the astrologers were to show such a match (or a similar correlation), with only a sample size of four, this would be very unconvincing evidence. For it is not very unlikely that four such matches might occur by chance, particularly if there were many astrologers searching for such a match. If the ratio of matches was 4 out of 15 or 4 out of 30, that also would not be convincing, and not very unlikely to occur by chance. But if the sample size was much larger, showing something like 15 out of 15 such matches, that would be compelling evidence for a real effect, being something very unlikely to occur by chance.  Similarly, experimental results in neuroscience papers should not persuade us when only four animals were used, or when 4 out of 15 or 4 out of 30 animals had some claimed effect. There is too big a chance that such results may be mere false alarms, the kind of matches or correlations that might be showing up merely by chance. When thousands of experimental neuroscientists are busily doing experiments and busily scanning data eagerly looking for correlations that can be interpreted as engram evidence, we would expect that very many false alarms would be popping up, particularly when too-small sample sizes were used such as only  four animals, or when low-percentage effects were claimed, such as 4 out of 15 or 4 out of 30. 

Once again, in the Marco paper we have a neuroscience study using mouse zapping.  Typically a study claiming engram evidence will shock a mouse,  and then later send some burst of energy or light to some cells where the scientists think the memory is stored. A claim will be made that this caused the mouse to freeze (in other word, not move) because the burst or energy of light has activated the fearful memory.  Such a methodology is laughable.  For one thing, it is hard to accurately measure the degree of freezing (non-movement) in a mouse, and judgments of a degree of freezing tend to be subjective. A measurement of heart rate (looking for a sudden spike) is a fairly reliable way to measure whether a fearful memory is being recalled, but such a technique is not used in such neuroscience studies. Also, if freezing behavior (non-movement) occurs, we have no way of knowing whether this is caused by a recall of a fearful memory, or whether it is an effect produced by the very burst of energy or light sent into the mouse's brain. It is known that there are many areas of a mouse's brain that if zapped will cause the mouse to show freezing behavior.   (The Marco paper uses the same unreliable technique of judging fear by trying to measure freezing behavior of mice, rather than the reliable technique of measuring heart rate spikes.)  One of quite a few reasons why trying to measure freezing behavior in mice is not a reliable way of determining fear is that fear typically produces in animals the opposite of freezing behavior: a fleeing behavior.  Over my long life I have very many times seen a mouse around my living quarters, but never, ever saw a mouse freeze when I walked near it (the mice always fled instead). 

In the MIT press release, we are told the scientists shocked some genetically modified mice, and that the mice then began to produce some protein marker. We have no way of knowing whether the production of such a protein marker had anything to do with an alleged formation of a memory in the brain. Organisms such as mice are forming new memories all the time, and also producing new proteins all the time. The formation of the protein could have been merely the result of the electrical shocking, not the formation of a new memory.  Or the protein could have formed simply because proteins are constantly forming in the brain, which replaces its proteins at a rate of about 3% per day (as discussed below). Electrically shocking an organism probably produces many a brain effect that has nothing to do with memory formation.  We can compare the brain during electrical shocking to a pin ball machine that lights up in many places at certain times. 

The MIT press release gives a quote by the post-doc researcher Marco that gives us a hint that he may be a bit on the wrong track. We read this:

“ 'The formation and preservation of memory is a very delicate and coordinated event that spreads over hours and days, and might be even months — we don’t know for sure,' Marco says. 'During this process, there are a few waves of gene expression and protein synthesis that make the connections between the neurons stronger and faster.' ”

 

It is utterly false that the formation of a memory requires "hours and days, and might be even months." To the contrary, we know that  a human being can form permanent new memories instantly.  If someone sexually assaults you or puts a gun in your mouth, you will instantly form a permanent memory of that event that will probably last the rest of your life.  But protein synthesis requires many minutes. The fact that humans can form permanent new memories instantly is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting all claims that memories are formed when engrams (new cells or new cell proteins) are produced.  The formation of neural engrams would necessarily take a length of time sufficient to prevent the instantaneous formation of permanent new memories. 

The ability of humans to form new memories in only three seconds was shown by a scientific experiment discussed in this post. 

We would take much, much longer to acquire new memories if the theory of engrams (neural memory storage) was correct.  Discussing the rate of translation (something that must occur during the synthesis of a new protein), the source here states, "It was found that the rate is quite constant across proteins and is about 6 amino acids per second."  A wikipedia.org article agrees, citing a speed of 6 to 9 amino acids per second. The average eukaryotic protein has a length of about 472 amino acids, according to this source.  Dividing 472 by 6, we are left with the conclusion that the synthesis of a new protein must take many minutes.  We cannot be forming new memories by some "engram creation" requiring the synthesis of new proteins, because we can acquire new memories instantly. 

The 2018 paper here gives us a reason for rejecting all claims that memories are stored in brains. The paper finds that proteins in the human brain are replaced at a rate of about 3% to 4% per day. Unlike very many neuroscientists, who seem very skilled at ignoring the implications of their own findings, the authors actually seem to have a clue about the implications of their research. We read the following:

"Here we show that brain tissue turns over much faster at a rate of 3–4% per day. This would imply complete renewal of brain tissue proteins well within 4–5 weeks. From a physiological viewpoint this is astounding, as it provides us with a much greater framework for the capacity of brain tissue to recondition. Moreover, from a philosophical perspective these observations are even more surprising. If rapid protein turnover of brain tissue implies that all organic material is renewed, then all data internalized in that tissue are also prone to renewal. These findings spark (even) more debate on the interpretation and (long-term) storage of data in neural matter, the capacity of humans to consciously or unconsciously process data, and the (organic) basis of our own personality and ego." 

The authors rightly seem to be hesitating about whether there actually is an organic basis for our personality and ego.  Given a protein replacement rate of 3% per day in the brain, we would not be able to remember things for more than about 35 days if our memories were created as brain engrams.  

Postscript: This month the Science Daily site (which so often has hyped headlines not matching any robust research) has been showing a headline of "New Player in Long Term Memory."  The article is about a paper that suffers from the same problems as the paper discussed above.  The paper provides no real evidence for any physical effect in the brain causing memory consolidation.  Examining the paper, I find the same old problems that are found again and again and again in papers of this type, such as the following:

(1) Too-small study group sizes, with several being less than 8 animals per study group (15 is the minimum for a moderately reliable result).

(2) A study involving only mice, not humans.

(3) A use of an unreliable method for judging fear in animals (trying to measure the amount of time a mouse is "frozen" in fear), rather than use of a reliable fear-detection method such as measuring heart rate spikes. 

(4) Citations to other papers that suffered from the same type of problems.

Looking further at the Marco paper (which is behind a paywall, but kindly provided to me by a scientist), I see other methodological problems with it. For one thing, mouse brains were studied hours  after some foot-shocking of mice,  which means there wasn't any real-time matching between a memory creation event and something happening in a brain.  The paper also informs us that "blinding was not applied in the behavioral studies (CFC) and imaging acquisition because animals and samples need to be controlled by treatment or conditions."  Blinding is a very important procedural precaution to prevent biased data acquisition and biased analysis, and we should be suspicious of experimental studies that fail to thoroughly implement blinding protocols.  The paper also makes no claim to be a pre-registered study. When a study does not pre-register a hypothesis to be tested, the scientists running the study are free to go on a "fishing expedition" looking in countless places for some type of association or correlation; and in such cases there is a large chance of false alarms occurring. 

Raven Smarts Defy Prevailing Brain Dogmas

 Professors who lack any understanding of how a brain could produce intelligence like to use localization claims to try to impress us. When a localization claim occurs, a professor will try to impress us with his understanding by claiming that some particular mental function comes from some particular part of a brain.  After hearing such claims, someone might say, "These guys may not the how of cognition, but at least they know the where."  But such localization claims do not hold up well to scrutiny. 

One of the main localization claims that has long been made by neuroscientists is a claim that thought or decision making come from the front top part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. In my post here I cite many neuroscience papers giving evidence that conflicts with such a claim.  For example, the scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence (a plausible assumption given that smarter people would be more likely to have smart behavior reducing their chance of injury). Similarly, this study checked the IQ of 7 patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and found that they had an average IQ of 101.

Claims that thought comes from the prefrontal cortex have always been inconsistent with the observational reality that certain birds behave with a rather keen intelligence, despite a lack of any cerebral cortex. An article on Aeon mentions how there is little correlation between brain size and intelligence, or a correlation between intelligence and the size of a frontal cortex. The article states the following:

"Some of the most perspicacious animals are the corvids – crows, ravens, and rooks – which have brains less than 1 per cent the size of a human brain, but still perform feats of cognition comparable to chimpanzees and gorillas. Behavioural studies have shown that these birds can make and use tools, and recognise people on the street, feats that even many primates are not known to achieve."

An article on the Science Daily site states the following:

"Some birds are capable of astonishing cognitive performances to rival those of higher developed mammals such as primates. For example, ravens recognise themselves in the mirror and plan for the future. They are also able to put themselves in the position of others, recognise causalities and draw conclusions. Pigeons can learn English spelling up to the level of six-year-old children."

There are two separate reasons why the cognitive abilities of ravens, crows and rooks argue against prevailing brain dogmas:  

(1) According to prevailing brain dogmas, animals such as ravens with so tiny a brain should not be anywhere near as smart as they are.

(2) According to prevailing brain dogmas, animals such as ravens with no brain cortex should not be anywhere near as smart as they are. 

In a recent "perspective" article in the journal Science,  a scientist makes a very strange attempt to get us to believe that crows have a cortex. The opinion piece is entitled, "Birds do have a brain cortex -- and think."  The author states that "birds, and particularly corvids (such as ravens), are as cognitively capable as monkeys and even great apes."  Using a tricky choice of words that might fool the average reader into thinking that some birds have more neurons than creatures such as humans, the author states, "Because their neurons are smaller, the pallium of songbirds and parrots actually comprises many more information-processing neuronal units than the equivalent-sized mammalian cortices."  Do not be fooled by this language.  The wikipedia.org page here lists the number of neurons in rooks, ravens and parrots as about  1 or 2 billion, and the number of neurons in a human as 86 billion. So humans have more than forty times more neurons than animals such as ravens and parrots. 

The author's attempt to argue that birds have a cortex is not persuasive.  Referrring to a part of the bird brain called the pallium, she states, "Birds do have a cerebral cortex, in the sense that both their pallium and the mammalian counterpart are enormous neuronal populations derived from the same dorsal half of the second neuromere in neural tube development."  But that's rather like saying that your ten-year-old owns an automobile, in the sense that a bicycle is a wheeled transportation vehicle capable of moving fast like an automobile.  The cortex is defined as a distinctive layer of cells on the outside edge of a brain.  Birds do not have such a distinctive layer of cells on the outside edge of their brains. So the very many scientists who have stated that birds do not have a cerebral cortex have spoken correctly. 

The author attempts to persuade us that the pallium of a bird's brain is kind of like a cortex, by making this dubious claim: "Nieder et al. show that the bird pallium has neurons that represent what it perceives—a hallmark of consciousness."  While we have good reason to think that the smarter birds such as ravens are conscious, there is no good evidence that any neurons of any organism represent something that the organism perceived.  When we look at the reference to the paper by Nieder and his colleagues, we find that it tested only two animals. 15 animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately reliable neuroscience experimental research paper. 

Another article in the journal Science is just as silly as the one I just discussed.  The article is entitled "Newfound brain structure explains why some birds are so smart—and maybe even self-aware." The article contradicts the other Science article by referring to a lack of a neocortex in birds.  The article refers to a paper by Onur Güntürkün and others that obscurely refers to "hitherto unknown neuroarchitecture of the avian sensory forebrain that is composed of iteratively organized canonical circuits within tangentially organized lamina-like and orthogonally positioned column-like entities."

Another article quotes this Onur Güntürkün speaking rather more clearly:

" 'Here, too, the structure was shown to consist of columns, in which signals are transmitted from top to bottom and vice versa, and long horizontal fibres,'  explains Onur Güntürkün. However, this structure is only found in the sensory areas of the avian brain. Other areas, such as associative areas, are organised in a different way."

Of course, the mere existence of such column-like structures does nothing at all to explain the smarts of birds like ravens, particularly since such structures are found only in sensory areas.  There is no possible physical arrangement of neurons that would do anything at all to explain anything like intelligence in any organism. So the  Science article headline claiming that  "newfound brain structure explains why some birds are so smart" is baloney. 

Postscript: A new scientific paper states that despite having tiny brains, mouse lemurs perform pretty much as well as primates with brains hundreds of times larger:

"Using a comprehensive standardized test series of cognitive experiments, the so-called 'Primate Cognition Test Battery' (PCTB), small children, great apes as well as baboons and macaques have already been tested for their cognitive abilities in the physical and social domain...For the first time, researchers of the 'Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit' of the DPZ have now tested three lemur species with the PCTB...The results of the new study show that despite their smaller brains lemurs' average cognitive performance in the tests of the PCTB was not fundamentally different from the performances of the other primate species. This is even true for mouse lemurs, which have brains about 200 times smaller than those of chimpanzees and orangutans. Only in tests examining spatial reasoning primate species with larger brains performed better. However, no systematic differences in species performances were ...found for the understanding of causal and numerical relationships nor in tests of the social domain."

Another study finds that even when ravens are only four months old, they have cognitive skills that rival those of great apes. 

A 330-Page E-Book of Mine, Available for Free

 I collected all of my posts at my blog www.headtruth.blogspot.com and placed them in a single PDF file that I uploaded to www.archive.org, where the file now exists as a 330-page E-book entitled "Why Mind and Memory Cannot Be Brain Effects."  Using a huge number of references to neuroscience papers, this book discredits the common claims that the brain produces the human mind and that the brain stores memories. Such claims are not things taught us by nature, but are merely speech customs of an academia belief community, a community that has discovered many facts conflicting with such claims (facts I discuss in the book).

You can now read the book for free (without any login) at archive.org using the address below:

https://archive.org/details/combinepdf_20200924/mode/1up

The native format you get using that link is instantly usable and very easy to use, but has the one disadvantage that the very many links in the book will not lead anywhere when you click them.  If you are interested in following the many links in the book, you can simply click on the link allowing you to download a PDF version of the book.  After I get a PDF version (using the link below) I am able to follow all of the links in the book.

https://ia801405.us.archive.org/25/items/combinepdf_20200924/combinepdf.pdf

The book can also be downloaded in many other formats (such as Kindle), using the first link above. 

In Neuroscience Papers Bluffing Is More Common Than Candor

The Cornell Physics Paper Server at arxiv.org is mainly useful for finding papers on physics, but it also includes many papers on quantitative biology and computer science. Below are some observations I made after searching for papers with "memory" or "thought" in the title.

Occasionally a neuroscience paper will have a little candor regarding the vast gulf between the claims neuroscientists make and the low-level data they observe. One paper gives us some indications that what neuroscientists observe on a low level is something totally different from the stability we see in long-term memories.  We read the following, in which "turn over" refers to demise and replacement:

"The building blocks of the brain are in constant flux at the subcellular, cellular and circuit level. Synaptic and non-synaptic proteins are mobile [1] and rapidly turn over on the scale of hours to days [2]. Individual synapses continuously change their size and strength both in vitro and in vivo [3–5]. Most notably, however, the mature brain appears to continuously rewire itself, even without experimental intervention [6,7]. This is evident from the perpetual turnover of dendritic spines, small protrusions from the parent dendrites of most cortical neurons that are commonly used as proxies for excitatory synapses. Depending on the cell types and brain regions investigated, dendritic spines are gained and lost at rates ranging from approximately 1% per day in primary visual cortex [8] over approximately 5% per day in the CA1 region of hippocampus [9] to up to approximately 15% per day in primary somatosensory cortex [10] (but see [6,11,12] for potential pitfalls of these quantifications)." 

Another paper refers to it as a "fundamental enigma" that memories can last for even weeks (which is not surprising, given the facts above). Using the acronym LTM for long-term memory, the paper says, "A fundamental enigma is how the physical substrate for storage of LTM can nonetheless be preserved for weeks, months, or a lifetime."

The paper here suggests that there is no understanding of how a brain could ever translate episodic experience or learned knowledge into neural states. The paper errs only in using the term "largely" when it should have used the word "totally." We read this:

"Codifying memories is one of the fundamental problems of modern Neuroscience. The functional mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain largely unknown."

The paper "Long Term Memory: Scaling of Information to Brain Size" by Donald R. Forsdyke is a paper of unusual candor.  We read the following about patients whose brain regions consisted almost entirely of watery fluid rather than neurons:

"The journal Science, under the title 'Is your brain really necessary?' (Lewin 1980), described a series of 600 cases with residual ventricular enlargement that had been studied in Britain by paediatrician John Lorber (1915-1996). Again, while long-term memories were not directly assessed, intelligence quotients (IQs) were. Amazingly, in 60 of Lorber’s cases, ventricular fluid still occupied 95% of cranial capacity. Yet half of this group had IQs above average. Among these was a student with an IQ of 126 who had a first class honours degree in mathematics and was socially normal....The drastic reduction in brain mass in certain, clinically-normal, hydrocephalic cases, seems to demand unimaginable levels of redundancy and/or plasticity – superplasticity. How much brain must be absent before we abandon these explanations and look elsewhere?...Regarding the human brain’s 'massive storage capacity' for object details, Brady et al. (2008) have also challenged 'neural models of memory storage and retrieval.' ...The unconventional alternatives are that the repository is external to the nervous system, either elsewhere within the body, or extra-corporeal. The former is unlikely since the functions of other body organs are well understood. Remarkably, the latter has been on the table since at least the time of Avicenna and hypothetical mechanisms have been advanced (Talbot 1991; Berkovich 1993; Forsdyke 2009; Doerfler 2010). Its modern metaphor is 'cloud computing.' ” 

But such candor and willingness to challenge fossilized dogmas is rare. What is more common is for neuroscience papers to give us bluffing, in which an author pretends to have something he doesn't have, like a poker player with a weak hand acting as if he has a royal flush.  An example is the paper "Neural origins of self-generated thought: Insights from intracranial electrical stimulation and recordings in humans."  The paper would have us believe that it is presenting some evidence that brains produce thinking.

But when we look at the visuals, we see no substantial evidence for such a thing.  Figure 1 and Figure 2 gives us the usual deal in which some tiny difference in signal strength is shown in a very bright color such as bright red or bright blue.  But in Figure 3 we get some hard numbers. We have some graphs showing brain signal differences during thinking, and we can see from the visuals that the percent signal change was never more than a tenth of one percent, never more than 1 part in 1000.   Of course, such a tiny difference in signal strength is no robust evidence at all that brains are producing thought, but is merely the kind of difference we would expect from chance variations.

A recent example of a bluffing neuroscience paper is the 21-page paper "Memory Systems of the Brain," which seems to be bluffing us in the sense that it provides no compelling evidence for such systems.  We have no discussion of how a brain could translate learned knowledge or experiences into neural states or synapse states. We have no discussion of how a brain could store a memory for decades, or even for a single year. We have no discussion of how a brain could retrieve a memory. 

How does the paper manage to fill up 21 pages without any such things? The paper follows various space-filling strategies used by similar papers:

(1) An historical approach is taken in which pages are filled up with a discussion of the history of human thinking about memory. 

(2) Lots of space is used up with a discussion of different types of memory. For example, there is a discussion about the difference between short-term memory, working memory and long-term memory. 

(3) There is a discussion of a handful of cherry-picked case histories, carefully chosen to make us believe in neuroscientist dogmas about a brain storage of memories. 

There are innumerable case histories that could be quoted, but neuroscientists tend to spend excessive time citing the cases of patient H.M and patient K. C.  The author of the "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper repeats the incorrect claim so often made about patient H.M, a claim that he was unable to form new memories. The paper states that patient H.M. "became unable to consciously recollect new events in his life or new facts about the world."  This is not entirely correct. A 14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

Another paper (""Evidence for Semantic Learning in Profound Amnesia: An Investigation With Patient H.M."tells us this about patient H.M.") states this:

"We used cued recall and forced-choice recognition tasks to investigate whether the patient H.M. had acquired knowledge of people who became famous after the onset of his amnesia. Results revealed that, with first names provided as cues, he was able to recall the corresponding famous last name for 12 of 35 postoperatively famous personalities. This number nearly doubled when semantic cues were added, suggesting that his knowledge of the names was not limited to perceptual information, but was incorporated in a semantic network capable of supporting explicit recall. In forced-choice recognition, H.M. discriminated 87% of postmorbid famous names from foils. Critically, he was able to provide uniquely identifying semantic facts for one-third of these recognized names, describing John Glenn, for example, as 'the first rocketeer' and Lee Harvey Oswald as a man who 'assassinated the president.' Although H.M.’s semantic learning was clearly impaired, the results provide robust, unambiguous evidence that some new semantic learning can be supported by structures beyond the hippocampus proper."

Patient K.C. was a patient who had extensive brain damage in a motorcycle accident, but could still remember learned information well. However, he was unable to provide autobiographical recollections of events before his injury.  But a study of a patient with a similar problem  (patient Y.K.) suggests the possibility that memory of experiences was not lost, but merely the ability to recall such information in the form of a first-person narrative. In one source we read the following:

"For example, one patient (Y.K.) was reported to have some knowledge of remote incidents in his life but was unable to 'remember' them (

Hirano and Noguchi, 1998

, 

Hirano et al., 2002

). Using the Remember and Know procedure (

Tulving, 1985

), Y.K. assigned K responses to all of his remote recollections, indicating that he had knowledge of the events as facts but could not actually place himself mentally at the scenes where the events occurred."

The "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper seems to hint that there is no understanding of how a brain could store a memory, when it states this: "It remains unclear how neuronal cooperativity in intact networks relates to memories or how network activity in the behaving animal brings about synaptic modification "  Before stating that, the paper makes this claim: "Clinical evidence indicates that damage to the hippocampus produces anterograde amnesia."  But while there are a few famous cases of patients with impaired recall of past experiences after hippocampus damage, there are vastly more cases of people who could recall previous memories fairly well after the total removal of the hippocampus. 

The "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper conveniently fails to mention the main research paper on the hippocampus and memory: the paper "Memory Outcome after Selective Amygdalohippocampectomy: A Study in 140 Patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy." That paper gives memory scores for 140 patients who almost all had the hippocampus removed to stop seizures.  Using the term "en bloc" which means "in its entirety" and the term "resected" which means "cut out," the paper states, "The hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus were usually resected en bloc."  The paper refers us to another paper  describing the surgeries, and that paper tells us that hippocampectomy (surgical removal of the hippocampus) was performed in almost all of the patients. 

The "Memory Outcome after Selective Amygdalohippocampectomy" paper does not use the word "amnesia" to describe the results. That paper gives memory scores that merely show only a modest decline in memory performance.  The paper states, "Nonverbal memory performance is slightly impaired preoperatively in both groups, with no apparent worsening attributable to surgery."  In fact, Table 3 of the paper informs us that a lack of any significant change in memory performance after removal of the hippocampus was far more common than a decline in memory performance, and that a substantial number of the patients improved their memory performance after their hippocampus was removed. 

In light of these results, it is objectionable for the "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper to have made this claim:  "Clinical evidence indicates that damage to the hippocampus produces anterograde amnesia."  The paper should merely have stated that there are a small number of famous cases of patients who had both hippocampus damage and anterograde amnesia, but that removal of the hippocampus generally does not produce either anterograde amnesia or even a very severe decline in memory performance. 

We should remember that nothing is proven by a few cases in which a small number of people had some brain damage and also a memory problem. We do not know in such cases whether there is a causal relation between the brain damage and the memory problem. If I scanned enough data in hospital records, I could surely find cases in which someone had a toothache before dying suddenly. But that would not at all prove that toothaches can produce sudden death. 

The "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper presents no good evidence that memories are stored in particular parts of the brain. But it does make this claim that it completely fails to back up with any evidence: "Memories are stored in the brain in a distributed pattern in the outer layer of the cortex, related to the area of the brain that initially processed them."  At the end of this statement, the paper makes a reference to another neuroscience paper, as if such a thing had been established by that paper.  The paper is the paper "Declarative and Nondeclarative Memory: Multiple Brain Systems Supporting Learning and Memory" by Larry R. Squire.  That paper fails to state any such claim that memories are stored in the outer layer of the cortex, and does not at all provide any substantial evidence to back up such a claim. 

The "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper does cite another paper co-authored by Squire, the paper "Structure and function of declarative and nondeclarative memory system." When I examine the paper in question, I find it does not actually make the claim that memories are stored in the outer layer of the cortex, and merely weakly says that the neocortex "is believed to be the permanent repository of memory."  The paper in question  does not establish any claim about a storage place of memory, and  merely mentions some small-effect experiments with monkeys that had damage to various regions of their cortex. None of the monkeys had any more than a small deficit in their memory performance after such damage.  For example, we are told in one case of cortical damage, performance declined from 79% correct to 67% correct, and in another such case  performance declined from 79% correct to 77% correct; and it is noted that cortex-damaged monkeys  "were unimpaired at learning and retaining single-object discriminations."  It is not very unlikely that you might get such results purely because of chance variations, particularly if you were using a small sample size less than 15. 

In this paper "Structure and function of declarative and nondeclarative memory systems" we learn that the authors are relying on absurdly underpowered cortex memory studies. For example, Figure 8 refers us to an experiment using only 5 monkeys with cortex lesions, which is way too few for a reliable experimental result. The minimum for a moderately reliable result is 15 subjects per study group.  

Below are some other examples of weak elements in the "Memory Systems of the Brain" paper:

(1) We are told on page 15 that neuroimaging shows that certain regions of the brain show "common activity" when memories are formed. This is irrelevant, because all regions of the brain are active during normal consciousness.

(2) We are told on page 18 that a paper showed "increased activity in the amygdala" for those who learned better. The paper in question actually only showed that those with higher levels of stress hormones in the amygdala tended to remember more.  But that does nothing to show that the amygdala stores memories, but merely shows we remember better when emotionally aroused. You could do a similar test showing that people remember more what they experience when their heart rate is 130 beats per minute rather than a normal rate of only 65 beats per minute.  But that would do nothing to show that memories are stored in the heart. 

(3) On page 14 we are told, "Imaging studies have also illuminated the contributions of distinct prefrontal regions to encoding and retrieval."  At the end of this statement there is a reference to three papers. The first of these papers used only 6 subjects per experiment, way too small a sample size to be a reliable result (15 subjects per study group has been suggested as a minimum for reliable results, and Kelly Zalocusky PhD hints that 31 subjects per study group may be needed). The second of these papers suffered from the defect of judging strength of memory based on subjective "confidence levels" rather than objective accuracy, and also the very large defect of failing to specify how many subjects were used for the experiments (we are told 14 subjects gave their permission to be tested, but not told how many subjects actually participated; and the graphs suggest that maybe only half that many participated). The third of the papers presents no original research. 

Containing some very dubious assertions, some references to weak research and some troubling omissions (such as no mention of the supremely relevant research of John Lorber or the short lifetimes of synapse proteins), the paper "Memory Systems of the Brain" is an example of a bluffing neuroscience paper (in the sense that its title suggests something the paper does not deliver). The author does nothing to describe a system of the brain capable of encoding memories. He does nothing to describe a system in the brain capable of storing memory information. He does nothing to describe in the brain a system capable of preserving memory information for decades. He does nothing to describe a system in the brain capable of retrieving memories. So he does not describe any such thing as a memory system in the brain.  Nature never told us that brains store memories; it was merely neuroscientists who told us that, without any good evidence for such a claim. 

Young Age of Languages Contradicts Claims of Neural Storage of Linguistic Information

The term “memory” refers to an extremely large set of faculties of the human mind, including all of the following:

Linguistic retrieval: the ability to recall particular stretches of words that have been memorized, and the ability to very rapidly use words you have been learned. The vast human ability for linguistic recall is shown by stage actors who memorize very large roles such as the role of Hamlet. An even greater capacity for recall is shown by Muslims who memorize every word of their holy book. Humans can also use words at dizzying speeds, which may involve people speaking at a clip of more than 2 words per second.

Literary passage recognition: the ability to identify particular literary passages when they are recited. Biblical scholars often show great capacity in this regard, and can often identify the correct biblical book (and often the exact chapter and verse number) when any of thousands of scriptural quotes are recited.

Word recognition: Humans have an immense ability to recognize words very rapidly. We see this going on whenever anyone understands someone talking very rapidly. English speakers with a good vocabulary can instantly recognize and understand more than 50,000 words.

Visual retrieval: the ability to recall in great detail particular visual experiences a person had. Legal testimony shows that humans have a very high capacity in this regard, although accuracy is probably less than for memorized literary information. Court witnesses will often give very lengthy testimony mentioning dozens of visual details of things they saw.

Visual recognition: the ability to identify a place, object or face when someone sees it. Human ability in this regard is very high. The average person can probably recognize 5000 or more objects and 5000 or more faces, even when seeing objects with large amounts of variations. For example, you can not only recognize a single photo of the latest US president, but can also recognize a hundred different photos of such a person, each with its own variations. Visual recognition occurs with blazing speed, often taking less than a fraction of a second. A person may take less than a second to start running away from an animal recognized as a danger, such as a wolf, bear or snake.

Musical retrieval: Humans have extremely impressive capacities for musical retrieval. Such abilities are shown by people such as pianists who can play hundreds of songs from memory, and opera singers who can sing all the notes of very long Wagnerian musical roles such as Tristan, Siegfried or Hans Sachs.

Musical recognition: Humans have an astonishing ability to recognize pieces of music, even when they are performed with variations. We saw this ability on television in the popular TV show Name That Tune.

Fast musical memorization: This very rare ability is shown by some musical savants who have the ability to memorize any piece of music they hear a single time.

There is not a single one of these capabilities that can be explained as products of the human brain. We know of no neural faculties that can explain instant visual recognition.  There is no convincing evidence that any part of the brain works harder during visual recognition than during visual non-recognition. A scientific paper tells us, "Specific complex mental processes cannot be inferred directly from functional brain imaging data." 

The study here is an example of a brain scan study failing to provide evidence that the brain produces visual recognition.  The study has the inappropriate title "Successful Decoding of Famous Faces in the Fusiform Face Area," an idea that is not at all shown by the paper. The paper describes a brain scan study in which 17 people had their brains scanned while looking at famous faces that should have provoked recognition. According to Figure 3, 11 out of 12 brain regions checked showed a 1% or less percent signal change during facial recognition, not more impressive than we would expect to have by chance. A single tiny brain region (called Right FFA) showed a 2% percent signal change, when tested with faces of 2 Israeli prime ministers.  But in a replication experiment using the famous faces of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, this result did not hold up, with the percent signal change being no greater than 1% for any brain region.  The paper does not give any test comparing recognition versus non-recognition.  All in all, this is no compelling evidence that something from a brain is retrieved when people recognize a face. Another paper also gets a result of only about 1% percent signal change when testing face recognition in different brain areas, getting only about a 1% signal difference for this FFA region.  Two other papers (this paper  and this paper) also find less than a 1% signal difference in this FFA region when testing facial recognition.  Another paper finds only a half of 1% signal change in the FFA during face recognition. Another paper using a larger sample size of 26 people reports a signal change of much less than 1% (only a small fraction of one percent) when testing this FFA region with face recognition. 

Such tiny percent signal changes do nothing to establish any reading of information from brains when visual recognition occurs. For one thing, since the sample sizes are mostly small (around 15 people per study), you could easily get a 1% or 2% signal variation by chance (just as you can easily get 55% of your coin flips being "heads" if you only flip 20 or 40 times).  If there is some tiny little signal change in one region of the brain when a face is recognized, that might be something that has nothing to do with reading memory information from brains. For example, it might be a little of an alert effect or an "aha" emotional boost effect caused by the mere fact of a successful recognition. 

But at least someone might argue that there was lots of time for a visual recognition capability to have evolved in a brain, and that if humans have some neural capability for fast visual recognition, such a capability might have very gradually evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, or millions of years. Such a person might argue that there was a big reason why such a capability was vital for survival.  It is at least true that a species will be much more likely to survive if organisms of that species can recognize their own offspring, and instantly recognize another animal as a dangerous threat. 

But in the case of language and musical memory capabilities, we have a totally different situation.  There is no survival-of-the-fittest reason why any organism would have either impressive language memory capabilities or impressive musical memory capabilities. Neither language nor music is needed for an organism to survive in the wild.  

There is a very big reason for disbelieving in a neural storage of linguistic information. The reason is that all of the languages used by humans are relatively recent inventions.  Languages such as the English language that I speak are less than a thousand years old.  There would have been no time for humans to have evolved some language storage capability for a language that has existed for such a relatively short time. 

In ancient times people spoke languages such as Latin and Greek. You can see that the English language is less than a thousand years old by looking at the text of the early English poem Beowolf, which dates from about 700 to 1000 AD.  Below are its opening lines (you can read the full text here):

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð

feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,

oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra

ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.

It is clear from this that the English language as it is now spoken has existed for less than a thousand years.  How could the brain have some elaborate system that allows Hamlet actors to store all the lines of very long English language roles such as Hamlet, when the English language has not existed for more than a thousand years? This seems impossible. 

Could it be that through some miracle of rapid evolution that the human brain has acquired some great neural capability that it did not have a thousand years ago, allowing it to store lots of data from a relatively recent language such as English? All claims of rapid new function evolution are mathematically unbelievable, and there is no evidence of any such rapid change in the human brain or the human genome.  The article here at a major science journal is entitled "Scientists track last 2000 years of British evolution." All that is mentioned is a few minor things such as greater lactose tolerance.  There is no mention of any brain evolution.  It seems that 2000 years ago people had the same brains they have now. There is no evidence that the brain has undergone any change after the birth of Jesus that might allow an ability to massively store (and instantly retrieve) words in a language that is less than a thousand years old.  An article in Scientific American states, "The past 10,000 years of human existence actually shrank our brains."

A similar situation exists in regard to music. Musical notation is a relatively recent invention, an invention so recent that no melodies survive from before the time of Jesus. But Wagnerian tenors are able to memorize not just songs but musical roles that involve hours of very specific singing.  No one can explain how a brain could have acquired such a vast ability in storing and retrieving musical notes given that musical notation is such a relatively recent invention, and given that musical rememberance is a superfluous skill having nothing to do with human survival. 

Study Finds Equal Brain Connectivity in All Mammals

Observational realities frequently conflict with attempts to correlate brain size and intelligence. In a scientific paper a scientist states, "After correcting for body height or body surface area, men's brains are about 100 g heavier than female brains in both racial groups."  After adjusting for size, male brains are 7% larger, but there is not even a 3% difference in intelligence between males and females. Elephants have brains several times larger than human brains,  but elephants are not as intelligent as  humans. Removing half of a human brain in a hemispherectomy operation has no major effect on intelligence, as discussed in the posts here.  Crows have high intelligence despite tiny brains, and a lack of a neocortex. 

Sometimes it is argued that the real measure of cognitive ability is brain connectivity (the degree to which brain cells are connected with each other).  It has been suggested that maybe humans are smarter than other mammals because our neurons are better connected. But a new study indicates that the brains of humans are not better connected than the btains of other animals. The study is announced on the Science Daily web site with this headline: "MRI scans of the brains of 130 mammals, including humans, indicate equal connectivity."

We read the following:

"Researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Prof. Yaniv Assaf of the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Sagol School of Neuroscience and Prof. Yossi Yovel of the School of Zoology, the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, conducted a first-of-its-kind study designed to investigate brain connectivity in 130 mammalian species. The intriguing results, contradicting widespread conjectures, revealed that brain connectivity levels are equal in all mammals, including humans." 

A Professor Assaf is quoted as stating, ""Many scientists have assumed that connectivity in the human brain is significantly higher compared to other animals, as a possible explanation for the superior functioning of the 'human animal.'" But it turns out that this assumption (a natural one from the idea that your brain is the source of your mind) just isn't true. 

So we have the brain connectivity of mice, the brain connectivity of cows, the brain connectivity of sheep. This is another reason for believing that the human mind (so vastly superior to the mind of such animals) is not produced by the human brain.