They Kept Torturing the Data Until It Confessed to "Time Cells"

Behold the power of the modern neuroscientist. Like a magician making you believe in something that did not really happen, a neuroscientist can make you believe in something that's not really there. Part of the trick is to just use loaded language to describe particular cells. So if a neuroscientist wants you to believe that some cells store memories, he can just start calling any arbitrary cells he has selected "engram cells." And if a neuroscientist wants you to believe that some cells have something to do with time-related episodic memories, he can just arbitrarily pick some cells and start calling such cells "time cells." And if the neuroscientist wants to suggest that some cells store information about some place, he can just arbitrarily pick some cells and start calling such cells "place cells."  There are no generally agreed upon standards for identifying some cell as an engram cell or a "time cell" or a "place cell." A neuroscientist can make up any criteria he wishes for identifying some cell as an engram cell or a "time cell" or a "place cell."

Let us look at one of the studies claiming to supply evidence for so-called "time cells." The study is entitled, "Time cells in the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex support episodic memory." At the very beginning of the paper we have a definition of time cells designed to make sure they will be found: "Time cells are neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex that fire at specific moments within a cognitive task or experience." It is well known that neurons are constantly firing. The page here (entitled "Neuron Firing Rates in Humans") states, "we expect average firing rates across the brain to be around 0.29 per second," meaning an average neuron would fire several times each second.  So if you have defined time cells as cells that "fire at specific moments within a cognitive task or experience," of course you will be able to find such cells, since neurons are constantly firing.  But in the next paragraph the text describes time cells as cells that "encode temporal information."  Of course, that's an entirely different definition.  The switch in definition does not inspire our confidence. 

The scientists describe below just a little bit of their convoluted and wildly unnatural method for trying to detect time cells:

"To identify time cells, we looked for an interaction between time and firing rate using a nonparametric ANOVA across time bins (Kruskal–Wallis test) after generating session-wide firing rate tuning curves with Gaussian convolution of the spike trains. Significance testing incorporated a permutation procedure, in which we repeated the ANOVA 1,000 times after circularly shuffling the original tuning curve."

This is not even a full description of the convoluted method the scientists have used to try to gin up some evidence for time cells. When you read the supplementary information of the paper, you will read about many other procedural twists and turns of their Byzantine method. For example, we read this:

"We first down sampled the spike train by a factor of 32 or 30, depending on the original sampling rate. We then compared the fits of two models that describe the likelihood of spiking activity at any given sample along the length of the encoding list (for encoding time cells) or retrieval list (for retrieval time cells)....A time field model, specified by a total of four parameters, included a Gaussian field of increased firing probability located somewhere along the length of the encoding list...The former was bound between 0 and 1, so that the mean of the field was located within the encoding list. To prevent excessively large Gaussian fields appearing as a flat line across the list, the standard deviation was bound at 1/6....We used matlab’s particleswarm with fmincon as a hybrid function to minimize the negative log-likelihood of these models to solve for their parameters.... We fit the model to data from all lists, only odd lists, and only even lists to avoid a single list driving the effect."

Reading about this labyrinthine methodology,  I'm reminded of a saying commonly stated among experimenters: if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. 

Neuroscience experiments often go rather like this

The visual evidence the authors present as evidence for "time cells" are some "spike heat maps," not anything coming directly from any scientific instrument, but some visuals resulting from some convoluted arbitrary fiddling with the data.  Such "spike heat maps" don't look impressive at all, and look like what we would get from random data. 

There are two things we would like to see in a study such as this, in order to have any faith that it has actually discovered any evidence of cells that "encode temporal information":

(1) Evidence of pre-registration.  To have some faith that the scientists were not just playing around with data analysis until they found some faint effect they could call evidence of what they wanted to see, we would like to see the paper tell us that the study was a pre-registered study in which the scientists tested only a very specific hypothesis they had previously publicly committed themselves to testing (before collecting any data), using one and only one method of data gathering and data analysis they had previously publicly committed themselves to (before collecting any data).  We can assume the study was not pre-registered, since no claim is made of such a thing. 

(2) Evidence of blinding.  For a study like this to be credible, we would need to see a description of how an exact blinding protocol was followed, to reduce bias in data gathering and data analysis. No mention is made of any blinding protocol. 

The study provides no robust evidence at all that there are cells that "encode temporal information."

Common Experiences That Show the Untruth of Professorial Memory Claims

Scientists have an "ivory tower" dogma about memory formation that is contradicted by much of human experience. The dogma is that you cannot instantly form a long-term memory.  The reason why scientists believe this very silly notion has to do with their groundless theory that memories are stored in brains through the strengthening of synapses. The strengthening of synapses would require the synthesis of new proteins, which requires minutes. 

So a neuroscientist will typically claim that you can't instantly acquire a permanent long-term memory, an idea that is sometimes called the theory of consolidation. They will claim that if you learn something just once, or see it just once, it will only exist in short-term memory, and quickly fade away. They will claim that repeated exposures are required of some thing to be learned, and that over the length of these repeated exposures, there will be time for synapses to be strengthened through protein synthesis. 

A statement of this theory of memory consolidation appeared recently in an MIT press release, making claims I debunk here. In the press release 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.' ”

Such a dogma is described like this in a scientific paper, which attributes to "common sense" something that is actually contrary to common sense and common experience:

"Common sense believes that long-term memory (LTM) is difficult to form for it requires repeated efforts for acquiring. The consolidation theory suggests that LTM needs hours to convert labile memory to LTM. This process requires the synthesis of new proteins that supports long-lasting changes in synaptic morphology." 

I could cite some animal studies that contradict such claims. But there would be no point in doing so, for we do not need any peer-reviewed scientific studies to prove that humans commonly form long-term new memories instantly. There is an abundance of very common human experience that can be cited to prove that humans routinely form new long-term memories instantly. 

Let us consider the simple case of a diary writer who has the habit of writing down in his diary before he goes to bed the events of the day.  Such a diary writer will have no trouble recalling all the important events that happened during the day, even events that he has not reviewed in his mind after they happened. Under the classification system used by psychologists, memories of things that happened twelve hours ago are long-term memory, and only memories of events within the past few minutes are short-term memory. 

Consider also the case of a store owner. He sees a customer he may have seen a few days ago, only briefly, for the first time. Upon seeing the customer the second time a few days or weeks later, he may say, "Good to see you again." Such a store owner has formed a long-term memory after only a single brief encounter with a person. 

It is a fact of human experience that humans can form long-term memories after listening to a teacher describe a historical incident only one time.  For example, after you heard your history teacher describe for the first time the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar or John Kennedy, you probably remembered such stories long enough to pass a test in that class a few days or weeks later; and there is a good chance you remembered such accounts for years.  It was not necessary for the teacher to tell the stories two or three times for you to form a long-term memory of them. 

An extremely common example of the instant formation of long-term memories is how we remember movies and TV shows we have already seen. Imagine you see a particular movie on television for the first time.  If you were paying attention while watching, you will instantly form a long-term memory of the events in that movie.  Then a few months or years later you may see the movie showing again on TV, which frequently has repeat showings of movies and TV shows.  What will you typically do when you find the TV showing that old movie you saw a few months or years ago? If you particularly enjoyed the movie, you may want to watch it again. But more commonly, you will just change the channel, thinking to yourself, "I've already seen that one."

Why do you do that? It's because you remember the story of the movie, after having seen it only one time. So you change the channel, because you want to see some fresh never-before-seen story rather than some story you remember.  This would never happen if the dogmas of neuroscientists were true. If it required minutes for you to synthesize a protein to strengthen synapses in order to form a memory, you would never be able to remember things in a movie at the speed at which a movie or TV show is displayed. 

You can do a test to refute claims that it takes many minutes for you to form long-term memories. Five minutes after you finish watching a movie (which is longer than the maximum retention time attributed to short-term memory), ask yourself to orally tell what happened in the movie. You will be able to recount the whole story if you paid attention while watching it.  There will not at all be any "catch-up" effect in which you start to remember the movie's story better a half an hour or hours later after your synapses and proteins have caught up in their storage work. This is because you aren't actually storing memories through protein synthesis or synapse strengthening.  There is no real evidence for a brain storage of memories. You remember things just as if your brain had no involvement, and you can instantly form a permanent new memory when something important happens.  When someone slaps you hard on your face, you will instantly form a vivid permanent new memory.  You do not require repeated slaps for you to remember being slapped. 

Brain proteins have an average lifetime of less than two weeks. Your brain replaces its proteins at a rate of about 3% per day, and you wouldn't remember things more than a month or two if your brain was storing memories. But people like me have very good memories of trivial things they saw 50 years ago. The other day I was watching an episode of the old "Columbo" TV series from the early 1970's. I correctly identified the full names of an actor and actress that were guest stars, both people I hadn't seen on TV in many years. Then I saw the face of a very little-known actor I haven't seen anywhere in almost 50 years. Very quickly I correctly identified that his first name was John, and that he had played a role in a short-lived TV show canceled in 1971. I quickly remembered the full names of two of the actresses in that short-lived TV show never shown after its cancellation in 1971, and also the name of the show.  One of these actresses was one I hadn't seen on TV or in the movies for  nearly 50 years. There was no memory consolidation involved in the preservation of such memories, involving persons I haven't seen or recalled in countless years.  While watching another "Columbo" episode, I saw Joyce Van Patten, who I remembered as the co-star of some series with Bob Denver, some TV series involving a diner. I hadn't seen the series ("The Good Guys") or read a word about it or thought about it since its cancellation in 1970. No one would have such 50-year memory retention of obscure things if your memories were stored in a brain that replaces its proteins at a rate of 3% per day, and no one would be able to recall such very obscure facts instantly if memories were stored in the brain (something without anything such as indexing allowing fast retrieval). 

The idea that repeated exposures are required for permanent memory formation is nonsense contrary to a large-fraction of human experience.  The only reason neuroscientists spout this nonsense is that they have committed themselves to some theory of neural memory storage. When I hear a PhD speaking the obvious nonsense that humans require repeated exposures of sensory information to have long-term memories of things, it's one of those times when I say to myself, "It takes a professor to be that blind." Isolated in some ivory tower ideological enclave in which adherence to group belief tenets is regarded as mandatory, a professor may start to believe things that make no sense and are contrary to abundant human experience.  He then may end up making some obviously false claim that would never be made by a truck driver or a plumber or anyone else who had not been so conditioned by academia groupthink. 

A Psychologist's Dubious Generalizations

 At an online site we have an interview with a psychologist who has written a book that claims to be teaching lessons about the brain. In the interview we have the usual oracular proclamations by a neuroscientist, without any reference to specific research studies or specific experiments. We are expected to accept such  ex cathedra declarations, like some Sunday school student is expected to accept whatever dogmas are taught by some minister teaching his class. 

The psychologist gets off to an extremely bad start by saying in the first paragraph, "Every thought you have, every emotion you feel, every action you take is ultimately in the service of regulating your body." That statement is quite absurd and untrue.  Philosophical thoughts and political thoughts and religious thoughts have nothing to do with regulating your body. The psychologist repeats the same obviously untrue statement later in the interview, by saying, "Everything you think, feel, and do is a consequence of your brain’s central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget."  Of course, this is nonsense.  When you watch TV or play games or read a novel, such activities are not at all "a consequence of your brain’s central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget." 

The rest of the interview just follows the old technique of describing the workings of the mind or will, and describing that as some action of the brain. The psychologist presents no evidence that most of the things described are products of the brain; she just keeps saying your brain does this and your brain does that.  Our psychologist makes this claim: "Emotions don’t happen to you—they are made by your brain as you need them."  No, you don't need to feel anger or disappointment when your favorite quarterback throws an interception; and you don't need to feel lust when you see a naked person on your laptop or TV; and you don't need to feel joy when your sports team does well; and you don't need to feel hate when you see someone on TV acting in a revolting manner;  and you don't need to feel grief when someone dies; and you don't need to feel wonder when you look at a sky ablaze with stars. 

Later our psychologist tells us "your brain doesn't know what's going on in the outside world." That at least is correct, although completely inconsistent with many of the other statements she makes.  Your brain does not know about the outside world, and no one has ever discovered knowledge of the outside world by examining neurons. It is only your mind that knows things. 

The interview was the usual procession of softball questions we see in interviews with scientists. Just once I would like to see a journalist asking a lot of probing questions when interviewing some authority spouting doubtful claims about the brain.  In such an interview, in which a journalist would act like a real journalist, there would be frequent questions like this:

• "Is there any robust evidence for such a claim? If so please explain what that evidence is."
• "So you mention some studies. Were they well-designed pre-registered studies using a good blinding protocol and adequate study group sizes after a sample size calculation was done? Or were such studies the kind of weak research that uses questionable research practices?"
• "On a scale of 1 to 10, in which 1 is pure speculation, and 10 is something directly observed like a moon of Jupiter is directly observed, how strong would you rate the evidence for that claim you just made?"
• "So you say your brain is thinking, but do you really have any understanding of how neurons could produce a thought?"
• "So you say your brain remembers things, but how could a brain remember things that happened 50 years ago, when the brain replaces its proteins at a rate of 3% per day?"
• "Do you really have any understanding of how a brain could translate some learned konwledge into brain states or neural states? If so, explain how that works."
• "Do you really have any understanding of how a brain could instantly remember some knowledge learned many years ago? If so, explain how that works."
• "So if brains do our thinking, how come so many of Lorber's patients had above-average IQ's and brains that were mostly destroyed by disease?"
• "If brains store memories, how come no one has ever found a memory in the brain of a dead person?"
• "So is it your habit to just always say 'the brain does this' when you merely know that a mind or a person does that thing?"
• "Have you studied evidence with conflicts with your claims about the brain, such as evidence for psychic phenomena? If so, what fraction of the 100 main books presenting such evidence did you read?"
• "Have you studied neuroscience case histories that seem to conflict with the standard claims about brains, such as people who think and remember well after removal of half a brain? How do you explain such cases?"
• "When you first started thinking that the brain does that thing, was it because some experiment or observation forced you to believe that, or did you just start thinking the brain does that thing because the people at your school thought such a thing?"

No One Can Credibly Explain Why a Brain Would Store a Memory in One Specific Spot

 The theory of the Christmas activity of Santa Claus is one that very small children will accept, but a theory that a child will discard once he gets a little older.  There are too many obvious detects in the theory for a mature mind to hold it: the impossibility of fitting toys for all the world's children in a single sled, the impossibility of such a sled being able to deliver millions of toys on a single night, and the impossibility of Santa Claus getting into so many locked homes.  Like the theory of Santa Claus, the theory that brains store memories does not hold up well to scrutiny.  Among dozens of good reasons for rejecting the theory, there are:

• the fact that brain proteins have a lifetime of less than two weeks, which is 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time that humans can remember things (60 years or so);
• the fact that no one has any coherent explanation as to how human learned knowledge could ever be translated into neural states or synapse states;
• the fact that humans can form new memories instantly, much faster than the time required for some kind of cellular or synapse modification to occur;
• the fact that no one has ever found any trace of stored information (other than the DNA information in all cells) by studying brain tissue;
• the fact that removing half of someone's brain (as is sometimes done to treat epilepsy patients) has little effect on memory;
• the fact that no one can explain how a brain (without any indexing system and without any position notation system) could ever instantly find the exact spot where some memory was stored in it, which would be like instantly finding a needle in a haystack. 

The more we scrutinize the theory that memories are stored in brains, the more problems we become aware of. Let me discuss a problem that was not one of the 30 reasons I previously gave for rejecting the claim that memories are stored in brain, but a different reason.  I refer to the problem that no one can give a credible explanation as to why a brain would store a memory in one specific spot in the brain. 

Let us consider some examples of information storage, and consider the question:  when a piece of information is stored, why is it stored at the specific place that it is stored?

Example of information storage	Why is the information stored in the specific spot where it is stored?
Arrival of a new email	All new emails are put at the top of a “stack” of emails
A student taking notes on one day in a class on some subject	The student selects a subject notebook, and writes at the first blank page of the notebook
A person making a diary entry	The person makes the entry in whatever page is marked with a date corresponding to that day's date
You save a new file on your computer	You are provided an interface allowing you to select some folder or directory on your digital device. After you choose a name for the file, the operating system in your computer creates a new file in the specified location, using an operating system routine for selecting empty space in that location.
You buy a book, and take it to your house	You manually select at random an empty space on a bookshelf, and put the book there
You receive an important letter you want to save	You select the appropriate file folder in your file box or file cabinet, and stick the letter in that file folder
You add an item to a “to do list” document you have on your computer	You simply scroll down to the end of your document, and write the new item at the end of the document
You just type some new text in whatever computer document you are currently working on.	Within your document is a blinking cursor that represents the current position, and your newly typed text is added at that position in your document.
You take a new photo with your digital camera.	The digital storage card in your camera is like a stack of photos, and each new photo gets added to the end or beginning of the stack.

So we can see that when information is physically stored, there are specific reasons why particular items of information get stored in specific locations. Let us now consider the human brain, and the theory that a new memory gets stored in some tiny little spot in the brain. Such a theory raises the question: why would a brain store some new memory exactly at that spot, rather than any of 10,000 other little spots in the brain? There are various possibilities you can imagine, but none of them seem to be credible. 

One possibility you might imagine is that a brain puts a new memory kind of "at the top of the stack" or "at one end of a chain." Being very imaginative, you can imagine extraterrestrial organisms that might have some kind of stack-like brain or chain-like brain, so that the organism might put each new memory at the top of such a stack or at one end of such a chain. But the human brain bears no resemblance to a chain or a stack. There is no "end writing position" or "first writing position" in the brain to which a brain could write if it were following a "put new information at the end" rule, or "put new information at the beginning" rule. 

Another possibilty you might imagine is that a brain might have something like a cursor or a movable write unit that moves from place to place in the brain to write memories at different locations. If the brain had such a thing, we could explain why a brain would store a memory in one specific spot. The explanation would simply be that the writing of a new memory occurs at whatever location the cursor or movable write unit is located. However, the human brain has no such thing as a cursor or movable write unit.  There is nothing that moves around in the brain other than electricity and chemicals.  We can certainly imagine some strange extraterrrestrial organism with a brain including a movable writing unit having the job of moving around in the brain and writing to different locations, but there is no sign of any such thing in the brain. 

You do not get around this difficulty of explaining why storage would occur at some exact location by speculating that there is one tiny brain region (such as the hippocampus)  where the brain stores all its new memories.  For such a region of the brain would consist of 10,000 smaller sub-regions, and the question would always remain: why was the memory put in one specific spot rather than in any of the other 10,000 spots?

We cannot get around this difficulty by imagining that a brain simply selects a random brain location to write some memory.  The selection of one specific random location is something that a human mind or a computer program can do, but there is no evidence that the human body ever subconsciously selects a random location in the body.  If you ask me to select a random city in America, I have knowledge of the cities in America and a mind capable of performing such a random selection task.  But it would be absurd to maintain that a brain has some kind of subconscious knowledge of some set of possible brain locations where a memory could be written, and some kind of subconscious ability to make a random choice from such a set of locations, choosing subconsciously a random place to write a memory. Nor could we ever explain how a brain (completely lacking in any coordinate system or position location system) could ever cause a memory to be stored exactly in some precise spot that it had randomly selected. Such a thing would be as hard as writing to hay strand #282,035 after your mind had randomly chosen such a hay strand as the place in a huge hay stack where something should be written.  

You also do not get around this difficulty by speculating that a brain stores a single new memory in very many separate spots, as that creates a host of difficulties such as how the memory could be divided up into so many different spots, and how the information could be instantly distributed to so many different spots. Then there would be the extremely great difficulty that a memory stored in many different spots would be like scattering each word on a page so that each word was stored in a different spot in your home. Just as such a thing would make it a thousand times harder to instantly retrieve the information on the page, a memory scattered among a thousand different brain places would be vastly harder to retrieve, making it all the more harder to explain how humans are able to instantly retrieve a memory.  Moreover, if we imagine a thousand different storage locations for a single memory, then we simply have the original problem a thousand times worse; for the question would be: why were those thousand locations chosen rather than any of a million other possibilities for the thousand places to store the memory?

There is no credible theory of how a neurally stored memory would end up in one specific spot in the brain, rather than any of a thousand other little spots in the brain.  What I have discussed here is only one of very many reasons why the idea of a neural storage of memories is untenable. 

Let us consider a case in which a memory arises, and what neuroscientists would need to explain under the theory that memories are stored in brains. Let's imagine a case in which a 13-year-old boy is scared very bad when someone sticks a gun in his mouth. The boy grows into a man who remembers this event for 70 years; and whenever he sees a hand gun (even guns with a different color or caliber), he instantly thinks of that moment when someone placed a gun in his mouth. Here are the things that would need to be explained under the theory that memories are stored in brains.

• How a brain could instantly form a permanent memory (for such a memory would appear instantaneously as soon as this traumatic event occurred), at a speed many times faster than the minutes required for some protein synthesis needed for synapse strengthening or synapse modification. 
• How a brain could translate into neural states or synapse states this sensory experience of having a gun placed in your mouth.
• How a brain could somehow select some location (among countless thousands of brain spots) for this memory to be stored.
• How a brain could somehow find such a location inside a brain that has no coordinate system and no position notation system, so that the memory could be stored in such a location.
• How a brain could instantly retrieve this memory whenever the boy saw a gun, which would be like instantly finding a needle in a haystack, given a brain with no coordinate system and no position notation system.
• Why such a memory could be retrieved by a brain, even when the person saw guns of a different color and caliber than the gun that was inserted in his mouth. 
• How this neural memory trace would somehow be translated into a recollection briefly active in the person's mind after he saw a gun years later. 
• How this memory could ever be accurately stored and accurately recalled (with a transmission across innumerable synapses) in a brain with so much signal noise that each time a signal passes across a synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of less than 50%. 
• How this memory could be preserved for 70 years, in a brain consisting of proteins with such short lifetimes (two weeks or less) that 3% of the brain's proteins are replaced every day. 

To  explain this case of the boy instantly forming this memory in a brain and remembering it for 70 years, neuroscientists would need to explain all of these things. Neuroscientists cannot even give a credible explanation for any one of these things.  

Preprint Server Counts Suggest Engrams Are Not Really Science

 The arXiv science paper server at https://arxiv.org/ is a widely used resource for finding and reading scientific papers. On its home page we read, "arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,780,158 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics."  It has become something of a custom for physicists to upload "preprints" of physics papers to this server. Although mainly associated with physics papers, the server also has a huge number of quantitative biology papers. 

An interesting way to use the arXiv server is simply to search for a topic, and see how high the paper count is (in other words, how many papers the server has on a particular topic). Such a method gives a rough idea of how much work has been done on a particular topic. It is not at all true that you can prove something is really science by doing a search for some topic and getting a high paper count. For example, when I search for papers with the word "string" in the title, on October 23, 2020, I get a count of 12,766 papers, a large fraction of which are papers expounding versions of string theory. But string theory is a speculative edifice that is not at all "science with a capital S," and has no observational basis. 

While we can't tell that something is science just by searching for a topic and getting a high paper count, if we search for a topic and get a very low count, that is a reason for suspecting that the topic may not be any such thing as "science with a capital S."  That's what happens when I search for the topic of "engram."  An engram is an alleged brain location where a memory is stored, or some kind of "memory trace" in the brain.  When I search for papers having "engram" or "engrams" in their title, using the arXiv science paper server, the server gives me a count of 0 such papers. 

Could it be that the arXiv science paper server just doesn't have many papers on biology? No, it has tons of papers on quantitative biology.  Below are a few examples of paper counts when I search for some biology topics:

Topic	Number of papers on arXiv server having that topic in their title
cancer	1115 papers
COVID-19	1738 papers
brain	2046 papers
tissue	708 papers
engram	0 papers
engrams	0 papers

So how come the server gives us no papers when we search for "engram" as the topic? Maybe it's because engrams aren't really science with a capital S. 

There's another way to do a search on the arXiv server. You can search for any use of the search topic in the abstract of the paper. When I do such a search, I get only 5 papers. Four of the five papers have no solid observational grounding, and are the kind of mathematical speculation papers that scientists write when they attempt to substantiate very doubtful speculations such as string theory or dark energy or primordial cosmic inflation.  The only paper built upon observations is a paper entitled "Recording and Reproduction of Pattern Memory Trace in EEG by Direct Electrical Stimulation of Brain Cortex."  The paper does not actually provide robust evidence that any such thing as a memory trace was detected.  To do such thing, you would need to have a study group of at least 15 animals, but we read in the paper that "the experiments were performed on 5 outbred male rats."  Using such a too-small study group, you have too high a chance of a false alarm.  

There is another "preprint paper server," one more oriented toward biology papers.  It is called bioXriv, and bills itself as "the preprint server for biology."  When I use that server to look for papers that contain "engram" in the title, I get only 6 papers.  Below is a comparision with other topics:

Topic	Number of papers on biorXiv server having that topic in their title
cancer	2777 papers
COVID-19	376 papers
brain	2651 papers
tissue	1021 papers
engram	6 papers
engrams	8 papers

The first of these six papers using "engram" in its title is a speculative paper with no observational grounding. The second of these six  papers uses study group sizes of only 5, which are way too small to provide any robust result.  The third paper has a similar problem, using study group sizes of only 8, way too small to provide any robust result.  The fourth paper is a mouse study that fails to mention anywhere how many mice were used, which typically occurs only when some way-too-small study group size was used.  The fifth paper suffers from the same problem, the only difference being that it vaguely suggests that way-too-small study group sizes of only 4 were used.  The sixth paper uses way-too-small study group sizes of only about six. 

Now let's look at the eight papers using "engrams" in their title. The first paper has "schematic" visuals based on imaginary hypotheticals.  The second paper tries to use the word "engrams" as much as it can, but provides no physical evidence for such a thing. The third paper was a rodent study using study group sizes of only about 8, way too small for a robust result.  The fourth paper was a rodent study using study group sizes of only about 5, way too small for a robust result. The paper confesses, "Data collection and analysis were not performed blind to the conditions of the experiments," a major procedural defect. The fifth paper is a theoretical paper not providing any observational results. The sixth paper and the seventh paper used way-too-small study group sizes of only 5.  The eighth paper is merely a theoretical work based on mathematical simulations. 

So the only six papers on the biorXiv server mentioning "engram" in their title fail to provide any robust evidence of engrams. Its the same thing for the 8 papers using "engrams" in their title. All in all, we have in these very low server counts (and the weaknesses of the papers coming up in the searches) a strong suggestion that engrams (supposed neural storage sites for memories) are not any such thing as well-established science, and that the evidence for engrams is merely very weak evidence rarely conjured up by scientists clumsily trying to provide some evidence for something they want to believe in. Engrams are not an example of science with a capital S. 

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. 

None of these papers I have referred to (on either preprint server) claims to have used a blinding protocol for both data gathering and data analysis. Most of them make no claims about blinding, which is usually a sure sign that no blinding protocol was followed. One paper makes a brief claim to have used a blinding protocol for experimentation, but makes no such claim for data analysis. Another paper claims briefly to have used a blinding protocol for statistical analysis, but makes no such claim in regard to experimentation and data gathering.  None of these papers describes in detail a specific blinding protocol. 

When blinding protocols are not thoroughly implemented, there is a large chance of bias and scientists reporting hoped-for effects that are not really there.  Unless a paper describes in detail a blinding protocol, you should be rather skeptical that any halfway-decent blinding protocol was used.  Similarly, if someone says, "I paid all my taxes," but doesn't release his tax forms, you should be rather skeptical that he did pay all his taxes. 

The failure of experimental neuroscientists to adequately follow blinding protocols is a huge problem in contemporary neuroscience research, as big as the failure of most such neuroscientists to use adequate study group sizes. Be suspicious of junk science wherever you find experiments not using proper blinding protocols.  A PLOS Biology article tells us, "Recent analyses have found, for example, that 86%–87% of papers reporting animal studies did not describe randomisation and blinding methods, and more than 95% of them did not report on the statistical power of the studies to detect a difference between experimental groups." 

Ian Stevenson MD once made some candid comments relevant to the topic of engrams, stating this:

"Neuroscientists and psychologists cannot tell us either how we store memories or how we retrieve them. Suggestions that experiences leave 'traces' in the brain (whether in altered neural networks or otherwise) have not so far led to further understanding." 

Inaccurate Titles and Misleading Citations Are Common in Science Papers

 I have discussed at some length on this blog problems in science literature such as poor study design, insufficient study group size, occasional fraud, misleading visuals and unreliable techniques for fear measurement. Such things are only some of the many problems to be found in neuroscience papers. Two other very common problems are:

(1) Scientific papers often have inaccurate titles, making some claim that is not actually proven or substantiated by the research discussed in the paper.

(2) Scientific papers often make misleading citations to papers that did nothing to show the claim being made. 

Regarding the first of these problems, scientists often write inaccurate titles to try to get more citations for their papers. For the modern scientist, the number of citations for papers he or she wrote is a supremely important statistic, regarded as a kind of numerical "measure of worth" as important as the batting average or RBI statistic is for a baseball hitter. At a blog entitled "Survival Blog for Scientists" and subtitled "How to Become a Leading Scientist," a blog that tells us  "contributors are scientists in various stages of their career," we have an explanation of why so many science papers have inaccurate titles:

"Scientists need citations for their papers....If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content."

Is this how today's scientists are trained?

A study of inaccuracy in the titles of scientific papers states, "23.4 % of the titles contain inaccuracies of some kind."

The concept of a misleading citation is best explained with an imaginary example.  In a scientific paper we may see some line such as this:

Research has shown that the XYZ protein is essential for memory.³⁴

Here the number 34 refers to some scientific paper listed at the end of the scientific paper. Now, if the paper listed as paper #34 actually is a scientific paper showing the claim in question, that this XYZ protein is essential for memory, then we have a sound citation. But imagine if the paper does not show any such thing. Then we have a misleading citation.  We have been given the wrong impression that something was established by some other science paper. 

A recent scientific paper entitled "Quotation errors in general science journals" tried to figure out how common such misleading citations are in science papers.  It found that such erroneous citations are not at all rare. Examining 250 randomly selected citations, the paper found an error rate of 25%.  We read the following:

"Throughout all the journals, 75% of the citations were Fully Substantiated. The remaining 25% of the citations contained errors. The least common type of error was Partial Substantiation, making up 14.5% of all errors. Citations that were completely Unsubstantiated made up a more substantial 33.9% of the total errors. However, most of the errors fell into the Impossible to Substantiate category."

When we multiply the 25% figure by 33.9%, we find that according to the study, 8% of citations in science papers are completely unsubstantiated. That is a stunning degree of error. We would perhaps expect such an error rate from careless high-school students, but not from careful scientists. 

This 25% citation error rate found by the study is consistent with other studies on this topic. In the study we read this:

"In a sampling of 21 similar studies across many fields, total quotation error rates varied from 7.8% to 38.2% (with a mean of 22.4%) ...Furthermore, a meta-analysis of 28 quotation error studies in medical literature found an overall quotation error rate of 25.4% [1]. Therefore, the 25% overall quotation error rate of this study is consistent with the other studies."

In the paper we also read the following: "It has been argued through analysis of misprints that only about 20% of authors citing a paper have actually read the original."  If this is true, we can get a better understanding of why so much misinformation is floating around in neuroscience papers.  We repeatedly have paper authors spreading legends of scientific achievement, which are abetted by incorrect paper citations often made by authors who have not even read the papers they are citing.  

A recent article at Vox.com suggests that scientists are just as likely to make citations to bad research that can't be replicated as they are to make citations to good research. We read the following:

"The researchers find that studies have about the same number of citations regardless of whether they replicated. If scientists are pretty good at predicting whether a paper replicates, how can it be the case that they are as likely to cite a bad paper as a good one? Menard theorizes that many scientists don’t thoroughly check — or even read — papers once published, expecting that if they’re peer-reviewed, they’re fine. Bad papers are published by a peer-review process that is not adequate to catch them — and once they’re published, they are not penalized for being bad papers."

We also read the following troubling comment:

"Blatantly shoddy work is still being published in peer-reviewed journals despite errors that a layperson can see. In many cases, journals effectively aren’t held accountable for bad papers — many, like The Lancet, have retained their prestige even after a long string of embarrassing public incidents where they published research that turned out fraudulent or nonsensical...Even outright frauds often take a very long time to be repudiated, with some universities and journals dragging their feet and declining to investigate widespread misconduct."

When Mainstream "Science Information" Sites Promote Mind Poisons

 Many people have the idea that if you keep reading mainstream sites that are commonly called "science information" sites, you will become a better citizen. Some people think that if you read such sites, you will frequently be reminded of how bad a problem global warming is, and that you will therefore be moved to reduce your carbon footprint. Other people think that if you read such "science information" sites, you will be a good global citizen, get all of your required vaccinations, and eat genetically modified food like our corporations wish you to do.  

I'm not sure there is any very good evidence that science knowledge causes people to be better global citizens.  These days a person's carbon footprint tends to be proportional to his or her wealth, a factor that is independent of a person's science knowledge. Furthermore, it is possible that after reading the articles on "science information" web sites, you might have a greater tendency to become morally indifferent.  That's because sometimes our mainstream "science information" websites publish articles that might tend to destroy any moral tendencies you had, if you took seriously what you were reading. 

I may use the term "mind poisons" for theories that tend to produce moral indifference in anyone who believes in them. One such theory (occasionally promoted on mainstream "science information" sites) is the theory that there are an infinite number of parallel universes containing an infinite number of copies of you, each a little different.  This insane notion is the idea that every instant the universe is kind of splitting into an infinite number copies of itself, so that every possibility is actualized.  There is no evidence or any good reason for believing in such nonsense, but it is occasionally sold on mainstream "science information" sites as if it was a respectable physics theory.  

It is easy to explain why such a theory promotes moral indifference. If every possibility is happening, and there are an infinite number of copies of you and everyone else, each a little bit different, then there would be no point in ever acting morally. For example, if you were walking along the street, and saw someone bleeding heavily, rather than phoning for help, you would think there was no point in acting, on the grounds that regardless of what you do, there will be an infinite number of parallel universes in which the person survives, and an infinite number of parallel universes in which the person bleeds to death. 

Another example of a morally destructive mind poison is the theory of determinism, the theory that humans do not have free will.  Such a theory is based on the erroneous idea that decisions arise from brain states.  The idea is that you have no free will because your decisions are produced by brain states, that follow inevitably from atomic arrangements. The posts on this site do a good of exploding the rationale for this philosophical theory. There is actually no understanding of how mind or memory can be brain effects, and there are very strong neuroscience reasons for believing that neither mind nor memory can be brain effects. No one has any real understanding of how neurons could ever cause an idea, a memory storage, a memory recollection or a decision.  So your decisions cannot be explained away as mere brain effects, and you very much do have free will. 

It is rather obvious why determinism is a morally destructive idea. If you believe that you have no free will and must act exactly as you act, then you will tend to have no guilt about anything you do. Contrary to all human experience and also contrary to what we know about the brain (something very different from commonly peddled myths about the brain), and being a very morally destructive doctrine, determinism can be accurately described as evil nonsense. 

 But the other day I saw the evil nonsense of determinism being promoted on a widely read web site that is commonly regarded as a "science information" web site. I will not link to the article, because my new policy is never to cause readership for those who teach such morally ruinous absurdities. I may merely note that the blog post promoting this determinism bunk was written by someone who has never shown any signs of being a serious scholar of either mental phenomena or neuroscience.

So these are two cases in which mainstream "science information" sites have promoted morally ruinous mind poisons.  There is a third such case. On some  of the leading sites regarded as "science information" sites, I recently read an article promoting the simulation hypothesis, the hypothesis that you are merely part of some computer simulation set up by extraterrestrials. 

That sites calling themselves "science sites" would be promoting such nonsense is merely additional proof that much of what you read on such sites is neither science nor rational speculation.  We have zero reasons for believing that a computer could ever produce consciousness, and have never observed any computer produce the slightest trace of consciousness.  So believing that you are just part of some computer simulation is as silly as believing that your mother is merely a TV series character that climbed out of your wide-screen TV set. 

The simulation hypothesis is as morally destructive as the other two ideas I previously mentioned, although most people fail to see why that is so.  The reason is that once you believe that you are merely part of a computer simulation created by extraterrestrials, you will tend to doubt that the people you observe with your eyes really exist. 

If some extraterrestrials had caused your consciousness to arise by creating some computer simulation, there is not the slightest reason to think that they would follow some rule that every person observed in the simulation has their own consciousness.  It would be almost infinitely easier to set up a simulation in which most of the bodies seen in the simulation were merely software routines that had no consicousness at all. That would be rather like a video game. In a video game there is a single conscious agent (yourself) interacting with various computer-generated characters that are merely software routines without any consciousness. 

So once a person believes that he is part of a computer simulation created by extraterrestrials, he may  tend to believe that the people he sees in the world are not conscious minds like himself, but merely "characters in the simulation," like video game characters.   That simulation believer will then feel absolutely free to commit any wicked act he pleases, thinking he is not causing any real pain by doing such things.  Similarly, while playing a video game you feel free to cause as much on-the-screen bloodshed as you wish, and don't worry that pain is being caused by such actions that occur in your video game. 

So it should be clear that the simulation hypothesis is a morally destructive doctrine, which may lead someone to kill, injure and rape without having any remorse.  We can therefore accurately say that the simulation hypothesis is a type of mind poison. But exactly this mind poison was being promoted recently on several leading mainstream sites that call themselves "science information" sites. 

Clearly, we must use our critical faculties when reading what is on so-called "science information" sites, because while such sites mainly teach truth, they often promote claims that are untrue or vastly improbable, and occasionally promote mind poisons that are evil nonsense. Sadly, some of the world's worst nonsense is sometimes to be found on mainstream "science information" sites.