They're Desperately Seeking Non-noise From the Brain's Dominant Noise

Brains are extremely noisy. Many neurons fire at unpredictable intervals, just as maple leaves fall from a tree in autumn at unpredictable intervals. A scientific paper tells us, “Neuronal variability (both in and across trials) can exhibit statistical characteristics (such as the mean and variance) that match those of random processes.” Another scientific paper tells us that “Neural activity in the mammalian brain is notoriously variable/noisy over time.” Another paper tells us, "We have confirmed that synaptic transmission at excitatory synapses is generally quite unreliable, with failure rates usually in excess of 0.5 [50%]." A paper tells us that there are two problems in synaptic transmission: (1) the low likelihood of a signal transmitting across a synapse, and (2) a randomness in the strength of the signal that is transmitted if such a signal transmission occurs. As the paper puts it (using more technical language than I just used):

"The probability of vesicle release is known to be generally low (0.1 to 0.4) from in vitro studies in some vertebrate and invertebrate systems (Stevens, 1994). This unreliability is further compounded by the trial-to-trial variability in the amplitude of the post-synaptic response to a vesicular release." 

The 2010 paper "The low synaptic release probability in vivo" by Borst is devoted to the topic of what is the chance that a synapse will transmit a signal that it receives. It tells us, "A precise estimate of the in vivo release probability is difficult," but that "it can be expected to be closer to 0.1 than to the previous estimates of around 0.5."  Slide number 20 of the 2019 Power Point presentation here has a graph showing that this release probability is often around 0.1 or 0.2, and the same page mentions 0.3 as a typical release probability. 

Another paper concurs by also saying that there are two problems (unreliable synaptic transmission and a randomness in the signal strength when the transmission occurs):

"On average most synapses respond to only less than half of the presynaptic spikes, and if they respond, the amplitude of the postsynaptic current varies. This high degree of unreliability has been puzzling as it impairs information transmission."

All of these facts are extremely damaging to all claims that the brain is the storage place of human memories, and the source of human thought. We know that humans can recall large bodies of information with perfect reliability. This happens every time someone plays the role of Hamlet, and correctly speaks every word in the 1480 lines in this role. The same reliability occurs when numerous Muslim scholars correctly recall every word in their holy book, a book of more than 6000 verses. Akira Haraguchi was able to recite correctly from memory 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours, in a filmed public exhibition. Besides such feats of perfectly reliable retrieval of very large bodies of information, there are also numerous math calculation savants who can perform very complex calculations with perfect accuracy.  No such feats should be possible if they are produced by brains dominated by noise, brains in which signals are transmitted so unreliably.

So what do you do if you are a scientist or philosopher handling the topic of brain noise, but mind-chained to the dogma that everything mental comes from the brain? You desperately seek to evade the clear message spoken by the brain's physical characteristics (the message that brains are physically unsuitable for massive accurate memory recall and accurate complex calculation),  and you  try to suggest that maybe there's non-noise in all of that tons and tons of brain noise.  A pair of recent essays have been examples of such a thing. 

An article in Quanta magazine is entitled "Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries."  We see two of the tricks often used when discussing quarter-baked ideas without any real observational basis. The first trick is to use some very vague and not-very-confident phrase such as "could hold clues" when discussing some unsubstantiated idea. The second trick is to use the vague claim that a "growing number" of scientists think something or suspect something, which doesn't really mean anything substantial, since the "growing number" might be something like "2 out of 20,000 increasing to 3 out of 20,000." Whenever people make a claim of a "growing number" of scientists believing something, they never give actual statistics backing up such a claim, and so we should suspect that there's no actual basis for such a claim of growing popularity.  The two tricks were used in this sentence: "Lendner is one of a growing number of neuroscientists energized by the idea that noise in the brain’s electrical activity could hold new clues to its inner workings." 

What follows in the article seems to be just an example of why people say "torture the data sufficiently and it will confess to anything," although in this case we don't even have such a "confession." We have a discussion of some scientists trying mathematical transformations of brain noise, eagerly trying to extract something that can be called a meaningful signal. No evidence is provided that the brain noise being analyzed is anything other than noise.  We merely get the impression of scientists desperately seeking some signal where there is none.  A similar thing might happen if biologists were to mathematically analyze dog barks in a hundred different ways, eagerly looking for some evidence of a dog language in the barks. 

We are given not one bit of indication that the so-called "aperiodic signals" derived from these mathematical fiddlings with brain noise readings actually are any such thing as a signal containing information, like a radio signal. Near the end of the article, these alleged "aperiodic signals" extracted from brain noise by mathematical fiddlings are compared to dark matter, a comparison that may cause a chuckle in anyone who has critically studied modern cosmology. Dark matter has never even been observed. 

At the Salon web site, we have an article by philosopher Thomas Nail entitled "Most brain activity is 'background noise' — and that's upending our understanding of consciousness." From this title you might get the idea that Nail has drawn the correct conclusion he should have drawn from "most brain activity is background noise": that the brain cannot be the cause of perfect recollections of vast bodies of information, and cannot be the cause of human mathematical calculation that can occur so flawlessly in some gifted people.  But no, Nail has instead drawn the wrong conclusions.  He makes groundless and silly-sounding statements such as "Neurons amplify the noise and even use it to help generate novel solutions to complex problems."  No one has any understanding of how neurons could generate any ideas at all,  and if neurons were to do such a thing, signal noise would be something to be avoided, not amplified. 

Nail makes this incorrect claim: "Several critical studies in this area have shown that cognitive flux, or 'spontaneous fluctuation,' is not secondary to but rather fundamental for consciousness, as neuroscientists Georg Northoff, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Stanislas Dehaene argue." He provides links to these authors, but none of the links provides any evidence we can freely read backing up any claim that any such thing has been shown.  Two of the links are to two old books unavailable for reading without purchase. Another link is to a paywalled paper with an abstract that confesses it is merely a hypothesis (one appealing rather suspiciously to psychedelic experiences as supporting evidence). 

Nail provides no evidence for his groundless claim that "just as whirling patterns emerge from turbulent waters, our stream of conscious thoughts and feelings arise from the torrent of spontaneous brain fluctuations."  This is a very absurd analogy. Whirling patterns in water do not involve information retrieval, and are momentary things showing no great organization. But a college professor can expound for a solid hour of organized thought on some topic, showing a degree of organization a thousand times greater than anything in whirling patterns of turbulent waters, and with an abundance of information retrieval not found in whirling patterns of turbulent waters.  The spontaneous fluctuations constantly occuring in neurons (and other abundant sources of neural noise) should  prevent any such organized thinking (with very accurate recall) from occurring, if our thinking were to be coming from our brains. Later Nail switches to a thought-as-frozen-ice metaphor and then to a thought-as-riding-a-wave  metaphor, neither of which is any better than his "whirling water" metaphor. 

What Nail has given us here is the same old nonsense reductionists are always trying to get away with: the trick of trying to portray human bodies or human minds or human mental phenomena as thousands  of times simpler than they are, and then offering some "explanation" for such crude little crayon sketches resulting from their ridiculous oversimplifications. 

Nail tries to impress us with a little neuroscience jargon by using the phrase "cross-frequency coupling."  But when he then says "it works a lot like syncopation in music," we should see that such a concept does nothing to explain how a very noisy brain could be capable of such accurate memory retrieval, accurate complex calculation and very complex organized thinking.  The fact that Nail's essay fails to use either the word "memory" or "signal" shows that he doesn't understand the real problem with noisy brains: that the amount of noise in brains (and the low reliability of signal transmission across synapses in brains) should be sufficient to make it impossible for brains to be capable of accurate recall of large masses of information, and also incapable of the type of accurate signal transmission needed for complex and accurate mathematical thinking to arise from brains.  

Who are these creatures Nail is describing, whose "conscious thoughts and feelings arise from the torrent of spontaneous brain fluctuations"?  They sound like some science-fiction entities, but seem to bear little resemblance to human beings. Rather than having thoughts and feelings that merely pop up like bubbles in turbulent waters, from brain fluctuations that differ from minute to minute, humans have very long-lived thoughts and feelings that often persist for decades. Examples include the love of a husband and wife that can persist for 50 years, the love of a parent for his children that persists for decades, racial hatred that sadly can persist for decades, and also religious, philosophical and political thoughts that tend to be remarkably stable, enduring for decades.  

The Social Construction of Eager Community Mirages

People who believe untrue things often are convinced that their incorrect belief is based on evidence.  This can occur whenever there is some enthusiastic community of researchers very interested in gathering evidence in favor of such a belief. If the community of researchers is well-motivated and well-funded, it may be able to create an illusion of having a body of evidence establishing the dubious belief it is eager to prove.  We may call such a large group of researchers an eager community.  We may call the misleading body of evidence created by such a community an eager community mirage. 

The word "mirage" may refer to an optical illusion in which something appears to be in front of you, even though it isn't actually there (the classic example being some reflective material ahead of you that reflects the sky, fooling you into thinking there is a body of water ahead of you).  The word "mirage" can also refer to something that appears real but is illusory. 

Let me give a fictional example of an eager community mirage. Let us imagine a billionaire who dreams up a theory that the ghosts of dead animals live in the clouds, and that you might be able to see the ghost of your dead pet up in the sky. Having many millions to spead publicizing such an idea, we can imagine the billionaire selling many copies of some book that he wrote advancing this theory. 

Let us also imagine that the billionaire decides to spend millions of dollars trying to prove his theory. He might find thousands of people very interested in proving his strange theory, and might pay them each tens of thousands of dollars to try to prove his theory, by taking photographs of clouds in the sky, and looking for shapes that look like animals. 

Given such a large of researchers, getting such lavish funding, it would be likely that some type of superficially impressive "body of evidence" would accumulate. If the billionaire asked everyone of his thousands of well-funded researchers to send him a photo whenever they photographed a cloud that looked like an animal shape,  the billionaire would be able to accumulate a fairly nice little collection of clouds that looked like animals (particularly if each researcher had a financial incentive for each such photo sent to the billionaire). 

Would such a collection of photos be good evidence that dead animals become ghosts that live in the sky among the clouds? No, it would not be.  It would simply be the amount of evidence we would expect to get for such a hypothesis, given the very large community of eager researchers, and given the funding the billionaire had given them.  The body of evidence the billionaire would accumulate from such researchers would be an example of an eager community mirage.  Like a mirage, the illusion of good evidence would be largely based in reality.  The photos would not be faked, and would show real clouds. But the collection of such photos would not be robust evidence to prove the theory that the ghosts of dead animals rise up into the sky and live among the clouds. 

In the world of scientific academia, there exist various examples of bodies of evidence that appear to be mere eager community mirages. Such bodies of evidence can arise because there is a large community of many thousands of well-funded researchers eager to gather evidence for some particular dogma believed in by a belief community of scientists. 

Let us consider the body of evidence that is typically cited to support claims that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories.  We do not find in such a body of evidence any "slam dunk" experiments or studies that provide "smoking gun" evidence in favor of such claims. Instead we find a whole bunch of studies providing far weaker evidence. 

Remarkably the standard for getting an experimental neuroscience paper published (and sold by some press release as being good evidence) is a very low standard, a very low hurdle to jump over. The convention is that you can get an experimental study published if your p-value is merely .05.  What is the p-value? It can be roughly thought of as the likelihood of you getting a particular result if your hypothesis of a causal effect is false. 

Let's imagine an example in a neuroscience experiment. Suppose I hypothesize that some region of the brain will light up more strongly than any other region under some particular example of mental activity. I then scan brains during this mental activity, and I get some result that I judge to have a p-value of .05.  That means that if there is actually no connection between that region of the brain and the mental activity I have tested, I should not have got such a result by chance in more than 1 in 20 experiments I did. 

A very important point is that the p-value is certainly not the likelihood about whether my result would show up if many experimenters were trying my experiment. It is merely something like the likelihood of me getting the result by chance on any particular time I tried the experiment. 

Now, is it anything like convincing evidence if I do some experiment getting such a p-value of .05? Certainly not. In fact, if I do the experiment twenty times, I should expect purely by chance to get such a result about 1 time in 20, even if my hypothesis about cause and effect is totally false. 

Now let us imagine a very large body of many thousands of well-funded neuroscience researchers. Altogether they have many hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, which each researcher can partially spend 30 weeks a year trying different experiments.  A study estimated there were about 300,000 neuroscience papers published in a ten-year period, about 30,000 per year. The actual number of neuroscience experiments done could easily be 100,000 or more per year, because of a "file drawer" by which null results are not even written up, or not published.  

How many results would we expect to get each year with a p-value of .05, purely by chance, even if brains do nothing to produce the human mind, and even if brains do not at all store memories?  Very many. In fact, we should expect to get thousands of such experiments producing a p-value of .05 or smaller, even if   brains do nothing to produce the human mind, and even if brains do not at all store memories. We also should expect to see hundreds of experiments with a more impressive p-value of only .001,  purely by chance, even if brains do nothing to produce the human mind, and even if brains do not at all store memories. Since tens of thousands of neuroscience experiments are being done around the world, we would expect that purely by chance hundreds of these experiments would produce results that had a chance probability of only about .001, even if no brain cause was producing the results.  We should also remember that scientists very often claim p-value results much more impressive than their observations warrant, as happened in the BICEP2 affair and the subsequently discredited  "phosphine on Venus" paper. 

What happens during the social construction of eager community mirages is that members of the eager community go searching for all of the results that best support the belief they want to believe in, and discuss these results in a single article or paper, often a scientific paper called a "review article." Gathered together, such results may seem impressive. But the appearance of some impressive reality is very often a mere mirage.  The results discussed may be merely exactly what we would expect to get by chance, given the size of such a research community, its eagerness to establish some particular result, and the number of trials that are being done.  

To give some examples, if there exists some large eager community desiring to prove some theory that the ghosts of animals live in clouds, and such a community is well funded by millions of dollars each year, we would expect that members of this community would spend many thousands of hours each year photographing clouds and looking for shapes that look like the ghosts of dead animals; and we would expect that every year some superficially impressive results would be produced by such a community.  But we would merely be seeing what we would expect to get by chance, even if the ghosts of dead animals don't live in clouds. Similarly, if there exists some large eager community of neuroscientists desiring to prove some theory that brains produce minds and that brains store memories, and such a community is well funded by billions of dollars each year, we would expect that members of this community would spend many thousands of hours each year doing experiments trying to show that brains produce minds and that brains store memories; and we would expect that every year some superficially impressive results would be produced by such a community.  But we would merely be seeing what we would expect to get by chance, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories. 

Defective or questionable research practices are a key factor facilitating the social construction of eager community mirages. The weaker the standards followed, the easier it will be for the eager community to socially construct the appearance it is trying to create. In experimental neuroscience we see such defective or questionable research practices very often. To give examples:

• Scientists know that the most reliable to do an experiment is to first state a hypothesis, how data will be gathered, and how data will be analyzed, using methods called "pre-registered studies" or "registered reports." But most experimental neuroscience studies do not follow such a standard, but instead follow a much less reliable technique, in which data is gathered, and then the experimenter is free to slice and dice the data in any way he wants, trying to prove any hypothesis he may dream up after collecting the data. 
• Because very many neuroscience observations are the kind of observations where subjective interpretations may be at play, a detailed and rigorous blinding protocol is an essential part of any reliable neuroscience experiment. But such a blinding protocol is rarely used, and in the minority of neuroscience experiments that claim to use blinding, the blinding will usually be only fragmentary and fractional. 
• Neuroscience experiments trying to measure fear in rodents can only do that reliably by measuring heart rate in such animals (which dramatically spikes when mice are afraid). But instead of using such a reliable technique, the most common practice in rodent experiments involving fear is to use an unreliable and subjective technique involving trying to judge so-called "freezing behavior."
• Brain scanning experiments typically present misleading visuals in which differences of less than 1% in brain activity are depicted in bright red in a brain diagram, creating the incorrect impression there was some big difference in activity in such a region. 
• A web site describing the reproducibility crisis in science mentions a person who was told of a neuroscience lab  "where the standard operating mode was to run a permutation analysis by iteratively excluding data points to find the most significant result," and quotes that person saying that there was little difference between such an approach and just making up data out of thin air. 

The neuroscientist community (very eager to prove dogmas that brains create minds and store memories) is only one example of eager communities in the world of scientific inquiry. Another such community is the origin-of-life research community, which for many decades has been eager to prove that life could have naturally originated from chance chemical reactions. 

A key element in the social construction of an eager community mirage may be biased interpretation of research results.  We have a gigantic example of this in the famous Miller-Urey experiment. In that experiment a small sealed glass apparatus was filled with a mixture of gases consisting of methane, ammonia and hydrogen, and subjected to continuous discharges of electricity for a week.  The result was some amino acids that formed at the bottom of the apparatus. For seventy years the eager origin-of-life research community has spread the groundless idea that such an experiment did something to show a likelihood of amino acids forming in the early Earth.  This claim never made any sense. Showing that some chemicals can form in a small sealed glass apparatus subject to continuous electricity discharge does nothing to show that such a formation would have occurred in the open atmosphere, both because gases and chemicals in the open atmosphere would have been many trillions of times more dispersed, and also because lightning in the atmosphere only occurs occasionally rather than continuously. But for 70 years the eager community of origin-of-life researchers has  misinterpreted the experiment as one showing that amino acids would have been common in the early Earth. 

Similar things happen in the neuroscientist community.  Scientists put whatever "spin" on their research results that most fit in with the belief dogmas they are eager to prove.  Such dubious or biased interpretations are endlessly repeated by other scientists eager to show that there is some evidence for some claim they want to believe in. 

I can give a little equation summarizing what I have discussed above:

Large community eager to prove some idea + lavish funding + weak research standards  + biased interpretation = occasional superficially persuasive results.

The "eager community mirage" arises when such occasional superficially persuasive results are collected from many years of effort by such a community. The result is something that may look like some body of evidence seeming to support the idea or dogma the community is eager to prove. But the result may be merely a mirage. 

A physical mirage does not stand up well to close inspection. On a hot road you may see in the distance something that looks like some water on the far horizon, but driving a hundred meters closer does not make that appearance seem more concrete. 

Similarly, socially-constructed eager community mirages do not stand up well to close inspection. The more closely we examine the techniques used to construct such mirages, the more likely we may be to realize that the body of evidence offered by the eager community to prove its favored beliefs is a mere mirage. 

Exceptional Memories Strengthen the Case Against Neural Memory Storage

Materialist thinkers often act as if their motto was "make humans seem like something much less than humans."  There are various different ways in which they do this:

• They sometimes make the utterly preposterous claim made by Darwin that there is no fundamental difference between the mental abilities of humans and the mental abilities of higher mammals, a claim contrary to all human experience.
• They senselessly classify humans as animals, and arbitrarily put the human species in an animal kingdom (given the abundant mental and behavioral differences between humans and animals, a sensible classification of organisms would be to have four kingdoms: a microbe kingdom, a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom and a human kingdom).
• They refuse to acknowledge hundreds of years of written testimony from reliable witnesses such as doctors and scientists (and many decades of compelling experimental evidence) that humans have faculties such as clairvoyance and ESP that are beyond any biological explanation.
• When describing human mental faculties, they tend to describe them as being far weaker than they are. 

It is interesting to read the writings of neuroscientists who try to portray human memory as something weak and unreliable.  Again and again they will try to suggest that learning something requires multiple exposures to some source material, a claim that is contrary to the facts of actual human experience, which is that humans can very often reliably learn things after a single exposure, that people can recognize faces they have seen briefly only one time, that people can remember stories they have heard only one time, and that people can remember events they have seen only one time. 

Neuroscienitsts often try to make us think that humans can't remember very well things they experienced years ago, or that each time we remember something there will be a high chance of error.  Such claims are contrary to abundant human experience. It is rather obvious why neuroscientists tend to speak in such a way. The more you believe that human memory is not very reliable, and something that requires multiple exposures, the more likely you may be to believe that human memories are stored in the brain. 

A neuroscientist's portrayal of weak and unreliable human memory can be refuted by citing a host of ordinary human experiences. Such a portrayal can also be refuted by citing cases of exceptional human memories.  Below are some examples:

• Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 
• Mathematician and computer scientist Herman Goldstine wrote this about the legendary mathematician John von Neumann: "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation."
• According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 
• According to one book, "John Fuller, a land agent, of the county of Norfolk, could correctly write out a sermon or lecture after hearing it once; and one, Robert Dillon, could, in the morning, repeat six columns of a newspaper which he had read the preceding evening. More wonderful still was George Watson, who... could tell the date of every day since his childhood and how he had occupied himself on that day."
• The mathematician Leonhard Euler could recite the entire Aeneid from beginning to end, a work of 9896 lines.  Another mathematician (Alexander Aitken) also memorized the whole Aeneid, and could recite the first 1000 digits of pi.  George Vogan de Arrezo also memorized the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid (consisting of 9,896 lines). 
• Young Leste May Williams memorized 12,000+ biblical verses including the whole New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, which has only 63,719 words.
• Between age 59 and age 67 a person memorized all 10,565 lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, recalling the entire work over a three-day period.
• A scientific paper says, "Rajan S. Mahadevan ...was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (McWhirter, 1983) for reciting pi to 31,811 places."  The same paper says that after about three minutes of study Rajan can perfectly recall all numbers in a grid of 50 random numbers, recalling not just the numbers but also their positions in the grid. 
• Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "According to Luria, Shereshevsky could' 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one."
• Mezzofanti could speak very well thirty different languages. 
• A four-year-old girl demonstrated on TV her ability to speak seven different languages. 
• Numerous Muslim scholars have memorized all 6000+ lines of their holy book, and some did this as early as age 10. 
• According to a book, "The great thinker, Pascal, is said never to have forgotten anything he had ever known or read, and the same is told of Hugo, Grotius, Liebnitz, and Euler. All knew the whole of Virgil's 'Aeneid' by heart." 
• The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas.  According to the 1920 newspaper article here, he had so well-memorized 150 opera scores that he "never even glances at a score when conducting."
• A 1902 newspaper story said that Professor Asa Gray claimed to be able to name 25,000 types of plants. It also says that thousands of Hindu Brahmins have memorized 10,000 verses of the Rig Veda. 
• Zafrullah Khan recited to a newspaper reporter 28 different roads he had taken and all the places they had passed through, while describing a long auto trip he took in 1954, just as if he had a photographic memory of a map of the complex route. 
• It has been estimated that the Babylonian Talmud contains roughly 1,860,131 words. According to page 4 of the document here, "Stromeyer mentions Luria’s famous mnemonist and the case of the 'Shass Pollaks,' who memorized all 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, and Oliver Sacks has reported a similar case of a person who among other things knew by heart all 9 volumes and 6000 pages of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians."
• According to a book, a waiter in San Francisco could recall exactly what any customer had previously ordered, even if the customer had not visited the restaurant in years. 
• The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 
• G. C. Leland says: " It is recorded of a Slavonian Oriental Sect called the Bogomiles, which spread over Europe during the middle ages, that its members were required to memorize the Bible verbatim. Their latest historian, Dragomanoff, declares that there were none of them who did not memorize the New Testament at least; one of their bishops publicly proclaimed that, in his own diocese of four thousand communicants, there was not one unable to repeat the entire scriptures without an error."
• Akira Haraguchi was able to recite correctly from memory 100,000 digits of pi in 16 hours, in a filmed public exhibition.
• The scholar and librarian Antonio Magliabechi of Florence, Italy was legendary for his memory.  According to the source here, " He not only knew all the volumes in the library, as well as every other possible work, but could also tell the page and paragraph in which any passage occurred."  The wikipedia.org article on him says, "Many stories are told of his marvellous memory that was 'like wax to receive and marble to retain.' "
• The fascinating 47-minute video here "The Boy Who Can't Forget" documents cases of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also called hyperthymesia.  According to the article here a scientist named McGaugh "is adamant that the super memory demonstrated by the small number of people he and others have identified represents a genuine phenomenon." People with such a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (including Jill Price and Aureilien Hayman) can recall what happened to them every day in the past ten years. 
• A book tells us this: "The geographer Maretus, narrates an instance of memory probably  unequalled. He actually witnessed the feat, and had it attested by four Venetian nobles. He met in Padua, a young Corsican who had so powerful a memory that he could repeat as many as 36,000 words read over to him only once. Maretus, desiring to test this extraordinary youth, in the presence of his friends, read over to him an almost interminable list of words strung together anyhow in every language, and some mere gibberish. The audience was exhausted before the list, which had been written down for the sake of accuracy, and at the end of it the young Corsican smilingly began and repeated the entire list without a break and without a mistake. Then to show his remarkable power, he went over it backward, then every alternate word, first and fifth, and so on until his hearers were thoroughly exhausted, and had no hesitation in certifying that the memory of this individual was without a rival in the world, ancient or modern."
• Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay.
• A newspaper account states, "That Italian prodigy of learning, Ignatius de Rosal, made the boast that if any one could repeat a line from any of the four great poets of Italy he would follow it by reciting 100 lines following in due order of succession, and on a trial being made be actually accomplished the feat."
• Describing both high recall capacity and very quick speed of recall, a 1914 newspaper account tells us that the boy Cleo Smith of Denver, Colorado "has accomplished the unbelievable task of being able to give from memory—'right off the reel'—the population of all the cities in the world having more than 90,000. the names of all the capital cities of the world, giving their altitudes; the population of every county seat in the United States; the altitude of every city in the United States, and of every mountain peak in the world; the number of miles of railroad in each state in the United States and in every country in the world; the number of farms in every state; the population of every city of more than 100,000, both in the United States and Canada; the length of every principal river in the world; the population of every country in the world; the foreign population in every city and in every state, telling the number of Indians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.; the total number of foreigners in every state; the number of counties in each state; the date of admission to the Union of every state; the number of manufactories in every state and in Canada, and in every principal city in the United States."
• According to an article on bbc.com, "Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work."
• Derek Paravicini was born 25 weeks early, with severe brain damage, but he has reliably demonstrated countless times the ability to very accurately play back on a keyboard any song that is played to him, note for note, even if he has never heard the song before. 
• A child (identified only as "Prodigy 1" in the paper here) was born seven weeks early, but still has a working memory in the 99.9 percentile, and "reproduced complicated musical pieces such as The Entertainer after only one or two hearings at age four," eventually scoring 149 on a test of nonverbal IQ. 
• A nineteenth century work describes a similar ability in a prodigy known as Blind Tom: "The doctor then called for some one of the audience to come and play a piece of music for the first  time in Tom's hearing, promising a very faithful imitation ; Miss Jones was persuaded to play a piece of her own composition, and hence unknown to Tom and the audience....When the lady was through and escorted from the stage, Tom sat down and played it through perfectly. " The next page states, "Tom executes some of the most difficult pieces of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bach, Gottschalk, Thalberg and others, and these he learnt by hearing them played."

Thomas Babington Macaulay

A scientific paper tells us this about the autistic savant Daniel Tammet:

"DT [Daniel Tammet] speaks 10 languages, including Estonian and Finnish, has invented his own language (Manti) and learnt Spanish in one weekend. He performs mathematical calculations at lightning speed, including multiplying six-digit numbers together. He commented that 31, 19, 79 and 1979 are all prime numbers, an indication of how he sees patterns in numbers very rapidly. As mentioned earlier, as part of a formal competition he recited Pi to 22,514 decimal paces, earning the title of European champion."

If normal human memory abilities are inexplicable as being produced by brains with very rapid protein turnover, very high levels of signal noise of several different types, and nothing like an indexing system, a position notation system or any known mechanism for reading or writing memories, brains that replace about 3% of their proteins every day, which is certainly the case, then cases of exceptional memory such as these are all the more inexplicable as being neural effects. 

Brain studies of people with exceptional memories have failed to present  any robust evidence for any brain difference that could explain such memories. The paper here  claims to have studied the brains of 11 people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).  The abstract makes no specific claim of having found any specific difference in the brains of such people.  The abstract does vaguely claim to have identified "nine structures as being morphologically different from those of control participants," but the text of the paper does not justify any claim of any significant morphological difference in the 11 people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).  We read in the paper nothing different from what you would get by randomly picking 11 people and comparing their brains to 11 other random people. 

It is interesting that Table 1 of this paper shows us the nine regions that were supposedly "morphologically different" from controls.  There are nine up arrows to indicate little regions of neural superiority in the HSAM subjects with amazing autobiographical memory, and down nine down arrows to indicate little regions of neural inferiority in such subjects.  "That's a wash," as they say: the negatives cancel out the positives. Overall there is no indication of neural superiority in these HSAM subjects with amazing memories. 

A more recent paper on this topic can be read here.  The paper fails to show any robust evidence of any significant brain activity difference between those with astonishing HSAM memories and normal controls. The very marginal differences discussed are merely the type of differences we would expect from comparing about 10 randomly selected people with 10 other randomly selected people. 

The fact that people with vastly superior recall ability have brains that are not structurally superior (and are sometimes very structurally inferior) to those with normal recall abilities, and the fact that brain scans of such people show nothing very noteworthy are both facts that strengthen the case against the claim that memories are stored in the brain. 

Postscript: Below is a quote from page 53 of the book The Mind and Beyond published by Time-Life Books:

"As reported in the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, in 1967, one Mehmed Ali Halici of Turkey recited from memory 6,666 verses of the Koran in six hours. And in 1989, Englishman Tony Power memorized in correct order a random sequence of thirteen packs of shuffled playing cards – 676 cards in all – after looking at them only once. But the world record for a single eidetic memory feat may be held by Bhandanta Vicitasara of Rangoon, Burma who in 1974 correctly recited from memory 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts."

On page 266 of the June 4, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, Cox describes a state of extraordinary memory, what sounds like a case of photographic or eidetic memory. Cox describes himself as having a similar memory. Cox states this:

"The Rev. Henry Christmas, formerly of Sion College, possessed an extraordinary memory. I have seen him read a page of Greek or Latin opened at random, close the book and repeat the whole of the page verbatim, beginning with the broken sentence in the first line. He knew by heart the entire of many volumes of poems. He could repeat the whole of Horace from memory : one perusal usually sufficed. He informed me that this marvellous memory of his was a memory not of sound but of sight. He did not recall the words, but the page on which they had been printed when he learned them, and in his mind’s eye he saw that page and read from it. I suspect such a form of memory to be not uncommon. It is possessed by myself. When I desire to repeat anything learned by rote I am compelled to recall to my mind the book and the page of the book from which I learned it. I see in my mental vision the very misprints, creases, and spots upon the paper, and I mentally read it from the ideal representation of the book. This is plainly memory for objects of sight, not for language."

Five Hallmarks of an Information Storage System (None of Which Your Synapses Have)

It is claimed by many that the synapses of the brain are an information storage system that stores our memories. To analyze whether this claim is credible, let us look at some common characteristics of information storage systems, and see whether synapses have any such characteristics.

Characteristic #1: An “alphabet” of symbolic tokens consisting of at least two types of tokens.

By an alphabet of symbolic tokens, I mean a set of symbols that can be used in the writing of symbolic information. Below are some examples:

1. In English books, this alphabet of symbolic tokens consists of the letters of the alphabet and the various punctuation marks.
2. In DNA this “alphabet” of symbolic tokens consists of the four types of nucleotide base pairs found in the DNA molecule (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine).
3. In early Egyptian hieroglyphics, there was an “alphabet” of different pictogram symbols, each of which stood for some particular thing.
4. In computers that store information using binary, there is an “alphabet” consisting of only two things: a magnetic mark standing for 1, and another magnetic mark (or absence of a mark) that stands for 0. Different combinations of such binary characters stand for particular letters in the alphabet. 

Characteristic #2: A recurring tendency for one or more of these symbolic tokens to represent some particular thing. 

In an information storage system such as a book it is not enough to simply have some set of symbolic tokens. There must also be some tendency for particular combinations of these tokens to represent some thing. 

In the simplest type of information storage system, a single token represents one particular thing. For example, we may consider road signs as an information storage system in which a single token stands for one thing. On the left is a token standing for "a gas station," and on the right is a token standing for "pedestrians crossing."

In a more complex information storage system, it is ususally the case that particular combinations of tokens stand for some particular things. For example, in the English language the combination of the tokens "c," "a" and "t" stand for a cat. 

Below we see a representation of the genetic code used by DNA. There are four tokens, A, C, T and G, which are the nucleotide base pairs adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine.  Particular combinations of these base pairs stand for particular amino acids. Looking at the chart below, and moving your eye from the center to the edge of the chart, you can see examples of these combinations and what they mean. For example, a combination of guanine (G), cytosine (C) and adenine (A) stands for the amino acid named alanine. 

Characteristic #3: A sequence of these tokens in which particular tokens of the “alphabet” are repeated multiple times.

Below are some examples of this type of sequence:

1. On a page of an English book, we have a long sequence of letters, and particular combinations of these stand for particular words. 
2. In a DNA molecule, there is a long sequence of nucleotide base pairs that collectively specify genetic information.
3. On a computer hard drive, there are files consisting of long sequences of magnetic marks (the equivalent of 1's and 0's), that store information in particular types of computer files.

Characteristic #4: Some physical arrangement by which it is possible for the sequence of tokens to be read.

In order for you to have a meaningful information storage system, there must be some arrangement by which the stored information can be read, so that the stored sequence is retrieved or read. Imagine a system by which you spell out your text messages in scrabble blocks, and then toss the scrabble blocks to the bottom of a large trash can. That is not a workable information storage system, for it offers no hope of retrieving the original messages.

Some examples of systems that meet this characteristic are as follows:

1. A book is an arrangement by which it is possible for a human to conveniently read all of the symbolic tokens in the book, in the correct sequence. The arrangement of tokens and the bindings of the pages make it easy for a sequential reading of the tokens.
2. A DNA molecule is an arrangement by which it is possible to conveniently read all of the tokens (the nucleotide base pairs) in the correct sequence. The physical structure of the DNA molecule (a long string-like structure) make this sequential reading fairly easy.
3. A tape playback and recording system such as a VCR had a physical arrangement by which a slowing turning tape passed by a read/write head, allowing magnetic marks on the tape to be read in a particular sequence. 

Characteristic #5: Stability

Most of the information storage systems we use have stability. For example, once words have been printed on paper, the information will last for a very long time. And once something has been stored on a hard drive, the information can last in exactly the same state for years.  Video tapes also last for many years. The information stored in DNA is also very stable. You still have basically the same DNA information in your cells that you had when you were born. 

Do Synapses Have Any of These Characteristics?

Now let us look at the synapses of the brain, and ask: do they meet any of these five hallmarks of an information storage system? We will find no match to these characteristics merely by mentioning DNA in synapses, because synapses do not have DNA (DNA in the brain is found in neurons, but not in the synapses that connect neurons). 

It seems that synapses do not have the first of these hallmarks. No one has ever discovered anything like an “alphabet” of symbolic tokens that could be used by synapses to store information. Some might argue that maybe the strength of a synapse acts like a symbolic token. But a synapse could have any of millions of different strengths, just like a muscle can have any of millions of different strengths. There doesn't seem to be any built-in characteristic of synapses allowing synapses to act as particular symbolic tokens, or to store symbolic tokens.

There is no evidence that synapses have the second of these characteristics. We can find no  combinations of synapse tokens that stand for particular things, because no one has discovered any tokens at all in synapses. 

It also seems that synapses do not have the third of these hallmarks of a system for storing symbolic information. No one has found any repetition of tokens in synapses.

It also seems that synapses do not have the fourth of these hallmarks of a system for storing symbolic information. There are countless synapses in the brain that exist in three-dimensional space, like tangled vines in a very densely packed jungle, or like strands of spaghetti in a huge pot filled with enough spaghetti to feed 100 children.  There does not exist anything in the brain corresponding to a synapse reader that might sequentially read some stream of tokens in synapses if they happened to exist in synapses. 

It also seems that synapses do not have the fifth of these hallmarks of a system for storing information. The proteins in synapses are short-lived, having an average lifetime of less than two weeks. It has been estimated the 3% of brain proteins are replaced every day. The paper here states, "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights." So synapses lack the stablility that characterizes information storage systems. 

It seems, therefore, that synapses have none of the main characteristics of information storage systems. Synapses no more resemble an information storage system than an outdoor lump of mud resembles an information storage system. So why do so many neuroscientists maintain that synapses are some storage system storing your memories?  It's merely because they have committed themselves to the silly idea that memories must be stored in brains.  It would be much better if neuroscientisists were to honestly say this: "We have found nothing in the brain that resembles a system for storing information that minds learn." 

The scholar Robert Crookall has collected very many accounts of out-of-body experiences which you can read online here, here and here. The great similarities of such accounts, the fact that they are so often reported as spontaneously occurring in healthy, normal people, and the fact that things observed in such experiences are often verified are all indications that such accounts are not merely hallucinations. In such accounts we see people reporting no dimming of memory when they reported floating out of their bodies. Such accounts (senselessly ignored by almost all neuroscientists) provide a clue as to what is the real repository of memory: some soul or spiritual faculty that is very different from the brain. 

A New Paper Suggests Scientists Have No Solid Theory of Neural Memory Storage

 For years scientists have been advancing the groundless theory that human memories are stored in synapses. Such scientists have ignored very strong reasons for concluding that this idea cannot possibly be correct. The first reason is the very short lifetimes of the proteins in synapses, which last only a thousandth of the longest length of time that humans can retain memories. Synapse proteins have an average lifetime of less than two weeks, but humans can reliably remember things for more than 50 years, a length of time more than 1000 times longer than two weeks.  I got a reminder of this yesterday, when I saw in print a reference to the 1970-1971 TV show "Nanny and the Professor," a show I haven't thought about (or heard mentioned or read about) in 50 years. I remembered correctly the name of the little-known female star of the show.  

If it were true that memories were stored by a strengthening of synapses, the formation of a memory would be a slow process. The only way in which a synapse can be strengthened is if proteins are added to it. We know that the synthesis of new proteins is a rather slow effect, requiring minutes of time. In addition, there would have to be some very complicated encoding going on if a memory was to be stored in synapses. The reality of newly-learned knowledge and new experience would somehow have to be encoded or translated into some brain state that would store this information. When we add up the time needed for this protein synthesis and the time needed for this encoding, we find that the theory of memory storage in brain synapses predicts that the acquisition of new memories should be a very slow affair. But it is a fact of human experience that humans can form long-term memories instantly.  You can often remember the plot of a movie months after seeing it only one time, and you can often remember months later experiences you had only one time, even if you never had any thought about the movie after seeing it, and never thought about the experience after having it.  Ask a man to tell the whole plot of a movie just after it ends, and he will be able to tell the whole story. He won't say that he doesn't remember the last few minutes of the movie, and ask you to wait for his memory formation to catch up.  And if you ask the man at the end of the movie to tell what happened at the end of the movie, he will have no trouble remembering, a few seconds after the movie's end.  

A new science paper gives us an indication that scientists have no solid theory of neural memory storage. The paper is entitled "What If Memory Information is Stored Inside the Neuron, Instead of in the Synapse?"  We read the following, which refers to a numbered list of papers given at the end of the paper:

"Conventional wisdom has it that memory information in the brain is stored in the synapse...In neuroscience literature, there is a growing number of findings against the synaptic hypothesis. For example: 'Long term memory storage and synaptic change can be dissociated' [13]; 'Increased synaptic strength that is the result of cellular consolidation is thus not a critical requisite for storing a memory' [14]; 'When enhanced synaptic strength between engram cells is abolished, the memory is not”'[15]; 'Memory does not reside in altered synaptic conductances.' [16]. As summarized succinctly in [17]: (we do not know) 'the physical medium in nervous tissue that is modified in order to preserve these empirical quantities for use in later computations.' "

This is quite a confession. A hypothesis of synaptic memory storage is still popular, despite the fact "there is a growing number of findings against the synaptic hypothesis."  This is what happens very frequently in scientific academia. Clinging to an achievement legend that is unfounded, scientists continue to believe they understand something they do not at all understand, as evidence continues to accumulate that their theory on the matter is wrong. This has been going on in one form or another through most of the history of scientific academia. Call it ideological inertia, which is the opposite of being able to quickly modify assumptions, what me may call hypothesis agility. 

The new paper refers us to a previous article in which a neuroscientist confesses his lack of understanding about a neural basis for memory and thought:

"We do not yet know how the brain implements the basic elements of computation (the basic operations of arithmetic and logic). We do not yet know the mind’s computational primitives. We do not yet know in what abstract form (e.g., analog or digital) the mind stores the basic numerical quantities that give substance to the foundational abstractions, the information acquired from experience that specifies learned distances, directions, circadian phases, durations, and probabilities. Much less do we know the physical medium in nervous tissue that is modified in order to preserve these empirical quantities for use in later computations. Already as an undergraduate, I wanted to know the physical basis of memory in the brain. I begin to think that we are not to know this in my lifetime, but science often progresses in sudden and unexpected spurts, so I still hope to know it."

This statement is a commendable confession, but it should have gone a little further. The scientist should have said "we do not know whether the brain implements any such thing as thought or computation," and "we do not know whether memories are stored through any such thing as a modification of nervous tissue." 

Having shaken our confidence in a synaptic theory of memory, the "What If Memory Information is Stored Inside the Neuron, Instead of in the Synapse?" paper proceeds to discuss a theory of memories stored in neurons. But the authors provide no evidence for such a theory, which would suffer from problems as great as the theory of a synaptic storage of memory. Nor do the authors even present any hypothetical description of how neurons could store information.  We are left with the impression that our scientists have no solid theory of how a brain could store memories. 

It is interesting that the paper authors feel compelled to spend a good part of their paper speculating on alternate ideas about the purpose of synapses.  Strange that even though we kept being told the far-fetched claim that our bodies merely reflect purposeless random mutations, our scientists so often tend to keep speaking as if everything in the body must have a purpose.

Fallacious Emptiness of a "Mind Is Like Wetness" Account

At the Aeon web site recently, we have a post by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci entitled "Consciousness Is Real." At some length Pigliucci makes a superfluous rebuttal of the boundlessly silly claim that consciousness is not real (a claim on the same credibility level as the claim that nothing exists).  Then Pigliucci offers his explanation for the mind, which is something very lame indeed: an analogy that the mind is like wetness.  I can see why Pigliucci has preceded this "mind is like wetness" account by attacking the mindless idea that consciousness does not exist.  It is so that some readers might think something like "the other idea was crazy, but this idea makes sense." But we should not think along such lines.  It is very silly to claim that consciousness does not exist, and it is also silly to try to explain the human mind by saying that it is rather like wetness. 

Pigliucci follows the typical strategy of reductionists offering goofy explanations for minds. The strategy is to use the word "consciousness" as much as possible to refer to human mentality. What's wrong with that is that consciousness is merely one aspect of human mentality. Human mentality consists of very many things, such as:

• the ability to perceive the outside world;.
• the ability to form memories;
• the ability to recall memories of things learned or experienced decades or a half-century ago;
• the ability to instantly retrieve facts when given some prompt such as a name, place or event;
• the ability to understand complicated things;
• the ability to form abstract ideas;
• the ability to form beliefs and maintain beliefs;
• the ability to feel certain emotions;
• the ability to experience mental and physical pleasure and delight;
• the ability to have paranormal experiences that are not neurally explicable.

A person who talks about a "problem of conssciousness" rather than a "problem of human mentality" is like some person who describes baseball as "base-running" and who then tells us that gorillas can play baseball because gorillas can run between bases.  Such talk would be very fallacious, because baseball is a complex thing involving much more than just base-running: things like pitching, umpiring, hitting, fielding and score-keeping. Similarly, human mentality is a very complex thing involving a wide variety of different capabilities and aspects.  The instant we hear someone mainly using the word "consciousness" to refer to the human mind, we should suspect that we are once again being subjected to a ridiculous reductionism, in which a person is trying the old trick of trying to explain something by first describing it as a hundred times simpler than it is. 

Speaking often rather as if human mentality is mere consciousness, like someone speaking as if baseball is mere base-running, Pigliucci tries to explain the mind by suggesting that consciousness is an "emergent property" like wetness.  He states, "I think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, not dissimilar from, say, the wetness of water (though a lot more complicated)."

In explaining the idea of emergence, an emergentist will typically give an example involving water. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and neither has any such property as wetness. But when oxygen and hydrogen are combined to make water, then we have something with the property of wetness. It is claimed that such a property could never be predicted by just analyzing hydrogen or just analyzing oxygen.

According to the emergentist, this example shows that amazing new properties can arise when matter combines in different ways. The emergentist tells us that human consciousness is simply such a property, a property that just arises from certain complex combinations of matter.

But this reasoning is not sound. The human mind is not a property of the brain or a property of the body.

In general, a property is a simple intrinsic characteristic of something, which can be completely expressed by giving a single number. For example, the properties of a rock are hardness, weight, height, width, length, and depth. Each of these simple properties can be expressed by a single number. (You may not think hardness can be expressed by a number, but there is something called the Mohs scale used to numerically express the hardness of rocks.) We might also think of the color of the rock as being a property, although that requires a simplification (since the rock will actually be multiple colors). If one makes such a simplification, then that color can also be expressed as a single number, such as a number on a color scale. Even wetness can be expressed by a single number (we might, for example, create a wetness scale of 1 to 10, and reasonably assign liquid water a value of 10,  a thick soup a value of about 5, and arid dust with a value of 1 or 0).

But the human mind is not a simple characteristic that can be numerically expressed by a number. When we consider all of the facets of the human mind (memory, intelligence, personality, emotions, spirituality and many others), we certainly do not have anything like a simple characteristic that can be expressed by a number. The human mind is also something mental, something much different from a physical property such as width, weight, or wetness.

In light of such facts, the argument of the emergentist falls apart. To some it may sound persuasive to make this shallow, sketchy comparison:

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of wetness. This can help explain how our consciousness could suddenly arise from the combination of certain types of neurons."

But it does not at all sound convincing to make this deeper, more complete comparison.

"When we combine hydrogen and oxygen, we see the emergence of a new, unexpected property of wetness, which is a simple, physical property that can be expressed by a single number. This can help explain how certain combinations of physical neurons could produce human mentality that is not physical, mentality that is extremely complicated and multifaceted, and not capable of being expressed by a single number."

Obviously the latter argument does not work. Our minds are not at all a property. They are far too complicated, multifaceted, and functional to be a property, which is a simple physical thing, like a single facet of something.

An additional reason for rejecting "mind is a property" reasoning comes from near-death experiences. In these experiences a person will often report floating above his body, and looking down on it. A property is something that cannot be separated from the object with which it is associated. So it would be absolutely nonsensical to say something like, “The rock is on the left side of the room, but the length of the rock is on the right side of the room,” just as it would be nonsensical to say, “I have your bicycle in my garage, but I have the weight of your bicycle in my kitchen.” But judging from near-death experiences, it is possible for a human mind to be separated from the brain, at least briefly. Since properties can never be separated from their associated objects, such experiences supply an additional reason for thinking that the human mind cannot be considered a property of the brain.

Pigliucci states this: "It follows that an explanation of phenomenal consciousness will come (if it will come – there is no assurance that, just because we want to know something, we will eventually figure out a way of actually knowing it) from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, once our understanding of the human brain will be comparable with our understanding of the inner workings of our own computers."  This is actually an embarrassing confession, the confession that evolutionary biology and neuroscience currently have no explanation for the human mind.  Pigliucci  merely suggests that maybe some day they will, after we understand the details of the brain better.    Got it, professor -- you have no explanation for the human mind, but you are just keeping your fingers crossed that one day such an explanation will arise, from more activity in two areas that have failed thus far to produce such an explanation. Why would someone think that after 150 years of failing to produce an explanation for minds, that evolutionary biology and neuroscience would one day produce them?  That's kind of like saying, "I have failed to find my car keys after 100 days of looking inside my living room, but if I ever find them, I will find them by further looking in my living room."

We already understand the physical details of the brain very well indeed. We can examine it with incredible detail using technologies such as two-photon microscopy.  Billions have been poured into multi-year projects clarifying the brain's physical details. What we have learned are facts (discussed in great detail in the posts of this site) that contradict all claims that the brain is the source of our mentality. We know, for example, that no has found any sign of any stored information in brains other than the genetic information in every cell.  We know that the proteins in brains are so short-lived that they have average lifetimes of only two weeks or less --- 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time that humans can remember things. We know that because of factors such as cumulative synaptic delays and the relatively slow speed of dendrites, brain signals in the cortex only travel relatively slowly, way too slowly to explain instant human recall and the blazing calculation speed of math savants. We know that protein formation in brains takes minutes, too long to explain human memories that can form instantly. We know the brain has no sign of any indexing or position notation system that might explain instant memory recall.  We know that there is nothing in the brain like the read mechanism and write mechanism in computers. We have found no trace of any encoding system in the brain by which information learned in school or daily experience could be translated into permanent neural states or synapse states. In short, we have learned very much that discredits the idea that the brain is the source of our minds and the storage place of our memories.  There is no credible scenario under which additional neuroscience findings will give us a neural explanation for our minds.  

Pigliucci insinuates that some special arrangement of neurons in the brain produces mental phenomena, and says "it is not just how they are arranged in the brain that does the trick." When water is frozen, water molecules have a kind of ordered lattice arrangement; but pure ice isn't wet. When water is wet in a liquid state, water molecules are not arranged in any structure (in terms of structure, a barrel of water is like a barrel of sand).  The fact that you get wetness from molecules that have no arrangement does nothing whatsoever to suggest that mental phenomena would arise from some special arrangement of neurons.  

Speaking of wetness, if we think about water we might get some clue about a source of minds. Let's imagine some father and son in Kansas 3000 years ago speculating about the source of rainfall:

Son: Dad, where does rain come from?

Father: I don't know, but things come from similar things.  Branches come from trees, not rocks. So there's probably some big source of water, somewhere, and I bet the rain somehow comes from that. 

The father in this case would have been on the right track, because the water in clouds arises through evaporation from the water in the ocean. And the ocean is the "big source of water" that the father speculated about.  An intelligent speculation about a source of human minds would be that there is some great mind source or oceanic mind, and that mind comes from that source, directly or indirectly,  one type of thing arising from a similar type of thing.  That makes more sense than believing that mind arises from something totally unlike mind (matter).  If we suspect that a human mind comes from some source that is itself mental,  that is like suspecting that a branch came from a tree. If we believe that a human mind comes from a brain, that is like thinking that a branch came from a stone.