She Has the Most Astounding Memory Skills But a Smaller-Than-Average Hippocampus

The explanations of neuroscientists lack very many things. For example, they lack:

• Any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert experience into brain states or synapse states when a memory is created;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert brain states or synapse states into thoughts or recollections when a memory is recalled;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly create new memories, something that humans routinely do; 
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory, such as instantly getting just the right answer when someone is asked to identify some person or object or technical term or historical event;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could create an abstract idea such as the idea of a child or the idea of a dog or the idea of a nation;  
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could imagine something such as some invention no one ever built yet. 

A standard approach of the writers about the brain is to use the trick that can be described as: when you don't have a how, try using a where. For the typical writer about brains, this involves making claims of localization of brain activity.  For example:

• When they don't have a "how" in regard to the brain and abstract thought, they try using a "where" by claiming that abstract thought comes from the frontal cortex. This claim is very dubious because of evidence I discuss in my post "Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex" you can read here.
• When they don't have a "how" in regard to the brain and memory, they try using a "where" by claiming that the hippocampus drives the wonders of memory. This claim is very dubious because of evidence I discuss in my post here. A key element of false claims about the hippocampus and memory is the claim that patient HM could not form new memories after his hippocampus was surgically ravaged. The claim that this patient could not form new memories after  such damage is untrue, as I show in my post here. 

People have been so conditioned to think that the hippocampus is crucial for memory that you can predict exactly what a typical reader of brain-related articles might say after reading this quote from a paper on the astonishing case of subject RS: "RS’s recall of past events appears profoundly rich in episodic detail, including associated tastes, smells, emotions, interactions with others, as well as more trivial details that others would likely forget (e.g., weather conditions). As mentioned above RS... apparently remembers the entire text from all seven Harry Potter novels." Hearing of  such amazing memory abilities far beyond the memory performance of almost everyone, a typical person might say something like: "Wow, she must have a really big hippocampus!"

But the astonishing subject RS actually has a hippocampus well-below average in size. 

The case of subject RS is described in the paper "Enhanced semantic memory in a case of highly superior autobiographical memory" which you can read here. The title refers to Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory or HSAM, a very rare ability in some people to recall  very well with extraordinary accuracy events and detail events in their lives. Such subjects are discussed in my posts here:

HSAM Memory Whiz Subjects Scored 25 Times Higher on a Random Dates Test

HSAM Wonder Daniel McCartney Was a Math and Memory Marvel

The Rare "Total Recall" Effect That Conflicts with Brain Dogmas

The paper describes the young subject RS in this way: 

"RS has vivid autobiographical memories that apparently arise automatically. At the same time, she describes her memories as being organised sequentially, so that to retrieve an event she mentally 'scans'  an ordered structure starting from the earliest memory and continuing to more recent memories until the correct entry is found, akin to scanning a mental timeline (Price & Mattingley, 2013)."

This is a striking description that seems to describe memory working different from the way memory works with the average person.  The paper says this about subject RS:

"The first source of her superior memory involved being able to name days of the week for any given calendar date since the year 2000 (e.g., 'What day was it on 2 March 2002?' Answer: Saturday). The second involved her seeming ability to remember the entire text, practically word for word, of the seven books of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling."

Those who have studied the most impressive examples of human memory performance will recognize the calendar ability described, which is typically called "calendar calculating" (although it can occur so quickly that it seems beyond any explanation of calculation, as confessed in the scientific article here).  It has long been known that some humans have an extraordinary ability to accurately name the day of the week given a very old random date from years ago. Such people may be called "human calendars" or "calendar calculators."  One of the most famous examples is Kim Peek, the autistic savant who inspired the Tom Cruise movie Rain Man. At the 2:31 mark of the extremely interesting video here, we see an example of Kim Peek's calendar ability. At that part he is asked by the adult Daniel Tammet what day of the week was Daniel's birthday of January 31, 1979. Within five seconds Kim correctly answers that the date was a Wednesday.  The same ability was proven to exist as early as the 19th century. My post here on the case of Daniel McCartney quotes an interview in which a reporter repeatedly asked Daniel what day of the week corresponded to some random date the reporter selected, with the dates spanning many decades.  Daniel would give the correct date of the week very quickly when asked such questions, just as if no calculation was involved. 

To test the calendar calculation abilities of subject RS, the paper authors devised a test in which a computer screen would ask 60 times a question like this (with the dates varying in each of the 60 trials): "Which date is earlier in the week:  25 September 2005 or 2 March 2005?"  Answering a question like this at levels above chance requires two different successes in the mysterious "calendar calculating" ability, one that might yield the day of the week for the first date, and another that might yield the day of the week for the first date. The performance of subject RS on this task was compared to that of 10 controls, ordinary people with no special memory ability. 

This was the result of the experiment, verifying that subject RS did really have the ability of being able able to tell the day of the week corresponding to randomly selected dates:

"Overall mean accuracy for determining the earlier date within a week was 90% for RS (SD = 0.30) and 50% for controls (ranging from 43% to 55%; SD = 0.50). Overall median reaction time was 17.12 s for RS (SD = 7.01) and 1.24 s for controls (ranging from 0.51 to 18.85 s; SD = 10.64). Controls responded quickly because they were only able to guess on this task, unlike RS who deliberated carefully and was correct on 9 out of 10 trials."

So in 62 trials subject RS answered 90% correctly when asked questions such as "Which date is earlier in the week:  25 September 2005 or 2 March 2005?" -- a type of question that requires "day of the week" remembering or "day of the week" calculation for two random dates. The control subjects scored only at the chance level of 50%.

To test how well subject RS could recall text from the Harry Potter series of books, scientists had RS and some control subjects attempt to answer 30 questions such as the one shown below, which has quotes from a particular book in the Harry Potter series of books. 

The control subjects presumably all had knowledge of the Harry Potter series of books much better than the average person, because they are described in the paper as "aficionados of the Harry Potter series." The results were that subject RS got 97% of the 30 questions correct (29 out of 30), while the control subjects got 71% correct (better than the by-chance expected value of 50%, because the control subjects were aficionados of the Harry Potter series). The almost-perfect result of patient RS in this experiment tends to back up the author's claim that she had a "seeming ability to remember the entire text, practically word for word, of the seven books of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling."

So we have in this subject RS several types of astounding memory ability, with RS having memory abilities of breathtaking power.  The same subject had an MRI scan of her brain. Did it reveal some anatomical anomaly that can explain the supernormal memory ability? Not at all.

Referring to regions of interest (ROIs0), which in this case means parts of the brain, the paper says, "High-resolution structural MRI scans revealed no volumetric or cortical thickness differences between RS and controls within any of the expected ROIs (i.e., hippocampus, amygdala, insula, temporal gyri and pole, subiculum, putamen)." In other words, she did not have some unusual brain anatomy that can explain her memory skills. 

In fact, the measured volume of the hippocampus of subject RS was below-average. The scientific paper tells us the total volume of her hippocampus (the sum of the volume on her hippocampus on the left side of her brain and the  hippocampus on the right side of her brain) was 4.731 cubic centimeters.  The scientific paper "HIPPOCAMPAL VOLUME AND SHAPE ANALYSIS IN AN OLDER ADULT POPULATION" attempted to judge the size of the hippocampus in 40 elderly adults.  Using "cc" to mean "cubic centimeters," the paper tells us this:  "Total ICV-adjusted volumes were 3.48 cc [cubic centimeters]  (±0.43) for the left hippocampus and 3.68 (±0.42) for the right hippocampus." That gives an average total hippocampus volume of 7.16 cubic centimeters for these 40 people.  According to Table 1 of the paper about her, subject RS had a "whole hippocampus" volume of 4.731 cubic centimeters; so her hippocampus was quite smaller than average. The same scientific paper on the 40 people tells us this: "There were no significant correlations between ICV-adjusted hippocampal volumes and age or memory performance (p>.05)."

So it seems we should not be surprised at all that this woman with the miracle memory had a hippocampus of below-average size, simply because there is no basis for any claim that hippocampus size has any major relation to memory performance, contrary to the misleading insinuations of people writing about the hippocampus.  

The term "hyperthymesia" is another term used for HSAM or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. A recent paper is entitled "Autobiographical hypermnesia as a particular form of mental time travel." In the abstract we read this:

"Here, we describe a case of hyperthymesia with an objective as well as a subjective assessment of mental time travel abilities in different temporal distances. This is the first observation of hyperthymesia with a full evaluation of mental time travel capacities in different temporal distances, encompassing the individual capacity to retrieve personal events from the personal past as well as to foresee personal events in the future."

Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall. But an article on the story summarizes some of its details:

"The study focused on a 17-year-old girl, referred to as TL, who organizes her memories with unusual precision. She separates her memories into two types: ‘black memory,’ which is factual information learned in school without emotional significance, and her autobiographical memories, which she stores in a detailed mental framework.

TL describes her autobiographical memories as being stored in a ‘white room,’ where binders are organized by theme and date. In this mental space, she can review episodes from family life, vacations, friendships, or childhood experiences. Some memories are recalled as images or text messages."

Criticism of Overconfidence, Dubious Theorizing and Poor Performance Is Not Conspiracy Theorizing

The Wall Street Journal recently published a poorly-written article by Dan Kagan-Kans entitled "The Rise of 'Conspiracy Physics.'" Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit describes the article like this:

"The article is an excellent example of the sort of epistemic collapse we’re now living in. There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone.

I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless (and I’m trying to improve my mental health this week, not make it worse). Sorting through a pile of misinformation, trying to rebuild something true out of a collapsed mess of some truth buried in a mixture of nonsense and misunderstandings is a losing battle."

Woit does not seem to have the time, inclination or energy to point out what the main fallacy in the article is. But I can do that. The main fallacy is its illegitimate use of the word "conspiracy." 

The article discusses some critics of scientific academia, and inappropriately labels such critics as conspiracy theorists. But the type of criticism discussed is not conspiracy thinking. It is mainly criticism of overconfidence, elitism, dubious theorizing and poor performance. 

The Cambridge Dictionary defines "conspiracy" like this: "the activity of secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal." What is a conspiracy theorist? A conspiracy theorist is someone who believes that some group has hatched one or more secret plots to do harm or do something illegal. 

The typical critic of scientific academia is not a conspiracy theorist. Such a critic does not believe that scientists met in secret to create some plan to do harm.  Instead, such a critic typically believes that some scientists were guilty of overconfidence, dogmatism, dubious theorizing or poor performance. If you suspect or believe that some group is misspeaking or bungling, that does not make you a conspiracy theorist. 

The article mentions criticism of string theory. Critics of string theory are not conspiracy theorists. String theory is a widely-touted theory in physics, one that has no evidence in its favor. String theorists made grand promises around 1990 that they were going to deliver a "theory of everything." But so far string theory has been a failure as a scientific theory. No observational results have supported it. String theorists were hoping very strongly that experimental results from a major scientific project (the Large Hadron Collider) would provide evidence in support of a theory called supersymmetry, a theory that string theory is built upon. No such evidence ever appeared.  The supersymmetry theory on which string theory is built flunked its observational test, and the "superpartner" particles it predicted were never found. 

It is not any type of conspiracy thinking to be critical of the poor performance and overconfidence of string theorists in academia. Such criticism does not involve any belief or suspicion about people formulating a secret plan to do harm. Similarly, it is not any type of conspiracy thinking to be critical of the poor performance and overconfidence of neuroscientists in academia, nor is it any type of conspiracy thinking to gather reasons for disbelieving in the dogmas taught by such neuroscientists. Such criticism does not involve any belief or suspicion about people formulating a secret plan to do harm or do something illegal.

What has happened is that Dan Kagan-Kan has engaged in a very lazy defamation of science academia critics. He has engaged in mudslinging by attempting to label such people as conspiracy theorists. This kind of lazy defamation is common these days. In the 1950's whenever you wanted to use the laziest and easiest way to defame some person calling for social progress, you might call such a person a communist, even when there was no evidence the person supported communism. Nowadays the  laziest and easiest way to defame some person criticizing the overconfidence, unjustified dogmatism and poor performance of some scientists is to call such a person a conspiracy theorist, even when there is no evidence that the person believes in a conspiracy. 

I myself am a critic of overconfidence, unjustified claims and poor performance of neuroscientists; but I am not any conspiracy theorist. I do not believe or suspect that neuroscientists ever formulated some secret plan to do anyone harm, or any type of secret plan. 

Another type of lazy libel people can make against critics of erring scientists is to call such critics "anti-science." 99% of the people called "anti-science" are actually pro-science, in that they are people who appreciate and applaud well-done science and good performance by scientists.  It is not "anti-science" to draw attention to misstatements and poor performance by some scientists, just as it is not "anti-baseball" to criticize some baseball players or baseball team for performing poorly. 

I consider myself very strongly pro-science, defining science as "facts established by observations" and "systematic efforts to establish facts by observations, experiments and analysis." I appreciate and applaud the work of scientists who do their jobs well, and avoid claiming to know things they do not know. I realize that much of the evidence basis behind this blog comes from the very good hard work of scientists who documented things such as brain physical shortfalls, people who performed well mentally with heavy brain damage, and cases of exceptional mental performance exceeding what should be possible from any brain. People who criticize misspeaking scientists and poorly performing scientists who use bad methods tend to actually be friends of science, just as testers who find bugs in software programs are friends of the software development process. 

What can be called science with a capital "S" is not the totality of what scientists believe in, but something very different: the totality of what scientists have proven. A person tending to take a "let's mainly stick to what scientists have proven" approach should not be called anti-science because of his lack of adherence to all of the belief traditions of scientists, many of which mainly involve belief community speech customs rather than beliefs mandated by proof. 

A sleazy tactic

Neuroscientists Financially Entangled With Biotech Device Makers Produce Flawed Studies

On the week I am writing this post auto-scheduled for later publication, I am observing what so often goes on in news reporting about science: a host of science news sites mindlessly parroting the unjustified claims of a university press release.  You would think that by now our science journalists might have learned the lesson that university press releases these days are often notorious for their hype, errors and misinformation, and that the claims of such press releases should be subjected to critical scrutiny. 

The unfounded claim this week is one that at-home magnetic brain stimulation "shows promise" for treating depression. The claims come from a Kings College press release here, which is entitled "At home brain stimulation for depression found to be safe and effective." We have a discussion of a new study testing at-home head gadgets using something called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS),

The press release states this:

"Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a form of self-administered, non-invasive brain stimulation that applies a weak, direct current of between 0.5 to 2 milliampere to the scalp via two electrodes. It is not electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which delivers about 800 milliamperes to the brain causing a generalised seizure and can only be conducted under strict supervision. 

174 participants aged 18 and over, and with a diagnosis of at least moderate depression were randomly assigned to one of two treatment arms; 'active' tDCS or 'inactive' tDCS which was the same device but did not provide a current. Participants had a 10-week course of treatment, initially having five 30-minute sessions a week for the first three weeks, followed by three 30-minute sessions a week for the following seven weeks.

Researchers found that participants in the active arm of the trial showed significant improvements in the severity of their depression, as well as the overall clinical response and remission compared to those in the ‘inactive’ placebo control arm. The rates of treatment response and remission were three times higher in the active treatment arm compared to the placebo arm, where 44.9% in the active arm demonstrated a remission rate compared to 21.8% of the control group."

A study like this attempts to follow the conventions of randomized controlled trials (RCT) using placebos.  In such studies patients are randomly assigned to either a medication group or a placebo group. Typically the medication group gets some medicine being tested, and the placebo group gets only a similar-looking placebo pill that is something like a sugar pill that looks just like the real medicine. The patient does not know which group he belongs to, and does not know  whether the pill he is being given is just a placebo sugar pill. Such a lack of knowledge is called an example of blinding. Such a randomized control trial attempts to see some medical outcome in the group getting the real medication that is superior to the medical outcome reported in the placebo group. When both a doctor or scientist and the patient are unaware (for at least part of the time)  whether particular patients belong to the get-the-real-treatment group or the placebo control group, such a study is called a "double-blind" study. 

The press release quoted above refers to the study here, entitled "Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation treatment for major depressive disorder: a fully remote phase 2 randomized sham-controlled trial." The study claims to have been a double-blind study, saying that it was a "fully remote, multisite, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized superiority trial."  But the claim about being double-blind is not correct. The patients who were supposed to be blind as to whether or not they were getting the real magnetic stimulation were  not really blind about such a thing. 

The failure of the blinding protocol to achieve real blindness (a lack of knowledge by subjects about whether they were receiving the real treatment) is shown by the section of the paper entitled "Analysis of study blinding and unblinding." There we read this:

"Before unblinding at week 10 (end of trial), participants were asked to guess whether they thought they were receiving the active or sham tDCS device and their level of certainty, rating from ‘1’ for ‘very uncertain’ to ‘5’ for to ‘very certain’. A guess of active tDCS was made by 77.6% in the active treatment arm and 59.3% in the sham treatment arm; the difference was significant (P = 0.01)."

This is a very big difference. 77% of the people getting the real treatment thought they were getting the real treatment, but only 59% of the people in the "no treatment" placebo group thought they were getting the real treatment.  This indicates a very major effect in which the people getting the real treatment were much more likely to think that they were getting the real treatment than those not getting the real treatment. In a randomized control trial that achieves an effective level of blinding, there will be no difference between the percentage of real-treatment subjects and placebo or sham treatment subjects who thought they were getting the real treatment. 

Analyzing the paper, it's easy to see why patients who were not getting the real treatment would have been been better able to figure out whether they were getting the real treatment. We read this:

"Active stimulation consisted of 2 mA direct current stimulation for 30 min with gradual ramp up over 120 s at the start and ramp down over 15 s at end of the session. Sham stimulation with the same device and app was used to resemble the active intervention and to receive the treatment schedule. An initial ramp up from 0 to 1 mA over 30 s then ramp down to 0 mA over 15 s was repeated at the end of the session to cause a tingling sensation that mimics active stimulation."

So the people getting the real treatment got 30 minutes of real direct current stimulation of their head, but the people getting the sham or placebo treatment got only about 30 seconds of real direct current stimulation. Such a big difference helps explains why a much higher percentage of those getting the real treatment thought they were getting the real treatment. 

That much higher percentage is enough to explain the difference in the reported relief of depression symptoms, even while assuming that the head device had zero real effectiveness in treating depression. Being much more likely to think that they had got some possibly effective  real brain zapping effect, the people in the real treatment group were much more likely to get a placebo effect that was largely the power of suggestion. Similarly, assign two groups of patients sugar-pill placebos, telling the first group that the pill is a powerful anti-depressant, and the second that the pill is just a vitamin, then the first group will probably report significant improvement in their depression, because of placebo effects and the power of suggestion. 

Nowadays biotech companies may have a very large incentive to fund and/or promote poorly designed and executed brain research, particularly whenever such research helps to promote some device that such companies sell. Biotech companies include very many companies such as the manufacturers of MRI devices, the manufacturers of EEG equipment, the manufacturers of implantable medical devices, and the manufacturers of noninvasive brain-related devices that a person may put on his head. The biotech industry is a trillion-dollar industry, and many billions of that involves brain-related products. 

Neuroscientists these days are thoroughly entangled with pharmaceutical companies and the manufacturers of biotech devices. The entanglement casts great doubt on the objectivity of any such scientists doing studies relating to the effectiveness of any brain-related medicine or any brain-related medical device. These entanglements and their pernicious effects on the objectivity of neuroscientists is discussed in my post "How the Academia-Cyberspace-Pharmaceutical-Biotech-Publishing Complex Incentivizes Bad Brain Research," which you can read here. 

The diagram below illustrates some of the entanglements and conflicts of interest going on:

Whenever you read a science paper that seems to promote some medicine or medical device, it is always a good idea to study the "Competing Interests" section of the paper, in which scientists are supposed to reveal possible conflicts of interest that may have affected their objectivity. When you examine that "Competing Interests" section of the paper being discussed, all kinds of alarm bells should go off. Here it is:

"C.H.Y.F. reports the following competing interests: research grant funding on behalf of the University of East London from Flow Neuroscience (no. R102696); research grant funding from NIMH (no. R01MH134236), the Baszucki Brain Research Fund Milken Institute (no. BD0000009), the Rosetrees Trust (no. CF20212104), the International Psychoanalytic Society (no. 158102845), the MRC (no. G0802594), NARSAD and the Wellcome Trust. She is Associate Editor of Psychoradiology and Section Editor of the Brain Research Bulletin. A.H.Y. reports the following competing interests: paid lectures and advisory boards for the following companies with therapies used in affective and related disorders: Flow Neuroscience, Novartis, Roche, Janssen, Takeda, Noema Pharma, Compass, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, LivaNova, Lundbeck, Sunovion, Servier, LivaNova, Janssen, Allegan, Bionomics, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, Sage, Novartis and Neurocentrx. He is principal investigator for the following studies: the Restore-Life VNS registry study funded by LivaNova; ESKETINTRD3004: ‘An Open-label, Long-term, Safety and Efficacy Study of Intranasal Esketamine in Treatment-resistant Depression’; The Effects of Psilocybin on Cognitive Function in Healthy Participants; The Safety and Efficacy of Psilocybin in Participants with Treatment-Resistant Depression (P-TRD); A Double-Blind, Randomized, Parallel-Group Study with Quetiapine Extended Release as Comparator to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of Seltorexant 20 mg as Adjunctive Therapy to Antidepressants in Adult and Elderly Patients with Major Depressive Disorder with Insomnia Symptoms Who Have Responded Inadequately to Antidepressant Therapy (Janssen); An Open-label, Long-term, Safety and Efficacy Study of Aticaprant as Adjunctive Therapy in Adult and Elderly Participants with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) (Janssen); A Randomized, Double-blind, Multicentre, Parallel-group, Placebo-controlled Study to Evaluate the Efficacy, Safety, and Tolerability of Aticaprant 10 mg as Adjunctive Therapy in Adult Participants with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) with Moderate-to-severe Anhedonia and Inadequate Response to Current Antidepressant Therapy; A Study of Disease Characteristics and Real-life Standard of Care Effectiveness in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) With Anhedonia and Inadequate Response to Current Antidepressant Therapy Including an SSRI or SNR (Janssen). He is UK Chief Investigator for the following studies: Novartis MDD study no. MIJ821A12201; Compass; and the COMP006 and COMP007 studies. Grant funding (past and present) includes: NIMH (USA); CIHR (Canada); NARSAD (USA); the Stanley Medical Research Institute (USA); MRC (UK); the Wellcome Trust (UK); the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh; the British Medical Association (UK); the VGH & UBC Foundation (Canada); WEDC (Canada); the CCS Depression Research Fund (Canada); the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (Canada); NIHR (UK). Janssen (UK) and EU Horizon 2020. He is the Editor of the Journal of Psychopharmacology and Deputy Editor of BJPsych Open. He has no shareholdings in pharmaceutical companies. S.S. reports the following competing interests: research grant funding on behalf of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston from Flow Neuroscience; paid advisory boards for the following companies: Worldwide Clinical Trials and Inversago; and Vicore Pharma. He is a full-time employee of Intra-Cellular Therapies. He has received grants and research support from NIMH (USA) (no. 1R21MH119441-01A1), NIMH (no. 1R21MH129888-01A1), NICHD (no. 1R21HD106779-01A1), SAMHSA (no. 6H79FG000470-01M003) and Fizer foundation. He has received research funding as a principal investigator or study/subinvestigator from or participated as consultant/speaker for Flow Neuroscience, COMPASS Pathways, LivaNova, Janssen, Relmada and the Psychiatry Education Forum. Intra-Cellular Therapies or National Institutes of Health (NIH) or SAMHSA or any other organizations had no role in study design and conduct; the collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data; the preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. The study’s content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Intra-Cellular Therapies or NIH or SAMHSA. R.M-V. has received consulting fees from Eurofarma Pharmaceuticals, Abbott and BioStrategies group; has research contracts with Boerhinger Ingelheim and Janssen Pharmaceuticals; and has received speaker fees from Otsuka, EMS and Cristalia. He is a member of the scientific boards of Symbinas Pharmaceuticals and Allergan. He is also the principal investigator for the following grants: NIH (nos. R21HD106779 and R21MH129888), Milken Institute (no. BD-0000000081). D.M. and L.H. work for Biomedical Statistical Consulting; they provide statistical support to MCRA and received payments from Flow Neuroscience. A.-R.G.-N., G.S., H.H., J.C.S., M.R., N.L., P.J.L., P.O., R.D.W. and S.S.K. declare no competing interests."

What is this Flow Neuroscience we keep hearing about? It is a manufacturer of a head-zapping device marketed as an aid for depression -- exactly the type of device being promoted by this poorly designed and unconvincing study. We should not expect scientists taking lots of money from some manufacturer to produce unbiased studies evaluating a device of such a manufacturer. 

Under the assumptions of materialism, the idea that you could improve your health by zapping your brain with electricity or magnetism makes no sense. Under the assumptions of materialists, we might expect that zapping your brain might disrupt the "delicate brain mechanism of memory storage" that materialists believe in.  Luckily such devices probably don't harm your memories, because such memories  are not actually stored in your brain.  It is ironic for neuroscientists to be promoting devices doing brain-zapping that make no sense under the assumptions of such neuroscientists.  Maybe when they promote such devices, somehow they are recalling the utter failure of neuroscientists to present a credible theory of brain memory storage or brain instant recall, and the utter failure of neuroscientists to find any trace of learned human knowledge by microscopic examination of brain tissue. 

They are "in bed with each other"

Postscript: A slightly different method uses alternate current rather than direct current, and is called Transcranial Alternate Current Stimulation or tACS.  A year 2025 review paper states, " Overall, tACS has minimal impact on working memory improvement, but it shows potential under certain conditions. "

Very Old Super-agers With Excellent Memories Have Normal Brains

Nowadays the BBC Science Focus site contains many misleading stories. This year a  story on the BBC Science Focus site had this utterly bogus Fake News headline: "We finally know how life on Earth started, staggering new asteroid discovery suggests." 

Fake News, BBC-Style

 

The study discussed provided not the slightest warrant for such a claim, and the article referred to a study written by authors who did not make such a claim.  The study merely claimed to have found the tiniest trace amounts (roughly 1 part in a billion) of some chemicals used by living things, in a sample taken from an asteroid. As I discuss at length in my post here, the claims made in the study are not reliable, because the amounts reported are such negligible trace amounts that  we can have no confidence that the reported chemicals came from the asteroid, rather than from earthly contamination. The BBC article on this study has quite a few statements as bogus and untrue as the article's headline. 

On the same day as the bogus headline shown above appeared at the BBC Science Focus site, we had this equally bogus headline: "Alien life on Mars: ancient beach discovery may offer clearest proof yet." The article discussed nothing that was any evidence of life on Mars, where scientists have failed to even find any of the building components (amino acids) of the building components (proteins) of the simplest living things. This BBC Science Focus site these days is a shameless spreader of bogus science-related stories.  This year it had a phony headline claiming "Our chances of finding alien just skyrocketed." It is referring to research that did nothing to make extraterrestrial life seem more probable, for reasons discussed here. 

A recent article at the BBC Science Focus on so-called super-agers did not have a misleading headline. But it did contain very misleading statements by both the article writer and a scientist quoted. The article referred to "super-agers" defined as people who are very old but still have very good memory, and perform on memory tests as well as people decades younger. The article stated this:

"These super agers also had a youthful brain structure. Older brains generally have thinner cortexes – the outer layer of the brain – than younger brains, but these super-agers’ cortexes had not thinned."

The statement is not supported by any strong evidence.  The 2012 scientific paper "Superior Memory and Higher Cortical Volumes in Unusually Successful Cognitive Aging" examined this question, looking at previously published papers. The paper stated this:

"Six articles [11, 14, 16–19] did not report statistical differences between superagers and age-matched controls concerning the whole-brain cortical thickness (mean wholebrain cortical thickness was 2.29–2.34 mm vs 2.27–2.32 mm, respectively). Only Harrison et al. [8] demonstrated a higher whole-brain cortical volume in superagers compared with age-matched controls and a similar volume to middle-aged control subjects (superagers vs. middle-aged controls vs. age-matched controls was 288.05 mm³ vs. 306.43 mm³ vs. 244.13 mm³ , respectively).....With the exception of the Lin et al. study [14] that has a high risk of bias, the included studies showed a weak correlation between levels of amyloid deposition and cognition among superagers and age-matched controls in a cross-section analysis [15, 17–19] following previous works in unimpaired adults [34–36]. In addition, histological studies demonstrated abundant deposition of neurofibrillary tangles in the hippocampalentorhinal complex [23] and in the posterior cingulate cortex of superagers [10, 21, 22]."

So according to the paper above, 6 out of 7 scientific papers on the topic failed to find any evidence that super-agers have more thick cortex regions of the brain than average people of their age. 

The BBC Science Focus article  quotes Sandra Weintraub, lead author of a year 2025 paper "The first 25 years of the Northwestern University SuperAging Program."  That paper states this, using as a reference the outlier Harrison paper mentioned in the quote above:

"We found, as expected, that neurotypical seniors≥80 years of age have significant and widespread cortical thinning compared to neurotypical 50- to 60-year-olds.¹⁹ Superagers, on the other hand, showed no cortical thinning compared to the younger controls." 

The reference (19) is to the Harrison paper mentioned in the quote above. But that paper is an outlier. As the quote above states, six other studies found the opposite, because they "did not report statistical differences between superagers and age-matched controls concerning the whole-brain cortical thickness."

The Weintraub paper states, "In a preliminary study over 18 months, overall cortical thickness was reduced by 1.06% in superagers compared to 2.24% in neurotypical peers, a difference that was statistically significant."  This is a low-quality study failing to make minimal standards for a correlation study. The study in question ("

Rates of Cortical Atrophy in Adults 80 Years and Older With Superior vs Average Episodic Memory") compared a super-ager group of 20 subjects to a normal control group of only 12 subjects.  But such a control group of 12 subjects was too small for any reliable result to be claimed. A good rule of thumb regarding neuroscience research is that no study should be taken seriously unless it uses a minimum of 15 or 20 subjects per study group, and such a requirement includes the control group.  

The paper "Prevalence of Mixed-methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research" has a Table 2 giving recommendations for minimum study group sizes for different types of research. According to the paper, the minimum number of subjects for an experimental study are 21 subjects per study group. The same table lists 61 subjects per study group as a minimum for a "correlational" study. A study trying to establish a correlation between super-aging performance and cortical thickness is an example of a "correlational" study, so it requires more than 50 subjects per study group to be good evidence. 

The Weintraub paper then claims this:

"The most surprising finding was the identification of an anterior cingulate region in which superagers had greater cortical thickness than even neurotypical participants 50 to 60 years of age (Figure 2A). This finding subsequently has been confirmed in other studies."

We have a reference to four different papers, none of which provide robust evidence for such a claim. The first is the paper here. It had a study group size of only 17 super-agers, not large enough for a convincing result to be claimed. A study like this cannot be taken seriously unless it followed a blinding protocol, in which analysts analyzing brain scans were blind as to whether a brain scan being analyzed did or did not come from one of the super-agers. The paper makes no claim to have followed any blinding protocol. The reported greater thickness in the anterior cingulate region was so small (much less than 1 millimeter) that we can have no confidence in the claimed greater thickness, particularly given the lack of a blinding protocol. The second paper mentioned is the one here, which also has a too-small sample size of super-agers (only 19), and also fails to follow any blinding protocol. The reported greater thickness in the anterior cingulate region was so small (much less than 1 millimeter) that we can have no confidence in the claimed greater thickness, particularly given the lack of a blinding protocol. The third paper has a much better sample size of super-agers, but also failed to use any blinding protocol. So we should have no confidence in its claim of "greater thickness" in the anterior cingulate region of super-agers, which is not backed up by any specific numbers. The fourth paper uses a probably-not-big enough study group size of 26 super-agers, and also fails to follow any blinding protocol. So its vague unquantified assertion of greater thickness in the anterior cingulate region of super-agers does not qualify as convincing evidence. 

The Weintraub paper then claims "the anterior cingulate gyrus of superagers also contains more von Economo neurons compared not only to neurotypical peers but also to much younger persons." We have a reference to three papers. The first paper used study group sizes (such as 21 and 18) too small for a reliable result to be claimed for a study of this type. We have only the scantiest claim about blinding, the claim that "the three cingulate subregions were traced...and analyzed...by an individual blinded to group affiliation." Claims about blinding are never credible unless a paper discusses a detailed blinding protocol; and we get no such discussion in this paper.  There are innumerable ways for a supposedly "blinded" analyst to actually know which study group some brain tissue belongs to, and we can only believe claims about blinding if the paper has at least a paragraph discussing how the supposedly blinded analyst really was blinded. The paper claims "there was a higher density of von Economo neurons," but fails to give us any numbers backing up this claim; and the reported statistical significance is an unimpressive "< .05." Also, the paper does not claim that this search for "von Economo neurons" was made by someone blinded as to group affiliation. So we end up with no compelling evidence that super-agers have more "von Economo neurons."

The second paper cited in support of the claim of more "von Economo neurons" is worse than the paper just discussed, as it used only way-too-small study group sizes of five, and has no mention of a detailed blinding protocol, other than the scantiest one-sentence mention, one failing to claim that the analyst looking for "von Economo neurons" was blinded as to group affiliation. The third paper mentioned is just as bad, involving way-too-small study group sizes of only five subjects per group. Contrary to one of the claims made above, the paper found "Preliminary stereological analysis found no significant differences in total neuronal counts (p>0.05) or neuronal size (p>0.05) among the three groups across the cingulate." Those three groups included a super-ager group and normal-performing people of the same age. 

I can hardly over-emphasize how important a detailed blinding protocol is for any analysis of this type to be credible. The type of questions addressed by studies such as this involve analysis that is extremely easy to do incorrectly whenever there is any motivation in an analyst to perform the analysis in some particular way. Doing something such as analyzing whether one group of subjects has an average cortical thickness half a millimeter greater (about the size of the period at the end of this sentence) is just the type of hard-to-get-right analysis task where bias (or belief in a desired result) might make analyst judgments unreliable. Trying to judge whether a subject has more neurons of some particular type is also the type of hard-to-get-right affair in which potential analyst bias is enough to invalidate any reported results. For there to be credibility of any claims made of an analysis of such marginal, hard-to-observe and hard-to-measure things, a paper must state a detailed blinding protocol explaining exactly why we should not believe that the analysts were just reporting a result that was longed for by their superiors. None of the discussed papers state such a protocol. Most of them fail to even use the word "blind" or "blinding." In the few cases when we find the word "blind" or "blinding" in such papers, it is the skimpiest mention, with a paper referring to blinding only in a single sentence, and mentioning only some limited type of blinding, not the following of a detailed blinding protocol. None of these papers did blinding right, and that is a major reason for dismissing all of them. 

With a wink and a nod

The fact is that we have no solid evidence that the brains of super-agers with superior memories tend to be different from the brains of typical people of the same age. Analysis of super-ager brains does nothing to support claims that brains store memories.

Postscript: In my original post I forgot to address another unfounded claim made by Sandra Weintraub in the BBC Science Focus article, the claim that super-agers "don’t make the plaques and tangles" sometimes claimed to be being associated with dementia. That article contradicts this claim, because the article states that in "some of the super-agers' brains, the scientists found amyloid and tau proteins (known as plaques and tangles)." A search for evidence on this topic shows how unfounded Weintraub's claim here is.  

I examined two papers analyzing this question. The study here found "SuperAgers showed a lower frequency of Alzheimer-type neurofibrillary tangles (p < 0.05)." But it found such a result with only the very unimpressive statistical significance of "p < 0.05," which is the minimum statistical significance qualifying for publication, not a convincing result. Figure 4 of the paper shows that the study group sizes for this analysis of neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) was only 5 subjects per study group, which is way too small a sample size for any convincing result to be claimed. As a general rule of thumb, any claim like this should be regarded as worthless unless the study groups size was at least 15 or 20 subjects per study group. 

Also failing to qualify as any good evidence for Weintraub's claim is Weintraub's paper "Von Economo Neurons of the Anterior Cingulate across the Lifespan and in Alzheimer’s Disease," which also used a way-too-small study group size of only five subjects for the microscopic analysis of plaques and tangles in brains. That study group is at least 300% too small for Weintraub to be justifiably making any claim about whether super-agers have fewer plaques and tangles than normal subjects. 

The study here also had too-small study group sizes, as it involved only 8 super-agers and 6 normal control subjects. But at least the study group size was larger than in the studies above. The study found "there were no significant differences in plaque density" between the super-agers and normal controls, contrary to Weintraub's assertion that super-agers don't have such plaques. 

Below is interesting data from Table 1 of the paper here. We have data on six elderly female subjects called "super-agers." The MMSE number is the score on the Mini-Mental State Examination, a test of cognitive ability including short-term recall and also long-term semantic memory.  The maximum score on the test is 30. Notice the lack of correlation between brain weight and IQ, and the lack of correlation between brain weight and the MMSE score. The  MMSE scores for the 1st and 2nd subjects are identical, with the 2nd subject being very slightly smarter, even though the second subject has a brain weight 25% smaller. That same 2nd subject has an IQ of 135 -- in the 99th percentile for humans -- despite her  brain being far below the average female brain size of about 1200 grams. The 4th subject has a brain much smaller than the fifth subject, but has the same perfect MMSE score, and an IQ score 10% higher. These results are consistent with the idea that your brain is not the source of your mind, and not the explanation of your memory powers. 

NAME	AGE	MMSE (MAX=30)	IQ	BRAIN WEIGHT (GRAMS)
SA1	87	29	133	1240
SA2	90	29	135	990
SA3	99	25	112	1020
SA4	87	30	119	1090
SA5	81	30	107	1269
SA6	90	29	111	1100

A similar table with data for 50 subjects can be found in the year 2021 paper "Is there a correlation between the number of brain cells and IQ?" We read this summary of the results:

"In our sample of 50 male brains, IQ scores did not correlate significantly with the total number of neurons (Fig. 1A), oligodendrocytes (Fig. 1B), astrocytes (Fig. 1C) or microglia (Fig. 1D) in the neocortex, nor with the cortical volume (Fig. 2A), surface area (Fig. 2B) and thickness (Fig. 2C). This also applied to estimates of the four separate lobes (frontal-, temporal-, parietal-, and occipital cortices; see Supplementary Material). Neither did IQ score correlate significantly with the volumes of white matter (Fig. 2D), central gray matter (Fig. 2E) or lateral ventricles (Fig. 2F), nor with the brain weight (Fig. 3A), or body height (Fig. 3B). All of these correlation coefficients were less than 0.2." 

Can we imagine a more complete research failure of the "brains make minds" hypothesis?

Their Memory Performance Far Exceeded What a Brain Could Ever Do

We do not know that brains remember anything; we simply know that people remember things. The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be learned and recalled, and the length of time things can be remembered. There has never been found in the brain any component known to be capable of a fast storage or retrieval of learned information, or the storage or retrieval of learned information at any speed. The protein molecules that brains are built from have a high rate of molecular turnover,  and have an average lifetime of less than two weeks.  There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  

Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast learning and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that learning, memorization and memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Attached to unstable dendritic spines that do not last for years, chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower.")  So the more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), and the more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very voluminous learning and memorization, the  stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall and memory formation occur from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and very carefully study and ponder all cases of exceptional human memory performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability and throughput of the best cases of human memory performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do, and the more cases of humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do, and the more cases of humans that seem to learn at a speed, reliability and capacity too fast and accurate for a noisy, relatively slow and transmission-unreliable brain to do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  

A case of exceptional memory performance is well documented in the book "The mind of a mnemonist : a little book about a vast memory" by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. You can read the book on www.archive.org using the link here. The book describes a subject it calls S, a subject now known to be Solomon Shereshevsky. A scientific paper says this about the book:

"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."

On page 17 of Luria' s book we are told that when asked to memorize the table of random numbers below, Shereshevsky reproduced the table perfectly, in 40 seconds, after only three minutes of studying it. 

On page 20 we are told that after Shereshevsky viewed a stimulus a certain length of time, he could continue to see the thing vividly in his mind's eye. We read, "He told us that he continued to see the table which had been written on a blackboard or a sheet of paper, that he merely had to 'read it off,' successfully enumerating the numbers or letters it contained." Around page 23 we are told that  Shereshevsky had to some degree synesthesia.  When tested with electronic sounds, he reported that they would produce some type of visual stimulus. On page 24 we are told, "Every sound he heard immediately produced an experience of light and color and, as we shall see later in this account, a sense of taste and touch as well."

On page 51 we are told that in 1936 Shereshevsky was asked to memorize a hard-to-remember table that started out like this, and had at least two additional rows like the rows below. 

We are told that he reproduced the table correctly, and that four years later he was asked to describe how he did it. Shereshevsky was able to describe in exact detail his memorization technique, and while doing so reproduced all the rows shown above, and two additional rows. On page 57 we are told this:

"On April 6, 1944, eight years after obtaining this record

from him, I had occasion to ask S. to repeat this performance (once again without giving him prior warning). He had no difficulty

whatsoever and came through with a faultless reproduction."

Here is an excerpt from page 61, in which the author talks about the astonishing lack of fading over time in Shereshevsky's memory:

On page 69 we read that  Shereshevsky scorned the idea of writing down things on paper in order to remember them, saying that if you did that, you would tend to forget what was written down. 

On page 139 we are told that Shereshevsky demonstrated that he could will his pulse rate to increase from 70 to 100. When asked how he could do this, he replied that he simply visualized himself running to catch a departing train. 

Recently the Cornell physics paper server included a paper by neuroscientist Bastian Wiederhold, one entitled "An introduction to memory competitions, records and techniques," one you can read here. Below are some quotations from the paper, quotations that may shock very greatly those who have failed to study cases of human best memory performances. 

• "The best competitors manage to memorize a one-hundred-digit number in under 15 seconds."
• "The record for memorizing the sequence of cards in shuffled deck of 52 playing cards was two minutes in 1993 and is now 12.74 seconds by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh set in 2018."
• "Nowadays, tens of thousands of digits are being recalled in π competitions. Modern records include memorizing 35 packs of cards or an over 3000-digit decimal number in one hour, a sequence of 145 words in 5 min, the names of a class of 30 students in under 30 s, a shuffled deck of 52 playing cards in around 12 s or a 50-digit binary number in one second."
• "But didn’t Daniel Tammet memorize 22514 digits of π? Recently, Susanne Hippauf, a policewoman, broke the German record with 18026 digits."
• "For example, in auditive digits, the objective is to memorize a sequence of decimal digits, read aloud at one digit/s [1 digit per second]. The score is the number of digits counted until the first error. The current world record of Lance Tschirhart is 456, over seven minutes of perfect memorization."
• "We tried to estimate the memorization time of the π-record using the function R(t). The π world record of Suresh Kamar Sharma stands at an impressive 70030 digits, a multiple of around 20.5 of the hour world record of 3412."
• "The speed of historic dates [is] the fastest among the five-minute disciplines (Figure 1). The objective is to memorize the year between 1000 and 2100 of fictional events (Appendix B). After memorization, the events are scrambled and competitors recall the respective years of the events. The current world record is 148 by Prateek Yadav." This presumably involved the correct memorization of the years of 148 fictional events, all within a five minute period. 

Listing these feats, our neuroscientist has no neuroscience hypothesis to offer to explain how people could memorize so quickly.  When neuroscientists attempt to explain learning and memory formation, they discuss processes that occur at a very sluggish rate, processes such as synapse strengthening and protein synthesis. Such explanation attempts are very lame and inadequate. When human memory performance is fastest, humans do not learn and recall at the speed of brains, but instead learn and recall at the speed of souls.