Raven Smarts Defy Prevailing Brain Dogmas

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

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

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

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

An article on the Science Daily site states the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another article quotes this Onur Güntürkün speaking rather more clearly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Neuroscience Papers Bluffing Is More Common Than Candor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hirano and Noguchi, 1998

, 

Hirano et al., 2002

). Using the Remember and Know procedure (

Tulving, 1985

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð

feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,

oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra

ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.

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

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

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

Study Finds Equal Brain Connectivity in All Mammals

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

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

We read the following:

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

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

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

Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain

"Scientific journals have reported cases of persons whose injuries have necessitated the removal of a large portion of the brain, and whose memory and power of thought were unimpaired by the loss of much cerebral matter, or by damage to centers which are supposed to be necessary to memory and consciousness. Dr. Troude writes:  'As M. Bergson foresaw in 1897, the hypothesis of the brain as conservative of memory images, must be renounced once and for all, and other ideas as to the nature of its role in the act of memory must be accepted. ' "

--- Helen C. Lambert, A General Survey of Psychical Phenomena, p. 49.

The idea of a crucial experiment or critical experiment is an old concept in the world of science. Such an experiment is supposedly one that leaves one particular hypothesis standing, and rules out all rival explanations or rival hypotheses. The idea that there are such experiments has been criticized by some. A simpler idea is the idea of a sink-or-swim experiment. A sink-or-swim experiment is one that either leaves some hypothesis standing as a viable hypothesis (the “swim” situation) or causes the hypothesis to be discredited (the “sink” hypothesis).

Scientists have very often claimed that the human mind is produced by the brain, and that memories are stored in the brain. A very interesting question is: could you do a sink-or-swim experiment testing such hypotheses? The experiment has actually been done, not just once but many times. I will here use the term “experiment” for medical procedures that were usually done for medical reasons such as stopping very bad brain seizures in patients. Although the doctors who did such procedures may not have considered them experiments, we can consider them as experiments in the sense of testing a particular hypothesis about the brain.

The sink-or-swim experiment for the hypothesis that the brain makes the mind and the hypothesis that the brain stores memories is to surgically remove half of the brain, and see what the effect is on the mind and memory. Such an experiment has been done many times. Almost every time the result has been that there was no major effect on consciousness, no major effect or intelligence, and no major effect on memory. The memories of people who had half of their brains removed usually preserved the knowledge and life memories they had acquired.

This is a “sink” result for this sink-or-swim experiment. The results of such surgical operations decisively refute claims that the mind is the product of the brain and claims that the brain is the storage place of memories. But addicted to materialist dogma that the mind is merely the product of the brain and that memories are stored in brains, virtually no neuroscientists have paid attention to the results of these sink-or-swim experiments. In this regard, they are like fundamentalists who keep believing that the Earth is 6000 years old despite observational results indicating our planet is billions of years old.

I have in five previous posts (here, here, here, here and here) listed very much data relating to such experiments. In this post I will not restate that data showing that intelligence is well-preserved after removing half of the brain, but will mostly cite some data and cases I have not previously discussed.

I can start with the results reported in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pages 500-503, regarding work of W. E. Dandy, in which he removed half of the brains of patients. You can read the results in the preview here (without doing any registration). We read the following (I have put a few of the sentences in boldface):

“Dandy has completely removed the right cerebral hemisphere from eight patients. He has performed total extirpations of one or more lobes much oftener... There are tabulated below certain generalizations on the effects of removing the right hemisphere.... The operation was the complete extirpation of the right frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes peripheral to the corpus striatum. The weight of the tissue re moved varies, with the pathological conditions involved, from 250 to 584 grm [grams].Coherent conversation began within twenty-four hours after operation, and in one case on the afternoon of the same day. Later examinations showed no observable mental changes. The patients were perfectly oriented in respect of time, place, and person; their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events; conversation was always coherent; ability to read, write, compute, and learn new material was unaltered. Current events were followed with normal interest. There were no personality changes apparent; the patients were emotionally stable, without fears, delusions, hallucinations, expansive ideas or obsessions, and with a good sense of humor; they joked frequently. They showed a natural interest in their condition and future. They cooperated intelligently at all times throughout post-operative care and subsequent testing of function.”

It would be rather hard to imagine a more decisive refutation of the claim that the human brain is the source of the human mind, and the claim that the human brain is the storage place of human memories. Here are eight people who had half of their brains removed. Yet the people showed “no observable mental changes,” and “their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events.” The people could read, write, compute and learn just as if nothing had happened, and “there were no personality changes.”

A 1966 paper was entitled “Long-term changes in intellect and behavior after hemispherectomy.” The paper refers to operations in which half of a brain is removed, often to stop very bad brain seizures. This paper gives very detailed “before and after” IQ score data on 11 people who had half of their brains removed. Eight of the 11 people had the left half of their brain removed, and the other three had the right half of their brain removed. Every single one of the 11 people was able to get an improved IQ score on at least one of the tests taken after half of their brain was removed, a score better than a corresponding score they had got before half of their brain was removed.

Patient 1 (a P.G.) had an IQ of 128 before half of his brain was removed. After half of his brain was removed, he scored 142 on an IQ test. The paper tells us that this man with half a brain “obtained a university diploma after operation” and “has a responsible administrative position with a local authority.”

The same paper refers to previous results when removing half of a brain, and notes data suggesting that such an operation has little negative effect on intelligence. Referring to intelligence, we are told that McKissock reported “short term improvement in 13 of 17 cases,” that another researcher found “significant improvement in verbal intelligence scores in a variety of tests after operation in five of 35 cases, with temporary deterioration in two, the remainder unchanged.” We are also told that White “reports improvement in personality in 80% of 134 cases” in which half of the brain was removed.

The 2013 paper "Long-term functional outcomes and their predictors after hemispherectomy in 115 children" reports this: "In this cohort of 115 children, at a mean follow-up of 6.05 years after hemispherectomy, 83% patients walked independently, 73% had minimal or no behavioral problems, 69.5% had satisfactory spoken language skills, and 42% had good reading skills."  These results are for people with half-brains, and we should remember that a large fraction of people with full brains lack good reading skills.  Typically a hemispherectomy operation occurs as a last resort for a child who has been long-plagued by seizures.  Before the operation, such seizures may have long-disrupted normal learning.  So this 42% may not even reflect any major deterioration in reading skills after removal of half a brain. 

In the scientific paper here, we have on page 248 and page 250 before and after test scores for various subjects who had of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.  The IQ score differences are slight. IQ tests don't involve learned information, but almost any IQ test would be largely a test of memory, as it would be a largely a test of ability to read test questions.  

On the same pages we have before and after test scores for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests given to various subjects who had  half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.   In these tests, someone is shown picture cards like the one below, and asked to name the words represented by the pictures.  These tests are tests of memory retention after removal of half of the brain.  On these memory tests there was no decline in the score of 21 subjects mentioned on page 248, and no decline in 7 subjects mentioned on page 250. 

In an article in the New Yorker magazine, we are told of a Christina Santhouse who had half of her brain surgically removed: “When I met her, she had taken her S.A.T.s and just finished high school, coming in seventy-sixth in a class of two hundred and twenty-five.” If your brain makes your mind, how could you finish in the top 34% of your class with only half a brain? The same article tells us of someone who had half of the brain removed, but made the dean's list in college, a list of the top-performing students on campus.

An article in the LA Times tells us about memory preservation in a young girl who lost half her brain:

“How is it that 8-year-old Beth Usher of Storrs, Conn., can lose her left hemisphere, yet retain her large repertoire of knock-knock jokes? Beth’s memories survived not just the loss of brain tissue, but also the 32 days that she spent in a coma, the result of some brain stem swelling that occurred in response to the trauma of surgery. Shortly after Beth regained consciousness, her father began quizzing her about people and places from her past. Brian Usher didn’t get very far. 'Dad,' Beth interrupted, with a trace of impatience. 'I remember everything.' ”

In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this:

"Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....Although there have been major concerns about loss of language after left hemispherectomy, all eleven of these children have regained virtually normal language....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."

There is a reason why we can be confident that removal of half of a brain in hemispherectomy operations does not cause any major loss of learned memories.  If there was a case of any such thing happening, you can believe that it would be endlessly recited by those who wish for us to believe that memories are stored in brains.  But there is no such case, so we never hear materialists telling us about some person who suffered some dramatic loss of learned knowledge after having a hemispherectomy operation in which half of his brain was removed. 

Our professors very often make biology claims that are contrary to the low-level facts of biology. The table below lists various cases in which the fantasy biology of academia dogma diverges from biology reality. 

FANTASY BIOLOGY VERSUS BIOLOGICAL REALITY
Dubious Biology Claim	Biological Reality
Brains store memories, probably in synapses or dendritic spines.	Neither synapses nor dendritic spines last for even a tenth of the longest time that humans can remember things, and both are made up of proteins with lifetimes of only a few weeks.
DNA stores a blueprint or recipe for making the human body.	DNA does not specify the physical structure of any of these things: an organism's body, its organ systems, its organs or its cells.
Visible biological innovations arise from a combination of random mutations and natural selection, which improves the DNA of a species.	It has not been proven that any visible complex biological innovation ever appeared because of random mutations and natural selection, and we know of a reason why mere DNA mutations could never produce a complex visible biological innovation: that visible physical structures are not specified in DNA.
Life appeared because of a lucky combination of random chemicals billions of years ago.	Neither a living thing nor any of the building blocks of a living thing (proteins and nucleic acids with genetic information) has ever been produced through any experimental process that  realistically simulated early Earth conditions.
The building blocks of life have been found in outer space.	No one has found in outer space either of the two actual building blocks of life: proteins or nucleic acids with genetic information.
Brain scans show your brain makes your mind.	Brains scans actually show signal differences of less than 1% during thinking or recall, what we would expect from random variations.
Brain signals are real fast.	Synaptic delays, synaptic fatigue and relatively slow dendritic transmission mean that signals in the cortex must be real slow.
The common descent of all life from a single ancestor is a fact.	A shortage of transitional fossils and the lack of DNA corresponding to old fossils (because of DNA's half-life of 521 years) make the doctrine of common descent very unproven.
Chemically humans are almost exactly like chimps.	80% of proteins are different between humans and chimps.
Our minds can be explained neurally.	There is no credible neural explanation for any of the main features of the human mind: memory, self-hood, consciousness, abstract thinking, and imagination.
We kind of understand how a speck-sized egg can progress to become a full-sized baby.	We have no understanding of how this occurs (given a lack of a body plan in DNA), and do not even understand what causes cells to reproduce.
Memory and intelligence depend strongly on brain status.	A person can lose half of his brain in a hemispherectomy operation, with little effect on memory or intelligence.

The image below reproduces the table above. 

Postscript: The paper "Language recovery after hemispherectomy in children with late-onset seizures" gives us before-and-after IQ scores for six children having removal of the left half of the brain (Table 1, FSIQ row). Such comparisons can be affected by short-term deficets that later are reduced. The comparison shows one child dropped 20 IQ points, one child dropped 10 IQ points, another child gained 3 IQ points, another child dropped 15 IQ points, another child gained 11 IQ points, and another child had no change in IQ. The very mixed results are consistent with the brain not being the source of the human mind. 

On page 254 of the textbook here, we read a statement by someone saying that he performed 43 hemispherectomy operations. He says, "The secondary outcome scores reevaluated at six months and 1 year showed no significant difference in IQ," indicating intelligence is not affected by removal of half of the brain. 

Page 5 of the scientific paper here describes a 7-year-old girl who is "fully bilingual in Turkish and Danish" despite having had most of half of the left side of her brain removed in a hemispherectomy operation at the age of 3. We are told that except for a slight spasticity, "she leads an otherwise normal life." 

On page 3 of the Florida newspaper you can read here, the Lake City Reporter of December 25, 2015,  we have a quote by brain surgeon Ben Carson:

"He recalled meeting one patient to whom he’d

given a hemispherectomy — removing half the brain

— as an infant. 'He had graduated from college

number one in his class — with half a brain,' Carson

said." 

Below is an excerpt from the 1931 newspaper article "How Much Brain Used?" by William Brady M.D.:

"Aside from the fact that the boy felt no pain from the surgical treatment (and had no anesthetic), it was remarkable that he retained full consciousness and unimpaired mental function, al| though a considerable part of the cerebrum was destroyed. Recent surgical observation has proved that the whole of the right cerebral hemisphere may be removed without disturbance of mentality: this has been done repeatedly for the removal of large brain tumor. Both right and left frontal lobes of the brain may be removed without disturbing the patient's mentality. The patient remains perfectly oriented as to time, place and person; the memory is unimpaired: reading. writing and mathematical calculation are still done accurately; conversation is normal. In other cases the left occipital lobe and the lower third of the left temporal lobe have been removed without apparent. effect on mentality. "

You can read the full article using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1931-01-20/ed-1/seq-28/

Below is the first page of a 1933 Popular Science article written by a doctor, one you can read here. We are told of a woman who had the "entire right half" of her brain removed. We are told that a few hours after the operation she "recognized and talked with her friends." The operation apparently caused no loss of learned knowledge or memories.  Both the act of recognizing a friend and the act of talking requires the use of learned knowledge such as the knowledge of what a friend looks like, and the knowledge of the words in a language and the grammar rules of the language. We are told the woman "improved rapidly, reading and writing during her convalescence." No mention is made of any loss of memory.  The reported result is consistent with the idea that the brain does not store memories. 

The next page mentions several case histories of people who suffered the most horrible brain injuries in various types of accidents. No mention is made of any damage to memory or mind. We hear instead comments such as "apparently his mind did not suffer from the accident" and mention of a "miraculous recovery."

Another case is discussed here, in a book chapter of a textbook. We read of a patient E.C. who had a large brain tumor. To treat the tumor, the left half of the patient's brain was removed, in a hemispherectomy operation. We read that "the entire hemisphere was removed in one piece" on December 7, 1965. We read that "immediately following hemispherectomy" the patient had an "ability to follow simple verbal commands."  We read on page 107 that "the patient spontaneously articulated words and short phrases fairly well immediately after the operation."  

We read that this patient E.C. "gave the correct number of years when asked how long he had lived at his house." We read on page 107 that on January 26, 1966 (about six weeks after the operation) he "slowly but correctly selected four of the first six items from six pages, each with four items to choose from, before indicating he was tired" when given the Peabody picture vocabulary test. Such a test involves a tester speaking a word, and the user pointing to the correct picture in a grid of 4 pictures. 

The image below (from the paper here) shows an example of one of the pages. The word spoken by the tester is "citrus."

The result described above (4 out of 6 correct on six such pages) clearly suggests that patient E.C. retained his learned knowledge after the left half of the brain was removed. Since the test was given only six weeks after the operation, and E.C. was in a recovering state during those weeks in which he was not being schooled, we cannot explain such a result as being due to knowledge acquired during those six weeks. We also read on page 107 that on June 3, 1966 patient E.C. correctly named 85 out of 112 items on such a Peabody picture vocabulary test. No mention is made of schooling occurring during the first six months of 1966. 

On page 109 we read of three other cases of the removal of the left half of the brain, and we read that "speech and verbal comprehension were present immediately after left hemispherectomy in all three cases." We read nothing about any loss of knowledge or episodic memories in any of these cases.  Neither speech nor verbal comprehension can occur unless a great deal of learned knowledge is retained. 

The news story here documents a very clear case of the preservation of memory after the removal of the left half of the cerebrum. We read of a 47-year-old man who had the left half of his cerebrum removed. We read this:

"Dr. Smith said the patient's memory of events before the operation 'was well preserved, much better than anyone expected.' Tests following surgy show Coe can perform many functions traditionally thought impossible after removal of the brain's dominant hemisphere. Immediately following surgery, Coe still had the ability to speak spontaneously."

A report like this does not merely contradict the claim that the brain is the source of the mind. It also contradicts the claim that the brain is a storage place of memories. 

The 1963 newspaper account here is entitled "Monkeys With Half a Brain." We read this:

"Fifty monkeys have had half of their brains removed. Their memories appear to be as complete as before surgery. Until this experiment was made, even doctors thought that such surgery would affect memory....Not only is memory retained; the monkeys are alert, intelligent, sociable, and have the same enthusiasm as doing things as before....What are some of things the team has discovered from observation of monkeys with half their brain removed? The monkeys remember how to do things taught them before surgery. Such as which of two blocks of wood place under them has a reward under it -- a raisin or other food. Fears are recalled....'While the rhesus monkeys we test remember everything taught them before surgery, it takes them twice as long to learn something new as monkeys with both half of their brain,' explains Dr. Kruper. 'But the important thing is that they DO learn, even if it does take them longer.' "

The visual below "speaks volumes" on this topic. It is the result of a search on Google Scholar for "amnesia after hemispherectomy." "Hemispherectomy" is the standard name for the operation that has been performed thousands of times, in which half of the brain is removed to stop very bad seizures. "Amnesia" is the main term used for a loss of episodic memories.  Any search on Google Scholar will produce very many results when there are quite a few cases corresponding to such a search. For example, doing a Google Scholar search for "vision loss after automobile accident" produces many results. But doing a search for "amnesia after hemispherectomy" produces zero results.

The results discussed in this post deserve to be pondered at great length. The results indicate very strongly that the human brain is not any storage place of human memories. After considering such results, you should also ponder the most important null result of neuroscience research: the fact that brain tissue from thousands of living and recently deceased humans has been microscopically studied at great length, with the most powerful microscopes; but no one has ever found the slightest trace of learned information or any episodic memory by such microscopic examination. No one found a single phrase, a single word or even a single letter of the alphabet after microscopically examining brain tissue. Nor did anyone ever find by microscopic examination of brain tissue any trace of anything a human ever saw or heard.