Shady Tricks Used by Writers About the Brain

When people are trying to write about the brain and the mind, they have the very big problem that neuroscientists lack credible theories to support some of their most important claims, and also lack solid evidence to back up such claims. How do writers get past such a roadblock when they are trying to write a book, article or scientific paper that parrots conventional ideas about the brain and the mind? They tend to resort to a set of widely used speech tricks. I will list some of them.

Trick #1: When They Don't Have a "How," They Try to Use a "Where"

Neuroscientist 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 getting 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.  
• 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.

Trick #2: They Appeal (Almost Always Incorrectly) to Claims of "Superior Activation"

To back up some claim that some particular part of the brain causes some particular mental activity, it is common for writers to appeal to claims of "superior activation," appealing to fMRI scans. Typically such claims are poorly founded. For example, brain imaging fails to find solid evidence for superior activation of any part of the brain during memory activity, as I discuss in my post here.  There are two severe problems with brain imaging studies:

(1) Studies typically show only very minor activity differences such as 1 part in 200. We have no way of knowing whether such differences are merely due to chance fluctuations.  Don't be fooled by those "lying with color" brain images which show certain regions of the brain in bright red or bright yellow.  If the coloring represented the actual data, the whole brain would be depicted in the same color, with a color shade so subtle you wouldn't be able to notice it. 

(2) Brain imaging studies typically involve way-too-small study group sizes. As discussed here, a study found that thousands of participants are needed for reliable brain imaging studies trying to find correlations between brain activity and mental activity. But the typical brain imaging study involves only about 20 participants.  

A headline from New Scientist

Trick #3: They Stay "Studies Have Shown" Without Citing a Particular Study, Sometimes When There Are No Such Studies

This is an extremely common tactic, and occurs all over the place. A writer will simply say "studies have shown" and then mention some dubious claim about the brain, without mentioning or linking to any particular study. Sometimes there are studies that show the opposite of what the writer claims "studies have shown."  A variation is to say "there is extensive evidence" in favor of some claim about the brain, without specifically citing the evidence. Often, the claim is completely groundless, and there is no evidence at all for the thing claimed to be supported by "extensive evidence."

Trick #4: They Cite a Specific Study, Claiming It Showed Something, When It Never Did Show Such a Thing

This is an extremely common tactic, and occurs all over the place. Often the guilty party is some writer who claims that a paper not written by him showed something it did not show. Nowadays university press offices are notorious for making unfounded boastful claims about research they are announcing. In other cases, the title or abstract of a paper may simply make some claim that something was shown, when no such thing was shown, typically because of a poor design or the use of Questionable Research Practices in the paper.  Scientific papers often commit what are called citation errors, in which they incorrectly claim or insinuate that some paper showed something. Read my post here to see examples. 

Trick #5: They Say "It Is Widely Believed" to Refer to Some Claim That Is Not Well-Supported by Evidence 

We can classify several different types of scientific truth claims, along with some tips on how to recognize the different types.

Type of truth claim	How to recognize it
Citation of established fact	Typically occurs with a discussion of the observational facts that proved the claim.
Citation of a claim that is not yet established fact	Typically occurs with phrases such as “scientists believe” or “it is generally believed” or an appeal to a “scientific consensus.” The claim of a “scientific consensus” is often unfounded, and there may be many scientists who do not accept the claim.
Citation of a claim that has little basis in observations, and that there may be good reasons for doubting	Often occurs with a phrase such as “it is widely believed,” or maybe a more confident-sounding phrase like “it is becoming increasingly clear” or “there is growing evidence.”

Writers about the brain make heavy use of the term "it is widely believed" to refer to claims that have little or no support in observations. In my post here, I gave links to 26 writers who made the claim that "it is widely believed" that changes in synapses are a physical basis or foundation of memory.  There is no robust evidence for such an idea, and the reasons for rejecting it are many (discussed here).  You should tend to regard it as a red flag or warning sign when someone claims that something is "widely believed." When people have good evidence for something, they tend to cite such evidence, rather than claiming the thing is "widely believed." 

Trick #6: They Make Empty and Unverifiable Appeals to "Brain Wiring" or "Circuit Dynamics" or "Neural Pathway Dynamics"

Neurons in the brain are connected by long synapses that are not unbroken wires but which can be roughly compared to wires or circuits. Pretty much any claim about the mind and the brain can be made through some vague appeal to "brain wiring" or "circuit dynamics" or "connection pathways" or "neural pathways." Such claims are almost always vacuous, never being backed up by specific details. It kind of reminds me of someone faking things during a technical interview, as in the example below:

Interviewer: So what exactly goes on when you look up something using a search engine?

Candidate: Well, that just involves some particular software dynamics.

Trick #7: They Appeal to Psychology Observations That Are Just Observations of What People Do, Not What Happened in a Brain

There is only so far you can go trying to refer to brains while discussing something that scientists have completely failed to explain by any theory or observations of brain activity. So a writer trying to make his writing sound like a neuroscience article will often just start listing results of psychology experiments.  For example, a person writing about memory retrieval may discuss experiments that had nothing to do with the brain, but which simply tested how well people recalled something under different conditions. Or a person writing about memory formation may discuss experiments that had nothing to do with the brain, but which simply tested how well people learned something under different conditions. 

Often an article will combine psychology results and neuroscience results, to try and "beef up" things so that the reader does not notice how miserably weak the neuroscience is relating to some particular topic of the mind. For example, there is hardly any "neuroscience of imagination." But a writer can combine a little discussion of scant neuroscience experiments dealing with imagination with a discussion of psychology experiments dealing with imagination, and try to pass that off as a discussion of "how your brain imagines."

Trick #8: They Use Inappropriate Language Claiming Your Brain Does Something When They Should Be Saying That People Did Something

A bad form of expression is to make superfluous causal claims.  Examples:

Evolution gave giraffes very long necks and lots of brown spots. 

God gave us some good weather today. 

There is no need to make such debatable causal claims. The first statement is better stated as "Giraffes have very long necks and lots of brown spots." And the second statement is better stated as "Today the weather is good." 

Superfluous causal claims are frequently made by people writing about the brain.  So we may hear that "brains can think very quickly" or "brains can remember things for half a century or longer" or "brains can recognize many faces." In each such statement the writer should simply be referring to people or humans rather than brains. We do not know that brains think, and no one has any understanding of how a brain could calculate something or have any idea. We merely know that people think and calculate and imagine.

Trick #9: Trying to Make Us Think a Particular Thing About Human Brains, They Cite Poorly Designed Studies Involving Mice, Often Burying the Fact That the Experiment Involved Mice

Something like this goes on all the time:

(1) Some headline announces that something important has been discovered about the brain or memory.

(2) Below the headline the only research mentioned is some poorly designed study involving mice, usually a study guilty of multiple types of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of pre-registration, and a lack of a blinding protocol. 

(3) The story below the headline may take a long time before it reveals that the research only involved mice.  The first paragraph or two may refer only to "brains," and the reader may get the idea human brains are being talked about. Only readers who read to the end of the story will find out that the research involved only mice. 90% of causal readers (who skim the story) will go away with the false idea that something has been learned about human brains or human memory.

Trick #10: They Make Dubious Claims Such As "Neuroscientists Believe" or "All Neuroscientists Believe" or Dubious Claims of a Belief Consensus Among Neuroscientists

Appeals to alleged beliefs of scientists of some type about some matter are rarely made when there is good evidence telling us about the nature of something.  For example, people don't say "scientists believe that there are many different types of proteins in the human body." Instead people say things like "scientists have identified more than 20,000 types of proteins in the human body." When someone appeals to some alleged belief tendency of scientists, it is a reason for suspecting there is a lack of clear proof about such a matter.  

We should distrust almost all appeals to what scientists of some type believe, because scientists are very bad at reliably measuring the beliefs of scientists in particular scientist communities.  The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of a scientist is to do a secret ballot poll, one that includes a variety of belief options including "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." However, such polls are virtually never done. When opinion polls of scientists are done, they typically fail to be secret ballots, and also fail to offer a full spectrum of answers including options such as  "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."  

Trick #11: They Claim That Scientists Have Imaged Mental Things When Merely Physical Things Were Imaged 

An example of this is found on page 119 of the document here. A previous Chief Scientist of Australia states this:

"Now differential tractography MRI shows us the white matter – the connections across the brain – and it’s revolutionised our understanding of cerebral networks. To start, we just imaged structure. Then, we imaged the functional areas of the brain. Now, we’re imaging thinking. And we couldn’t imagine neuroscience without it."

The claim about "we're imaging thinking" is a misstatement. No one has been able to do any such thing as "imaging thinking," nor has anyone been able to find any robust evidence of neural correlates of thinking.  Brains don't look any different or act any different when someone is thinking, as I discuss in my post "The Brain Shows No Sign of Working Harder During Thinking or Recall."

Trick #12: They Insinuate That If You Distrust Them It's Your Fault Not Theirs

The previously quoted  "pope of Australian science" (having the official title of Chief Scientist) has been replaced with a new one.  The latest "papal encyclical" of this Chief Scientist (which you can read here) is a document that seems to have a theme of "scientists must not be distrusted."  We read, "Questioning is healthy for good science and good government, but distrust is not." No, whenever scientists don't follow good procedures or act way too overconfident or speak in an inaccurate or misleading manner, then distrust is a very healthy response. The document laments that trust in scientists is declining. We hear nothing about the main factors causing such a decline, which include:

• The ever-increasing tendency of university press releases to make false boastful claims about the research they are announcing.
• The ever-increasing tendency of scientists to produce papers with titles making claims that are not justified by anything discussed in the paper.
• The runaway epidemic of clickbait "science news" stories containing false or misleading headlines that lure you to click and read "science news" accounts often much different from the headline. 
• The ever-increasing tendency of scientists to produce hype and unfounded boastful language in their scientific papers and public statements (see here for a prominent recent example).
• The very persistent tendency of many scientists to make untrue claims that dozens of other scientists have renounced, such as the entirely false claim that the DNA in our bodies is some blueprint or recipe or program for constructing our bodies. 
• The prevalence of very bad research practices in some fields of science, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes in most experimental neuroscience papers.
• The low reproducibility of studies in many fields of science such as psychology and neuroscience.
• The substantial existence of fraud in some branches of science such as neuroscience (discussed here).

Instead our Chief Scientist attempts to tell us a story trying to blame those who are reporting on faulty scientist behavior rather than the scientists who are engaging in such behavior.  The Chief Scientist's "Trust in Science" article fails to provide any recommendations to scientists to improve their behavior and get more reproducible results. We hear not a word about the huge replication crisis in science. 

Trick #13: They Make Impossible-to-Verify Sweeping Generalizations About the Brain

Rather like how the Catholic Church officially declares some of its former members as saints to be venerated, Australia's Chief Scientist has listed certain living scientists as "science superheroes" who she may regard as worthy of special adulation.  Alas, some of these "superheroes" are teaching people things that just aren't true. For example, at the Chief Scientist's web site, one Lila Landowski states, "Everything you do, whether you’re thinking about it or not, is controlled by the brain." There is no robust evidence that thinking, imagination or remembering are controlled by the brain, and neuroscientists have no understanding of how a brain could produce any such effects. 

Trick #14: They Vaguely Appeal to Brain Reorganization and Brain Rewiring

It often happens that people with shockingly large parts of their brain seem to have little damage to their mental faculties. Examples are discussed in my posts here and here. How do our mainstream writers on the brain explain such cases? They often make a vague appeal to "brain reorganization" or "brain rewiring." Typically we have no specifics. There is no evidence that brains that lose brain cells grow more brain cells to replace them, and claims of adult neurogenesis are very widely disputed by neuroscientists themselves. The liver is an organ with an astonishing capacity to regenerate itself. You can remove up to 90% of the liver, and it will regenerate to its full size. But the brain has no such power.  Remove 50% of the brain's neurons and you will be stuck with a brain that has only about 50% of its neurons. We never get much specifics on this supposed "brain reorganization" or "brain rewiring" that is claimed to occur upon brain injury. We never see photographs documenting such a thing. Often the "proof" given for such a thing is simply that mental function was not damaged. But that is proof for mind resiliency, not brain reorganization. 

Trick #15: They Claim That Evolution Has Wired You to Do This or That Mental Thing

In the United States the neuroscientist belief community is an academia tribe consisting of only about 25,000 members, a tribe with its own distinctive folklore. In the US the academia tribe of evolutionary biologists is a similar-sized tribe that pushes another type of folklore. It can have a powerful-sounding mythic resonance when the folklore of these two tribes is combined, and such combinations often occur. Below we see an example of this, along with a correction that tells us the truth about DNA. 

Jane: How is it that a brain could possibly do such things as create abstract ideas or imagine or plan?

John: That's easy! You were wired by evolution to think and imagine and plan. 

Jane: So how did evolution do that?

John:  It was just random mutations. So ages ago, there was a lucky copying error that accidentally caused a "think" random mutation, that was preserved by natural selection because it was useful. Something similar explains how we got imagination and planning abilities.

Jane:  So it was just accidental DNA mutations that caused some particular kind of brain wiring?

John: Exactly!

Jane: So humans got an ability to think from a single DNA mutation -- a change in just one of the amino acids in a protein with hundreds of amino acids, only one of the more than 20,000 proteins used by humans?

John: Uh...yes. Isn't evolution amazing?

Jane: So there was just a one part in 10,000,000 change in the human genome, and then, poof, suddenly humans suddenly had the ability to imagine?

John: It's amazing what a tiny chemical change can do. 

Jane: No, John, your story is nonsense, and I'll tell you why. Brain wiring isn't specified in DNA. DNA does not specify the structure of cells or neurons or axons or synapses or brain wiring. DNA does not even specify how to make up the organelles and protein complexes that are the building components of cells. DNA only specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  So there are no conceivable genetic mutations that could have caused a brain to have some particular wiring or neural arrangement. And there is no conceivable arrangement of cells or neurons or axons or synapses or brain wiring that could ever explain how a mind is able to think and imagine and plan and yearn.  Evolution does not explain DNA; DNA does not explain bodies; and bodies don't explain minds. 

The truth about DNA differs from the myth often taught

Goofs of the Site Brainfacts.org

When scientists of a particular type speak, they are often speaking to advance what may be called guild interests. Guild interests are the vested interests of a particular class of professionals. When we read neuroscience claims, we are often reading claims made to advance the guild interests of neuroscientists.  There is a guild of neuroscientists in the United States, an organization called the Society for Neuroscience. It has a worldwide membership of about 37,000 members. 

We should not at all regard such an organization as being purely devoted to the objective and unbiased analysis and study of nature. The web site of the Society for Neuroscience makes very clear that the organization exists largely to advance the vested interests of neuroscientists.  On the top of the site's home page we see a tab that includes an "Advocacy" link. When you click on that link, you go to the page below, which is all filled with "Advocacy" links.

When you click on these links, you will go to pages such as:

•  a page giving you tips on how to lobby the US Congress for more funding; 
• a page encouraging you to get involved in politics by doing things such as writing op-eds and writing letters to the editor;
• a page urging you to send emails to US congressmen, to offer lab tours to US congress members, and to show up at the town halls of US congress members. 
• various pages giving you tips on getting government funding.

Elsewhere on the site we learn that the Society for Neuroscience has helped fund a site called www.brainfacts.org. It is a site that seems dedicated to propagating the belief dogmas cherished by neuroscientists. Upon visiting this site, I find quite a few errors.  

On a page entitled "Decision Making" we do not get what we should get, which is a candid confession of the truth that no one has the slightest understanding of how neurons could ever do any such thing as making a decision. No theory or speculation of how a brain could make a decision is offered. We have a few statements claiming that particular parts of the brain are more active during decision making. None of these statements is supported by a reference or a link to a particular paper. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Constructing Memory Representations." We read this:

"Recordings of individual brain cells’ electrical activity show that specific, single cells may fire when presented photographs of a particular person, but remain quiet when viewing photographs of other people, animals, or objects. So-called 'concept cells' work together in assemblies. For example, the cells encoding the concepts of needle, thread, sewing, and button may be interconnected. Such cells, and their connections, form the basis of our semantic memory."

There is no robust evidence for these claims, and the author fails to provide any links or references to support them. No one has found any evidence that there are cells encoding any concepts whatsoever, and neuroscientists don't even present theories as to how a concept could be represented in a brain. According to the source here, neurons fire at a rate between once every tenth of a second and once every two seconds.  If you are tracking the firing in 1000 neurons that fire randomly while people are shown photos for an instant, anyone looking hard enough could find some neurons that fired when some photos were seen and did not fire when other photos were seen. That would probably be a pure chance result of no significance.  The result would disappear upon further study.  Similarly, study 10 days data and you might find that it rains in Cincinnati when the Boston Red Sox win; but check enough days and the effect would disappear. 

The page also repeats a false claim often made in neuroscience literature, stating that patient H.M. "could not form new memories" after having some experimental surgery in 1953.  That is not 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., clearly providing evidence that patient HM could form many new memories:

"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."

Alas, our www.brainfacts.org site has not given us the facts on this matter, but made an important untrue claim that patient HM "could not form new memories." The same false claim is made on another page on www.brainfacts.org, where we are told the untrue claim that patient HM "was no longer able to form new memories." The same false claim is made on another page on www.brainfacts.org, where we are told the untrue claim that patient HM "was unable to form new memories."

On another page entitled "Regional Specialization and Organization," we have an example of what so-often occurs in neuroscience literature: groundless claims of representation in the brain. We read, "Regions that encode words include the posterior parietal cortex, parts of the temporal lobe, and regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC)." There is no evidence that any region of the brain encodes words. No one has ever found a single word of any language by microscopically examining brain tissue.  The evidence the author supplies to back up these claims are appeals to brain scan studies claiming to show superior activation during certain speech activities. Such studies provide no robust evidence that the brain is encoding words. The page  makes claims such as these:

"Likewise, there are specific brain areas that represent numbers and their meaning. These concepts are represented in the parietal cortex with input from the occipitotemporal cortex, a region that participates in visual recognition and reading."

The page provides no links or references on this page to back up such claims. Other than the fact that humans can remember and use numbers, there is zero evidence that the brain represents numbers. No one has found any human-learned numbers by examining brain tissue under a microscope. Referring to the leading theory of memory storage in the brain, the theory of synaptic memory storage, a scientist has stated, "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts/’ about quantities like space, time, and number)."

A page on "Synapses and Neurotransmission" is written by Diane A. Kelley, who is described as someone who "studies neuroscience" at UMass. The page tells us it is "Adapted from the 8th edition of  Brain Facts by Diane A. Kelly."  We have a link to a 71-page book in PDF format called "Brain Facts." The file lists no author. On other pages such as this one, we read, "Adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Marissa Fessenden." On another page we read "This article was adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Alexis Wnuk."  It seems that the www.brainfacts.org is telling us conflicting claims about who is the author of its "Brain Facts" companion book. 

The main defect of the page on "Synapses and Neurotransmission" is that it fails to tell us the supremely important fact that neurotransmission across chemical synapses (by far the main type of synapses in the brain) does not occur reliably. Estimates of the success rate of neurotransmission across chemical synapses (based on experimental studies) range between 10% and 50%. A 2020 scientific paper states this: " Chemical synaptic transmission appears unreliable: for most synapses, when an action potential arrives at an axon terminal, about half the time, no neurotransmitter is released and so no communication happens." The implications of this low reliability are gigantic, but have been ignored by neuroscientists, who have a very bad tendency to ignore facts conflicting with their cherished dogmas.  If chemical synapses do not transmit information reliably, this implies that the brain cannot be the source of memory recall which can occur massively with 100%  reliability. Such reliability occurs every time an actor playing Hamlet correctly recalls all of his more than 1000 lines. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Introduction to Common Mental Disorders" and is written by a pharmacology PhD. We read the claim that "Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) raise serotonin levels, which are known to be deficient in many psychiatric conditions."  But a scientific paper states this:

"Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency. Modern neuroscience has instead shown that the brain is vastly complex and poorly understood. While neuroscience is a rapidly advancing field, to propose that researchers can objectively identify a 'chemical imbalance' at the molecular level is not compatible with the extant science. In fact, there is no scientifically established ideal 'chemical balance' of serotonin, let alone an identifiable pathological imbalance....With direct proof of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder lacking, the claimed efficacy of SSRIs is often cited as indirect support for the serotonin hypothesis. Yet, this ex juvantibus line of reasoning (i.e., reasoning “backwards” to make assumptions about disease causation based on the response of the disease to a treatment) is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain.." 

On a page entitled "The Neuroscience of Decision Making," we have an interview with some neuroscientists who make unfounded claims.

We have this statement by two neuroscientists:

SALZMAN: Researchers can now study how neurons represent rewards, and how information on rewards may be integrated over time in order to reach a decision. 

WANG: It’s quite fascinating that what we are seeing now in single-neuron recordings is not coding for what we see or do—sensory and motor coding—but for the processes involved in how we value and make choices. That’s an important advance in neuroscience."

These claims are not correct. No one has found any robust evidence of neurons representing rewards. And no has found any evidence from single-neuron recordings that such neurons are encoding "the processes involved in how we value and make choices." The page has no link to any scientific studies. 

I looked up papers of one of these neuroscientists on Google Scholar to see whether I could find any research done backing up these statements. Salzman's most cited article is a paper co-authored by Salzman entitled "The primate amygdala represents the positive and negative value of visual stimuli during learning." It seems like a bad example of Questionable Research Practices. The paper uses a study size of only two monkeys. The study used no blinding protocol, no pre-registration, and no sample size calculation. Most of the results are  unimpressive "p < .05" results. The paper provides no robust evidence of representations in a primate brain.  

Another page on www.brainfacts.org tells us, "We now know neurogenesis — the birth of new cells — occurs throughout life, but only in certain parts of the brain, including an area involved in learning and memory called the hippocampus." But a 2018 paper states, "Our recent observations suggest that newborn neurons in the adult human hippocampus (HP) are absent or very rare (Sorrells et al., 2018)." A 2022 paper was entitled "Mounting evidence suggests human adult neurogenesis is unlikely."  A 2022 paper states, "In this review, we will assess critically the claim of significant adult neurogenesis in humans and show how current evidence strongly indicates that humans lack this trait." The paper states that "In summary, a thorough review of the literature shows that there is no scientific convincing evidence of the generation and incorporation of new neurons into the circuitry of the adult human brain, including the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus." 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "The Search for the Engram: Where Memory Lives in the Brain." The author is Mirjam Guesgen, who has a PhD in zoology.  Guesgen begins by repeating an unfounded legend. We read this about a sea slug:

"That knowledge — the memories of lived experience — came from a neighbor in the tank next door. The memories were transferred the day before when a member of David Glanzman’s lab injected tiny snippets of genetic material from another sea slug that had been trained with mild shocks to take a defensive posture."

There was never any robust evidence to back up this claim. The 2018 paper claiming to have done this ("RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia") is the paper here, and a reading of that paper will reveal some bad examples of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes (such as only 7 organisms), a lack of pre-registration, a failure to do any sample size calculation, and dubious assumptions about an animal's recall based on unreliable subjective judgments about only 30 seconds of an animal's movements. The paper's claim heavily depends on subjective judgments about  30 seconds of alleged "siphon withdrawal reflex" occurring in sea slugs. Sea slugs have a size ranging from an eighth of an inch to 1.5 inches. Any judgments about whether they showed such a reflex is subjective and unreliable. We read that in a crucial part of the experiment "The siphon was lightly stimulated with a soft, flexible probe and the duration of the resulting SWR was timed." Variations in this manual stimulation could easily account for any differences reported in the animal's response, as could mere chance variations. 

I am unable to find any replication of this research. Glanzman got a big grant ($600,000) for further research along the same lines, with a project start of February, 2022, but the grant page so far shows no results indicating a replication of such a memory transfer effect.  Looking on Google Scholar for papers written by Glanzman in the last four years, I can find no papers by Glanzman claiming a replication. 

Later in Guesgen's article we have a reference to another paper by Glanzman, a 2017 paper which seems to be guilty of Questionable Research Practices just as bad as the paper just mentioned. It's more work with sea slugs, using study group sizes way-too-small such as only 7. There is no mention of any blinding protocol or pre-registration and no mention of a sample size calculation. The whole thing hinges upon someone's subjective judgment on whether about 30 seconds of behavior in tiny sea slugs were or were not examples of a "siphon withdrawal reflex." No robust evidence about memory has been provided. We are then told about Glanzman's "heretical" theory of memory, inconsistent with what the vast majority of neuroscientists have been telling us for decades. We read this: "The experiment led Glanzman and his colleagues to their latest theory: memory is found in the neuron’s nucleus, in bits of genetic material called non-coding RNA helping to switch genes on and off." The theory makes no sense, because RNA only has a very short lifetime of a few hours.  Also, believing memory is stored in a cell nucleus worsens the problem of explaining instant human recall, because it takes substantial time for complex molecules to cross the outer cell barrier and the nucleus outer barrier.  The page here tells us that the time needed for diffusion across a cell membrane depends exponentially on the size of the molecule passing through such a barrier, which mean complex molecules such as RNA would travel across such a barrier relatively slowly. 

Sounding like she failed to apply proper scrutiny to a faulty and not-replicated study with way-too-small study group sizes, Guesgen at first seems like she has uncritically accepted Glanzman's boasts which have no strong experimental foundation. But later she does her job better, by giving us an opposite viewpoint. She states this:

"Not everyone is convinced that epigenetic change is the final answer to the engram puzzle.  'I find [the nuclear model] to be completely implausible,' says Tomás Ryan, an associate neuroscience professor at Trinity College Dublin."

So now Guesgen in effect tears down the rogue Glanzman "nucleus memory" theory she spent the first half of her article building up. She now mentions a different theory of memory:

"Ryan and his colleagues believe memory is stored as a network or pathway of connections between neurons. It’s a subtle distinction from the idea that memory resides in synapses."

We hear a claim of some evidence for this idea, but the link is just to a paywalled study that mentions no experimental evidence in its abstract. And so the page "The Search for the Engram: Where Memory Lives in the Brain" at www.brainfacts.org ends. We have been given not the slightest bit of robust evidence that there exists any such thing as engrams, memories stored in brains. But at least Guesgen has in one respect done her job somewhat well, by leaving us with the idea that engram researchers (researchers into a neural basis for memory) are in disarray, and lack any consensus. Glanzman's theory does not agree with Ryan's, and Ryan's does not agree with the synaptic theory that neuroscientists have been pushing for decades. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org discusses a fourth theory of neural memory, a theory involving perineuronal nets. But the page seems to contradict itself. First it says that such perineuronal nets "play a role in functions like learning and memory." But then the page tells us that "lab studies with rodents have suggested that removing these nets aid in the learning of new information." 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org (entitled "Storing Memories") makes the incorrect claim that "much evidence supports the idea that memory involves a persistent change in synapses, the connections between neurons."  There is no robust evidence in favor of such an idea, and synapses are unstable things, made up of proteins with average lifetimes of less than two weeks, and connected to dendritic spines that last only months or even a shorter length of time. Conversely, human memories can last 60 years. The page describes LTP as "a long-lasting increase in the strength of a synaptic response."  To the contrary, misnamed LTP (which stands for "long-term potentiation") is a very short-term change in synapses, usually lasting only hours. The www.brainfacts.org page tells us this:

"In addition, studies using genetically modified mice have shown that alterations in specific genes for NMDA receptors or CREB can dramatically affect the capacity for LTP in particular brain areas. What’s more, the same studies have shown that these molecules are critical to memory".

This is not true. A 1994 paper claimed to show that "CREB knockout" mice perform more poorly on memory tests, but it was not a well-designed study, using a way-too-small study group size of only 7. The study showed the "CREB knockout" mice performing almost as well on the Morris water maze test  as regular mice, defying that claim that CREB is "critical to memory." A 2010 study with a larger sample size (about 25) showed similar results, with the "CREB knockout" mice performing only a little worse than the control mice (and better under some measures).  This study tells us that there two separate CREB knockout" mice "cohorts" tested, one with an age of 2-3 months, and the other with an age of 8-10 months. The paper doesn't tell us whether the controls were age-matched to those cohorts, so we can't tell whether the small performance difference reported in the maze test was due to age rather than the CREB knockout.  Figure 4 of the paper here shows no difference in the performance of "CREB knockout" mice.  We read this:

"Mutant mice with a loss of Creb in the adulthood do not show disturbed learning during acquisition in the Morris water maze as represented by the distance moved to reach the platform...induced loss of Creb in the adulthood does not affect spatial reference memory in the Morris water maze...."

Regarding NMDA receptors which our www.brainfacts.org page has claimed to be "critical for memory," a 2014 study was entitled "Hippocampal NMDA receptors are important for behavioural inhibition but not for encoding associative spatial memories." And a 2011 study found this:

"We found that inducible knockout mice, lacking NMDA receptor in either forebrain or hippocampus CA1 region at the time of memory retrieval, exhibited normal recall of associative spatial reference memory regardless of whether retrievals took place under full-cue or partial-cue conditions. Moreover, systemic antagonism of NMDA receptor during retention tests also had no effect on full-cue or partial-cue recall of spatial water maze memories. Thus, both genetic and pharmacological experiments collectively demonstrate that pattern completion during spatial associative memory recall does not require the NMDA receptor in the hippocampus or forebrain."

Another page on www.brainfacts.org dealing with psychiatric disorders refers to the "the biological problems at the root of patients' symptoms."  A page on obsessive-compulsive disorder (classified as an anxiety disorder) seems to talk approvingly about fiddling with the brains of those having such a tendency. We read this:

"Electrodes implanted at specific brain locations emit high-frequency electrical pulses intended to reset abnormal neuronal firing. Scientists are beginning to explore the use of DBS [Deep Brain Stimulation] in the basal ganglia and several other brain regions to alleviate symptoms of OCD. Other types of brain surgeries are sometimes used as OCD interventions, namely anterior cingulotomies and anterior capsulotomies. These procedures involve drilling through the skull and using a heated probe to burn an area within a specific brain region for OCD symptom relief."

The idea that psychiatric disorders are mainly caused by biological problems (rather than things such as trauma, deprivation, life experience and social conditions) is a dubious dogma of neuroscientists and geneticists. Papers and articles lamenting the lack of neuroscience progress in helping mental disorders include the article here, the article "The Rise and Fall of Biological Psychiatry" and the 2020 paper "Why hasn't neuroscience delivered for psychiatry?" by David Kingdon, a professor of psychiatry. After noting some progress in medicine, Kingdon states the following:

"The major mental illnesses psychosis, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, anorexia nervosa and depression have proved remarkably resistant to similar developments. Unfortunately, it is still not possible to cite a single neuroscience or genetic finding that has been of use to the practicing psychiatrist in managing these illnesses despite attempts to suggest the contrary."

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Is photographic memory real? If so, how does it work?" We are given a very misleading answer by a psychiatrist:

"Photographic memory is a term often used to describe a person who seems able to recall visual information in great detail. Just as a photograph freezes a moment in time, the implication for people thought to have photographic memory is that they can take mental snapshots and then recall these snapshots without error. However, photographic memory does not exist in this sense."

To the contrary, history has produced many cases of people with visual memory so strong it can reasonably be called photographic. Such memory (frequently reported in young children) is often called eidetic memory. Countless papers have been written on this topic (see here for a bibliography). Here are some examples:

Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 

According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 

Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "According to Luria, Shereshevsky could' 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one."

The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 

Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

These are only a few of many equally astounding cases of exceptional memory listed in my post here. What we have on this "Photographic Memory" page of www.brainfacts.org is a great example of what goes on so often in the literature of neuroscience: people withholding from us extremely important relevant facts they should be telling us when discussing a topic. There are many known cases of people with exceptional memory that seems to work in some respect vastly greatly than ordinary human memory. The topic of the page is exceptional human memory, and our psychiatrist author has not mentioned a single case of such a thing, leaving his reader with the misleading impression that the idea of exceptional human memory is a myth.  Once again www.brainfacts.org has not given us the relevant facts, but planted in our minds incorrect ideas. 

No one has a good theory of how memories could be stored in brains, and no such theory can explain how humans are able to instantly acquire new memories and instantly recall things and remember things for 50 years or longer.  Cases of exceptional human memory (which neuroscientists like to sweep under the rug) typically involve people with normal brains (and often heavily damaged brains) having memory performance vastly superior to that of the average person. Such cases further undermine the credibility of claims that memories are stored in brains. 

Stumbles of His Claimed Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

In recent decades there has been an extremely lamentable tendency to describe problems of explaining the mind as "a problem of consciousness."  This speech tendency is an example of what I call shrink-speaking, which is when someone uses diminutive language with the intention of making some extremely complex or impressive reality sound like something simple or unimpressive.  A human mind is something vastly more than mere awareness. A person who speaks as if a human is just consciousness is like someone who tries to reduce astronomy into a mere problem of explaining comets. Just as explaining comets is only a tiny sliver of the job of astronomy, explaining consciousness is only a tiny sliver of problem of explaining minds. 

The silliness of people who pose a mere "problem of consciousness" or "problem of experience"  rather than a problem of human mentality is illustrated in the visual below. The word cloud on the screen shows a vast diversity of mental things to be explained: imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings.. But the person in front of the screen has foolishly ignored this great complexity and phenomenal diversity, and has wrongly stated that all that he needs to explain is consciousness.

Generically, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the term "consciousness." Let's look at one example of such a thing. In his 2017 paper "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," a paper with too boastful a title, independent scholar Bernardo Kastrup advances an offbeat theory of mind which he summarizes like this in the paper's abstract:

"It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis."

Right off the bat, we should be extremely skeptical of such talk. The first reason is that we have right at the beginning a reference to "spatially unbound consciousness" as an "ontological primitive." What we need to explain are human minds, and human minds are a very complex and diverse reality, not at all anything like a "primitive." There is no reason to think that we could explain the extremely complex and diverse reality of the human mind by referencing some thing that is called a "primitive."  But if you made the huge mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the great complex and diverse reality of the human mind by using the diminutive term "consciousness," then you might think that you had got a good idea by postulating that such a reality can be explained by appealing to a "primitive."  Similarly, if you made the great mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the enormously organized and functionally complex and hierarchically organized human body as "carbon stuff," then you might think that you had a good idea of the origin of such a thing by merely postulating a "carbon stuff source." 

The last sentence of the paragraph quoted above is an extremely odd statement: "As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis." Abiogenesis is the creation of one-celled life from non-life, something that has never been achieved. It is very strange to equate that with creating an artificial consciousness. 

Kastrup's paper takes an approach in which he describes some things he calls the Basic Facts of Reality, and then attempts to deduce things from such facts. This approach goes wrong at the very beginning, for the first of these claimed "basic facts of reality" is no such thing. Kastrup lists as his first "basic fact of reality" the claim that "There are tight correlations between a person’s reported private experiences and the observed brain activity of the person."  This is not correct. Contrary to the unfounded boasts of neuroscientists  scanned brains don't look different when people are thinking, learning or remembering.  For a review of the failure of attempts to provide evidence for "neural correlates of consciousness," see my posts here and here.  The results typically reported in studies looking for "neural correlates of consciousness" are fluctuations of about 1 part in 200. We would expect to find fluctuations of that size even if the brain does not produce the mind, and memories are not stored in brains.  

The next four of Kastrup's "four basic facts of reality" are pretty uncontroversial. Kastrup then proceeds to make some metaphysical deductions, which he strangely lists as "five other facts." The first of these he states as " Fact 5: irrespective of the ontological status of what we call ‘a person’, there is that which experiences."  This is not a fact at all. Strangely, Kastrup attempts to justify this assertion by stating this, using "TWE" to mean "that which experiences":

"This is self-evident and, as colorfully put by Strawson [1] (p. 26), not even a sensible Buddhist rejects such a claim. For clarity, notice that I am not necessarily making an ontological distinction between experience and experiencer here; in fact, soon I will claim precisely that there isn’t such a distinction. I am simply recognizing that experience necessarily entails a subjective field of potential or actualized qualities. TWE is this field."

At this point Kastrup just leaps from a list of mostly truthful facts to some strange metaphysical assertion that is not at all self-evident, and is not justified by the claim that it is self-evident.  Alas, a thousand metaphysicians have appealed to things they called "self-evident" but which were not at all self-evident. A good rule is: never trust a metaphysician claiming something is self-evident. "Field" is a physics term, and seems out of place in the type of discussion here, since nothing physical is being talked about.  

Kastrup then lists another assertion as a "fact," by stating this: "Fact 6: A person has private experiences that can only be known by others if the person reports them, for other people do not have direct access to these private experiences."  This is not a fact at all.  We have very good evidence for extrasensory perception or telepathy. A first person may have a private experience of thinking about something, which a second person is able to identify even though the first person did not report it.  I have personally experienced this effect quite a few times in my life, and the effect has been reported by innumerable witnesses. Experiments attempting to reproduce such an ESP effect have been massively successful for decades. 

Also extremely dubious is what Kastrup claims as "Fact 9" which he states as "A brain has the same essential nature—that is, it belongs to the same ontological class—as the rest of the universe," a claim that he justifies by stating, "After all, brains are made of the same kind of ‘stuff’ that makes up the universe as a whole." All cellular matter in human bodies is matter in an extremely high state of organization, and therefore different from 99.9999999999% of the ordinary matter in the universe, which is no such high state of organization. 

After listing nine things claimed as facts, three of which are not actually facts, Kastrup attempts to derive what he calls "inferences." His first inference he states like this (using TWE to mean "that which experiences"):

"Inference 1: The most parsimonious and least problematic ontological underpinning for Fact 5 is that TWE and experience are of the same essential nature. More specifically, experience is a pattern of excitation of TWE."

This doesn't seem to actually be any inference, but simply an arbitrary and very dubious metaphysical assertion. We can only wonder: why is Kastrup claiming that experience is "a pattern of excitation"? When I'm calmly lying in bed with my eyes closed, that is an example of experience. But it seems to be nothing at all like some state of excitation. 

Kastrup's next inference states, "TWE is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible." Something has gone very wrong here.  A leap has been made to a claim about some uncaused reality, without any argumentative justification. Soon after making this claim, Kastrup says, "Substantial literature supports this view," referring us to three books which sound like metaphysical books. 

Very strangely, Kastrup keeps using the words "dissociated" and "dissociation," using such terms 77 times in his article. He seems to imagine some "ontological primitive" he calls "universal consciousness," and seems to claim that you and I are "dissociated alters" of such universal consciousness. Constantly using the term "dissociated" to describe humans, he ends up sounding very strange. A central reality of a human mind is its unity. So it sounds very strange for Kastrup to keep talking about humans as being "dissociated."   Kastrup evokes the term "alter" saying that it means one of the personalities of a split personality. He then attempts to use claims about split-personalities as a metaphysical springboard, claiming that each of us is an "alter" of "universal consciousness," with each of us being like one of the personalities of a split personality. This leaves his "universal consciousness" as rather sounding like some psychiatric case, like Sally Field's Sybil character, but infinitely more mind-fragmented.  Such reasoning is bizarre, and it ends up making each human sound like a psychiatric symptom. 

At the conclusion of his paper, Kastrup states this:

"I have argued for a coherent idealist ontology that explains reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This idealist ontology also offers more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. As such, the quest for artificial consciousness boils down to the quest for abiogenesis. The currently prevailing concept of a physical world independent of consciousness is an unnecessary and problematic intellectual abstraction." 

This may sound somewhat impressive until we remember the very great folly of trying to reduce human minds and human mental experience to some bloodless abstraction called "consciousness." What we have to explain is not some mere abstraction called "consciousness" but the extremely complex and diverse reality of human minds, things such as imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings. 

Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. 

Being a person who denies the reality of matter, an idealist needs to have a credible answer  to the question of why people report identical experiences of observing physical things that don't really exist according to the idealist.  For example, why do you and me and all of our relatives always have the same experience seeing a bright yellow thing in the sky during the day, and a bright white thing in the sky during the night? For a materialist or a dualist the answer is easy: because the sun really physically exists, and the moon really physically exists. But for the idealist who does not believe in the physical existence of the sun or the moon, this uniformity of observations is a problem. 

Berkeley got around this problem by imagining a divine reality (God) that causes such uniformity of perceptual experiences. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our mind.  We know that movie directors cause people to have certain uniform perceptual experiences. So, for example, all of the people who saw Saving Private Ryan in the movie theater had the same perceptual experience.  So it's not too implausible that a divine power could cause humans to have certain types of uniform perceptual experiences. 

But it would seem that thinkers such as Kastrup have no good answer to the question of why humans would have uniform perceptual experiences of matter if matter does not exist. It seems rather implausible that some mere "universal consciousness" would cause you and I to have identical experiences of perceiving the sun and the moon if the sun and the moon did not materially exist.  The problem is that Kastrup has hitched his wagon to the bloodless, abstract, shrink-speaking term "consciousness,"  and imagined some "universal consciousness" which he describes as a mere "ontological primitive." Having done that, he is left with a "primitive" bloodless abstract "universal consciousness" that seems to lack any will or intention, and would therefore be incapable of intentional effects such as making sure that you and I have uniform experiences of observing the sky.  So it seems the idealism of Kastrup is not as credible as the idealism of Berkeley. 

I must emphasize that we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the diminutive and minimalist term "consciousness." Similarly, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the minimalist term "Being." You should doubt that the armchair reasoning of ontology will yield an explanation of humans. 

Postscript: In a Scientific American article, Kastrup made the incorrect claim below about "dissociative identity disorder" (DID):

"Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint."

To the contrary, the 2014 study failed to show any such thing.  It was a Questionable Research Practices study that involved a far-too-small sample size of only 11 subjects identified as having "dissociative identity disorder."  The subject was not a pre-registered study, failed to follow any blinding protocol, and failed to do any sample size calculation. Anyone searching for differences in brain scans can always find differences in one random group of about a dozen people and some other random group of about a dozen people.  Study group sizes far greater than 11 are needed for robust results. 

The way to get a reliable result would have been to first state (before gathering data) a specific hypothesis to be tested (such as a description of some specific difference in brains), and then to test for that exact hypothesis using an adequate study group size (determined by a sample size calculation), in an analysis done by analysts blind as to whether the brain scans come from the control group or the study group. 

Contrary to Kastrup's claims, split-personality cases are of no value in helping to establish the credibility of some claim that humans are "but dissociated alters of universal consciousness" (to use a phrase of Kastrup I quoted above).   The "alters" of people diagnosed as split personalities are not personalities existing at the same time, but personalities that may appear sequentially. An analogy is the channel dial on an old TV of the 1960's, which would only allow you to choose one channel at a time. The "alters" of the person with split personality are like "personality channels," and only one appears at any instant. As suggested in the diagram below, someone with a split personality may switch from Personality 1 to some different Personality 2, but such personalities do not appear at the same time. Such cases do nothing to help establish the claim that some "universal consciousness" has split up into billions of human minds that simultaneously exist at the same instant.  

Schematic diagram of a split personality

Post-postscript: In a recent post Kastrup confesses this:

"Rupert highlights that Analytic Idealism is still naturalist and reductionist. That is entirely correct. I think the world unfolds spontaneously, according to its own inherent dispositions (i.e., the observed regularities we call the 'laws of nature'), and without supernatural intervention from an outside agent beyond the boundaries of nature itself."

Kastrup denounces materialism, and uses language different from that of a materialist. But when it comes to the key questions thar really matter, such as whether the human race is a mere accident of nature, it seems that Kastrup's ideology at its core is pretty much the same as that of materialists. And his "analytic idealism" fails for the same type of reasons that materialism fails, in that it fails all over the place to credibly explain the organization marvels of human bodies and the wonders of human minds. "Atheistic idealism" would be a more honest name for his philosophy. 

Kastrup can be a very careless reasoner. In one post he states this: 

"There is nothing you can pin down about the infant, the child, the teenager or the young adult you once were that has remained intact in you today. Everything about them has changed: their bodies, appearance, feelings, dreams, thoughts, opinions, everything."

This is not true at all. An old person like me has many memories of his youth, and such memories have not changed. I still have many of the opinions and feelings I had when I was a young man, and my feelings  towards my mother and siblings have not changed in 50 years. 

The same poorly-reasoned post gives me further suspicions that there is no great difference between the thinking of Kastrup and that of a materialist, despite the superficial differences and differences in language. Kastrup's concept of death seems to be essentially identical to that of a materialist not believing in life after death. He seems to imagine a person's death as a "you will no longer be a separated alter of mind-at-large or universal consciousness" deal which is for all practical purposes the same as death without an afterlife.  Observational reality tells us a different tale, and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are part of the huge amount of evidence in favor of the survival of persons and souls after death.