They Stored and Studied Thousands of Brains, But Still Failed to Show Brains Store Memories

The failure of scientists to find any memories by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is one of the strongest reasons for rejecting claims that the human brain stores memories. There is encoded genetic information in the nucleus of most cells, information which is pretty much the same in every cell, and is not memory information. That information was discovered around 1953. Since 1953 our technology has grown enormously. But there is still not a single case of anyone ever reading a memory from any brain (human or animal) outside of his own body. Scientists have never been able to read a memory by scanning with a microscope a living person's brain, or scanning some brain tissue. Do not be fooled by press accounts that sometimes grossly exaggerate scientific experiments, and give us headlines such as “Scientists invent mind-reading device.” Such experiments (typically trying to read neural correlates of visual perception) do not actually involve thought reading, and do not at all involve a reading of stored information in the brain.

When reminded of the non-existence of claims to have read memory information from human tissue by microscopic methods, someone might respond like this: 

"Well, the problem is that scientists don't have time to study a brain after someone dies, because the body is buried or cremated. If scientists were able to spend lots of time studying the brains of people who had just died, they would probably be able to find memories in the brains of dead people."

But this claim is not correct. There actually exists an institute of scientists devoted to studying the brains of dead people. And they have had over 4000 brains to study, mostly cases of brains that were donated very soon after someone died, and quickly preserved. 

The institute is called the Lieber Institute, and its web site is here. The site says that the  Lieber Institute has 48,000 square feet of laboratory space at Johns Hopkins University.  The Lieber Institute claims to have a repository of about 4000 brains.  On another page of the institute, we are told, "Each brain is donated by a bereaved family just hours after the loss of their loved one." A Washington Post article  describes  a guy working for that institute who has the job of calling the families of people who just died (often from suicide), asking them for the brain of the dead person to be donated. We are told such requests must occur very quickly. The article says this guy "has a small window of time in which to get that consent — just one to three hours." The Post story says, "Researchers try to obtain brains within 24 to 36 hours." We are told the brains are "flash frozen."

So we have a modern institute with 4000 brains frozen within about a day after death.  The Lieber Institute has been studying such brains for about a decade, mainly for the purpose for trying to find links between brain states and mental illness. The work of the Lieber Institute has involved a huge amount of studying brains frozen in the state they were put in within a day after death. You would think that if human brains stored memories, that by now such an institute would have been able to find abundant evidence of stored memories in brain.  But no such evidence has been found. Nowhere in the 10-year progress report of the Lieber Institute is there any mention of finding any memories in the brains of dead people. 

Could it be that one of the 100 or so publications on the institute's Publications page is one mentioning the finding of a memory stored in the brain? It seems not. Below is a list of all the papers on that page that use the word "memory":

"THE DOPAMINE D5 RECEPTOR IS INVOLVED IN WORKING MEMORY." This is a poorly designed Questionable Research Practices study involving only mice, one using a way-too-small study group size of only eight mice. 

"BRAIN CATECHOL-O-METHYLTRANSFERASE (COMT) INHIBITION BY TOLCAPONE COUNTERACTS RECOGNITION MEMORY DEFICITS IN NORMAL AND CHRONIC PHENCYCLIDINE-TREATED RATS AND IN COMT-VAL TRANSGENIC MICE." This study is another poorly designed Questionable Research Practices study involving only rodents, one using a way-too-small study group size of only six rats. 

"NEUROPROTECTIVE EFFECTS OF DOCOSAHEXAENOIC ACID ON HIPPOCAMPAL CELL DEATH AND LEARNING AND MEMORY IMPAIRMENTS IN A VALPROIC ACID-INDUCED RAT AUTISM MODEL." The paper is behind a paywall, and the abstract does not give any specifics to back up the claim in the title.

"STRONG COMPONENTS OF EPIGENETIC MEMORY IN CULTURED HUMAN FIBROBLASTS RELATED TO SITE OF ORIGIN AND DONOR AGE." The epigenetic "memory" referred to is not actual memory in the sense of being to recall anything. 

"DOPAMINE TRANSPORTER 3′ UTR VNTR MODULATES STRIATAL FUNCTION DURING WORKING MEMORY UPDATING ACROSS THE ADULT AGE SPAN." The study merely did some experiment claiming to show that working memory performance decreases with age, something already known (20-year-olds for example are better at remembering 5 just-mentioned 4-digit numbers than 80-year-olds). 

So based on The Publications page of the site, we should conclude that the Lieber Institute has not been able to find any evidence (through microscopic examination of thousands of brains) that memories are stored in brains. Its scientists have not read one single memory through microscopic examination. The Publications page of the site has no studies using the word "engram," a word sometimes when scientists claim to observe something in a brain they think may be a storage place for memory.  

4000 human brains microscopically studied with state-of-the-art equipment, but no sign was found of any stored human memories. Not even a tiny fragment anywhere.  Not so much as a single bit of brain tissue storing a home address or a telephone number of the name of a historical figure. 

The rationalizations given to explain failures of this type are amusing. It is sometimes claimed that the brain must use some "secret code" to store information, one that humans have not been able to crack. For comparison, the Bletchley Park analysts in England were able in the 1940's to crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis to transmit secret information. That was a code specifically designed to be impossible to decipher by anyone who did not know the secret code. The Bletchley Park analysts were able to crack the Enigma code using only the most primitive predecessors of modern computers.  Can we really imagine that today's scientists would fail to unravel a code used by the brain to store memories,  even though they have microscopes vastly better than those that unraveled the Genetic Code discovered around 1953, and even though they have computers a million times better than the Bletchley Park analysts had? 

It is much more logical and credible to believe that no such memories have been found by examining brains microscopically simply because brains do not store human memories. Nature never told us that brains store memories. It was merely overconfident scientists who told us that, scientists who never had any justification for such a claim. 

It is also sometimes claimed that memories are stored electromagnetically in the brain, the way a computer stores its memories electromagnetically. Some people claim that you can't retrieve memories from dead brains because the memories are fragile electromagnetic things that are lost when you die, in something like the way you may lose something you were writing if someone suddenly turns off your computer. But if memories were stored in the brain electromagnetically, then why would neurologists often use electroshock therapy on people with depression, a "shock their brains with electricity" technique that would destroy all their memories if such memories were stored electromagnetically? And if memories were stored in the brain electromagnetically, would we not expect epileptic patients to lose all of their memories every time they had a major seizure, which is like an electrical storm in the brain? No such thing happens. Severe seizures often are not remembered by patients having them, but there is no effect of someone forgetting his school lessons because he had a major seizure. 

When there is a hard-to-crack code what typically happens is that someone finds undeniable evidence that the code exists and was used, before anyone is able to crack the code. For centuries Egyptologists were unable to crack the code used in hieroglyphics, but they knew during those centuries that the walls of ancient Egyptian sites were using a code that had not yet been deciphered.  Such Egyptologists could see the repetition of symbolic tokens, alerting them that a code was being used.  In the case of the brain, not only can we find through microscopic examination no memories that can be read, but also we can find no indications that any code is being used in the brain other than the genetic code used to store genetic information, not memories. This is a very strong indication that brains do not store memories. 

Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for memory storage. The Japan Times tells us this:

" Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark's University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world's largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life's work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren...The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark. Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission."

We hear not one word about any discovery that came from studying these brains. A web page of the University of Odense describes the collection of brains, but fails to mention any progress that has come from studying the brains.  There is no link to any papers that were produced using such brains. 

There is another brain collection called the Human Brain Collection Core (HBCC). The collection is described here. The collection seems to consist of about 1000 brains, 700 from people who were diagnosed with mental illness. 300 of the brains are from normal people. We seem to have the same kind of method as used by the Lieber Institute. The families of people who recently died are asked to donate the brain of a family members, with a time pressure element of "we must act fast." 

Related to this collection is a "Selected Publications" page, apparently listing the best results obtained from studying these brains. None of the 46 papers reports anything like a discovery of memories by analyzing brain tissue. None of the papers has a title referring to either memory or engrams. 

Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 500 nanometers, about 5000 angstroms.  When you search for "width of a synapse," you will commonly get a figure of 20 to 40 nanometers, but that is the width of the synaptic cleft, the gap between two synapses or between a synapse and a dendrite. The full head is much wider, as you can see from the page here.

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 500 nanometers, about 500 to 5000 angstroms.

Length of a dendritic spine: the site here says, "the thin spine neck, which connects the spine to the main dendritic branch, has lengths between 0.04 and 1 μm [microns] and has 'door knob'-shaped head structures with diameters that between 0.5 and 2 μm [microns]." That length dimension is between 400 and 10,000 angstroms; and that head diameter is between 500 and 20,000 angstroms. 

The visual below (from the page here) shows an electron microscope image of a synapse. The width of the synaptic head is more than 500 nanometers (nm). We see nothing that looks like any kind of storage of human learned information. The neurotransmitters inside the spherical vesicles are short-lived chemicals that don't even last a week. 

Below we see a closeup electron microscope photograph of some dendritic spines which are 500 nanometers (5000 angstrom) wide, from the scientific paper here "Ultrastructural comparison of dendritic spine morphology preserved with cryo and chemical fixation," Tamada et. al.  We see nothing that looks anything like  stored learned information or stored memory information. 

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 10,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage. 

They Stored and Studied Thousands of Brains, But Still Failed to Show Mental Illness Comes From Sick Brains

In 2019 the Washington Post had a long article entitled "Dissecting brains to find the biological answers to the mysteries of mental disorders."  We hear about a Lieber Institute of Brain Development that is engaged in the strange business of requesting brains from the relatives of those who very recently died, and then studying such brains.  But we read nothing substantial in the Post story about any progress made in understanding mental illness by studying brains.   We are told, "Since opening in 2011, the institute has amassed more than 3,000 of these post-mortem brains that they are studying to better understand the biological mechanisms behind such neuropsychiatric disorders as schizophrenia, major depression, substance abuse, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder."  

We are told of a guy working for that institute who has the job of calling the families of people who just died (often from suicide), asking them to donate the brain of the dead person. We are told such pleas must occur very quickly. The article says this guy "has a small window of time in which to get that consent — just one to three hours." We can only imagine how many families have been bothered in their worst hour of grief by such requests. Later the Post story makes it sound like some of the brains gathered are not that fresh, saying, "Researchers try to obtain brains within 24 to 36 hours." We are told the brains are "flash frozen." A 2019 annual report of the Lieber Institute tells us, "After consent, we obtain a detailed clinical history via interviews with the family." I can only imagine what a burden that would be on family members with a recently deceased relative. 

A page of the Lieber Institute brags that it now has a collection of 4000 brains. Another of its pages calls this collection "the largest collection of brains in the world that’s devoted to enhancing science’s understanding of psychiatric disorders" (which doesn't seem accurate, since the Dutch collection described below, existing for the same purpose, is twice as large). A page of the Lieber Institute entitled "Important Breakthroughs" mentions nothing very substantial about finding a link between brain structure and mental illness. 

The site has a link to a "10-Year Anniversary Report" that fails to report much of any real progress in finding a link between mental illness and brains. We have in the report a page with a big headline of "KEY PUBLICATIONS."  The first publication listed in this report has a title of "Electrophysiological measures from human iPSC-derived neurons are associated with schizophrenia clinical status and predict individual cognitive performance." It's a Questionable Research Practices study that used a sample size of only 13 subjects.  We read in the study, "The sample sizes were small and, because there were no similar prior studies, we could not reasonably estimate expected effect sizes or error rates." The study says, "Due to the small sample sizes and the number of tests performed, some of the associations observed may be spurious, so replication studies with larger samples are necessary to confirm and extend these findings." And this is what the Lieber Institute is offering as the first example of its work in their 10-year progress report?  The other three studies mentioned on the page only talk about claims of genetic differences. 

The 10-year report has this not-very-wise comment on suicide:

"There is certainly a genetic component to suicide, meaning that it can run in families. Twin studies, however, have shown there is more to it. Scientists believe epigenetics—the interaction of genes and the environment—is at play. Perhaps early trauma or illness can turn on specific genes, increasing a person’s risk of suicide. Until we unravel the biological mechanisms underlying suicide, it’s hard to fully understand, treat, or prevent it."

The idea of suicide being caused by genes is nonsensical, as are all ideas of some idea or behavior being caused by genes. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the amino acid sequence of proteins, not any tendencies to think or act in a particular way.  A gene may help make possible some physical action, but is never the cause of such an action. The idea of a genetic basis for suicide is nonsensical according to the assumptions of Darwinism. According to such assumptions, if there were any gene tending to cause suicide, natural selection would tend to weed out such a gene, reducing its occurrence of such a gene in the gene pool of humans. But suicide is still a widespread phenomenon, and it is estimated that 1.7 percent of people in the US die by suicide.  The person claiming a genetic basis for suicide is as misguided as a person claiming a genetic basis for homosexuality. It's the same situation in regard to homosexuality: if there were a genetic basis for it, we would expect (according to Darwinian assumptions) for homosexuality to be very rare or nonexistent. Instead it is estimated that 5% or more of the population is homosexual. 

Ignoring socioeconomic causal factors

The 10-year Lieber Institute report says, "Lieber scientists ask what happens in the brain that makes some people take their own lives." That's a question making an implausible assumption, and what we should be asking is: what goes on in the mind or what occurs in a person's life history or current life situation that might make him suicidal?  There is no evidence that something occurring in a brain causes people to commit suicide. 

The 10-year Lieber Institute report has a link to a paper entitled, "Genetics and Brain Transcriptomics of Completed Suicide." The "Brain Transcriptomics" part involves the ridiculous procedure of trying to analyze rates of gene transcription activity in the brains of people who have already died, using brains frozen 12 to 24 hours after death.  Gene transcription is greatly altered by death, and rapidly trails off in the hours after death. The idea that you can shed some light on what was happening in either the minds or brains of people when they killed themselves or beforehand by studying gene transcription rates in brains frozen 12 to 24 hours after they died seems likes nonsense. 

A paper like this should not be taken seriously by anyone unless the authors followed a careful blinding protocol so that those analyzing the brains did not know whether any particular brain came from someone who committed suicide. We read of no such thing. There is merely a single sentence saying, "All diagnoses and decisions about manner of suicide were determined blind to any of the molecular data." That does not mean that people studying the brains were blind to whether suicide occurred. 

Very ridiculously, the 10-year Lieber Institute report has a line saying, "Lieber researchers are looking at these biological snapshots of what occurred in the brain at the moment of suicide completion to determine what's different about these brains."  The brain of a dead person frozen 12 to 24 hours after he died is not a biological snapshot of what occurred in the brain at the moment of suicide. 

The publications page of the Lieber Institute lists their top papers for the past nine years. We seem to find no mention of a discovery linking brain states and mental illness. Most of the papers mention only claims about genes. None of the papers listed uses the word "replication." What the Lieber Institute mainly seems to have in its research is gene analysis, particularly the weak borderline type of gene analysis called transcriptomics. Transcriptomics is some not-very-solid-seeming branch of inquiry that tries to analyze what genes were being used at particular times.  The idea of trying to use transcriptomics to study dissected dead brains is laughable. Gene transcription is greatly changed by death, and trails off not long after death. 

What do you do when you can't find differences in brain size or brain structure to explain mental differences? Maybe you look for differences in genomes. But the genes in genomes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the amino acid makeup of proteins,  and have basically nothing to do with mental states. What do you do if you cannot find differences in genomes to explain mental differences? Then maybe as a last resort you do some studies on the will-of-the-wisp, ever-changing kind of thing called "transcriptomic profiles." Since transcriptomic profiles are ever-changing, and it is possible to get a separate  "transcriptomic profile" for any of 20,000+ genes, you will have some very noisy data allowing you to see pretty much anything that you want to see. 

Apparently no drugs or treatment for mental illness have yet resulted from all this studying of 4000 brains.  On a page of the Lieber Institute we read this

 "Seven years of operations, we have made considerable progress in identifying and developing a promising set of novel therapeutic targets including two that could be in clinical trials within two to three years. In addition, we have four promising leads that could introduce two new drugs into Phase II clinical trials by 2021."

That isn't a report mentioning that any drug had yet been developed by such brain studies. We hear of four drugs "out-licensed for further development," but we don't hear of any drug that has been federally approved. Apparently all this annoying the families of just-deceased people for a brain donation isn't getting much of anywhere in establishing a link between brain states and mental illness. 

The Lieber Institute publishes a free online magazine called neuroDEVELOPMENTS. In the March 2019 edition we have the very untrue claim that "the genome guides construction of the brain." The human genome (DNA and the genes in it) do not guide or specify the construction of either any human organ or any human cell. The claim that DNA is a blueprint telling how to make a body or any of its organs or cells is a grotesque lie that materialist scientists have been telling for 70 years.  For a long list of quotes by scientists and doctors saying that DNA is not a blueprint, program or recipe for building a body, see my post here. 

Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for mental illness. The Japan Times tells us this:

" Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark's University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world's largest collection of brains. There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s. Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life's work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren...The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark. Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission."

We hear not one word about any discovery that came from studying these brains. A CNN story on the basement filled with brains tells us this:

"A 2012 study found that roughly 40% of Danish women and 30% of Danish men had received treatment for a mental health disorder in their lifetimes – though Werge estimated that number would 'almost certainly' be higher if the same study was done today. (By comparison, that same year, less than 15% of US adults received mental health services.) 

I don't think Danes are any more prone to mental illness than Americans, but it seems from the numbers above that Danish authorities have some great enthusiasm for diagnosing people with mental illness, particularly women. We may only wonder how many of the brains in the Danish collection were taken without permission from women who were wrongly put in mental hospitals. The CNN article also fails to tell us of any progress in understanding the cause of mental illness from studying such brains. A web page of the University of Odense describes the collection of brains, but fails to mention any progress that has come from studying the brains.  There is no link to any papers that were produced using such brains. 

There is another brain collection called the Human Brain Collection Core (HBCC). The collection is described here. The collection seems to consist of about 1000 brains, 700 from people who were diagnosed with mental illness. 300 of the brains are from normal people. We seem to have the same kind of method as used by the Lieber Institute. The families of people who recently died are asked to donate the brain of a family member, with a time pressure element of "we must act fast." We are told "there is no direct benefit to the family for allowing the donation." I guess such "grab the brains without paying a cent for them" stinginess is what we might expect from research neuroscientists, who nowadays pay meager  "chump change" wages to volunteers for scanning their brains in medically unnecessary brain scans that might expose them to health risks (as discussed here). 

Related to this collection is a "Selected Publications" page, apparently listing the best results obtained from studying these brains. None of the papers listed have impressive-sounding titles making it sound like any brain structure or brain condition has been found explaining mental illness. Most of the papers merely refer to obscure claims about genetics and genetic transcription.  

Of about 46 papers listed, the paper that sounds the most like something reporting a link between brain structure and mental illness is a paper entitled "Accelerated hippocampal biological aging in bipolar disorder." The paper does not report any differences in the hippocampus size or structure for those with bipolar disorder. The authors tried to look for some epigenetic difference, and initially found "Groups did not differ for epigenetic aging acceleration when considering the entire sample." After using the old "slice the study group into a smaller group, looking for statistical significance" trick, the authors were able to report a very marginal  statistical significance of just barely better than the minimum of p < .05, something that smells like p-hacking.  We can't tell how large the sample size is, because the authors haven't listed it in the abstract, and the paper is behind a paywall. This does not at all qualify as any brain difference explanation for bipolar disorder.  

The Lack of Correlation Between Most Mental Illness and Brain States

In a 1920 book by Carl August Wickland there is a discussion of the lack of correlation between brain states and mental illness. We read this:

"Dr. W. M. L. Coplin, Director of the Bureau of Health and Charities, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said 'Insanity, in most cases, is unaccompanied by any perceptible change in the brain structure. The brain of the patient, when examined under a microscope, shows absolutely nothing which differs in any way from the appearance of the brain of the perfectly sane person. It is therefore evident that the insanity might be due to toxemia, the effect of some subtle organism in the nature of bacilla.... Something causes insanity but what it is, we do not yet know.'

Dr. Britton D. Evans, Superintendent of the Morris Plains, New Jersey, Insane Asylum, stated: 'Brain tumor or brain fever may not affect the mind.... A man may have trouble of the brain and still have a normal mind.'

Dr. Th. Ziehen, a noted German alienist, and an authority on hysteria, wrote: 'For many functional neuroses there is as yet no accurate limitation and definition. As pathological anatomy does not aid us, no uniform and exclusive cause for hysteria can be demonstrated.'

Dr. William Hanna Thomson, physician to the Roosevelt Hospital and Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Diseases of the Nervous System, New York University Medical College, in referring to Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, asserted that:  'The contributors to this great encyclopedia are from the most eminent professors, experts, and superintendents of insane asylums in Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and Russia. In the articles by the writers on kleptomania, dipsomania, chronic mania, etc., there is not a word about the pathological anatomy, (because none can be found). Just so it is in the article on melancholia, puerperal insanity, katatonia, circular insanity, homicidal insanity or epileptic insanity; in none of these is there a word about pathological anatomy, for the sufficient reason that not one of these forms of insanity shows any pathological or diseased condition in the brain different from the sound brain of a healthy man killed in an accident.'

He also said: 'It is high time that we now look in the direction of toxemia (or blood poisoning) for the explanation of the insanities which produce no changes whatever in the brain.' ”

The quotes above date from about 100 years ago. For a modern take on these questions, we can look at some of the chapters of the free online psychiatry textbook "Critical Psychiatry Textbook" by Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD. In Chapter 3 Gøtzsche states this: "Despite 15 years of intense studying, I have been unable to find any important contribution of biological psychiatry to our understanding of the causes of psychiatric disorders and how they should best be treated."  

Gøtzsche cites psychiatry textbooks that attempt to link small brain differences with mental illness. He gives many examples indicating that such textbooks routinely make untrue claims based on weak evidence. He points out that many of these textbooks are citing unreliable studies with too-small sample sizes. He also raises an important point that casts doubt on the unreliability of all such claims: the fact that nowadays people suffering from mental illness are massively prescribed brain drugs, and many think that such drugs themselves may produce changes in brain states, including shrinkage of brain tissue. If drugs may change some part of the brain, and the mentally ill people being studied have been long taking such drugs, then any difference in their brains may be caused by the drugs themselves, rather than such changes being the cause of their mental illness. 

He states this about brain imaging studies (often used to try to back up claims of a physical basis for mental illness):

"This whole area is a mess of highly unreliable research. A 2009 meta-analysis found that the false positive rate in neuroimaging studies is between 10% and 40%.  And a 2012 report written for the American Psychiatric Association about neuroimaging biomarkers concluded that 'no studies have been published in journals indexed by the National Library of Medicine examining the predictive ability of neuroimaging for psychiatric disorders for either adults or children.' 

One good research paper can sometimes make hundreds of poor studies redundant. This is the case for a 2012 systematic review by Joshua Carp that surveyed the methodological state of the art in a random sample of 241 fMRI studies. Carp found that many of the studies didn’t report on critical methodological details about experimental design, data acquisition, or analysis, and many studies were underpowered. Data collection and analysis methods were highly flexible. The researchers had used 32 unique software packages, and there were nearly as many unique analysis pipelines as there were studies. Carp concluded that because the rate of false positive results increases with the flexibility of the design, the field of functional neuroimaging may be particularly vulnerable to false positives. Fewer than half of the studies reported the number of people rejected from analysis and the reasons for rejection, and the median sample size per group was only 15, which generates an enormous risk of selective publication of those results that happened to agree with the investigators’ prejudice."

The doctor includes many additional paragraphs challenging the reliability of brain imaging techniques. He points out people analyzing brain scans have an almost infinite variety of possible "analysis pipelines" they can choose from, each of which is a different way of analyzing the data. He suggests that you can show almost anything you want from brain scan data, simply by fiddling around with different analysis pipelines until one such analysis pipeline shows what you are trying to show.  He then states this:

"The experience of the Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain is also relevant to consider when assessing the merits of brain scanning studies in psychiatry. In 2020, he described what happened when he requested to see the raw data in 41 of the 180 manuscripts he had handled. Upon his requests, 21 of the 41 manuscripts were withdrawn by the authors, and he rejected a further 19 'because of insufficient raw data,' which suggested that the raw data might not exist, at least for some of the cases. Thus, only 1 of 41 papers (2%) passed his reasonable test."

A 2016 paper ("Finding the Elusive Psychiatric 'Lesion' With 21st-Century Neuroanatomy: A Note of Caution") has this abstract:

"The widespread use of MRI has led to a wealth of structural and functional anatomical findings in patients with diverse psychiatric disorders that may represent insights into pathobiology. However, recent technical reports indicate that data from popular MRI research-particularly structural MRI, resting--state functional MRI, and diffusion tensor imaging--are highly sensitive to common artifacts (e.g., head motion and breathing effects) that may dominate the results. Because these and other important confounders of MRI data (e.g., smoking, body weight, metabolic variations, medical comorbidities, psychoactive drugs, alcohol use, mental state) tend to vary systematically between patient and control groups, the evidence that findings are neurobiologically meaningful is inconclusive and may represent artifacts or epiphenomena of uncertain value. The authors caution that uncritically accepting from study to study findings that may represent fallacies of all sorts carries the risk of misinforming practitioners and patients about biological abnormalities underlying psychiatric illness."

Referring to major depressive disorder, a 2019 paper published in Nature states this: "MRI scans cannot be used to aid in the diagnosis or treatment planning of patients with MDD." A 2019 scientific paper states this: "Neuroimaging studies show structural alterations of various brain regions in children and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), although nonreplications are frequent."  The frequent "nonreplications" are apparently studies that fail to show structural alterations of various brain regions in children and adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The paper very weakly concludes that "subtle differences in cortical surface area are widespread in children but not adolescents and adults with ADHD."  Given such frequent nonreplications, we may be skeptical about the "subtle differences" claimed. Gøtzsche  states, "The fact is that ADHD is a social construct and that no reliable studies have shown any biological origin for this construct, or that the brains of people with this diagnosis are different to the brains of other people."

A 2021 study is entitled "Systematic Review of Functional MRI Applications for Psychiatric Disease Subtyping." Hinting at a lack of good quality evidence that brain scans can be useful for psychiatric diagnosis, the paper says that "this subfield is at an incipient exploratory stage, and all retrieved studies were mostly proofs of principle where further validation and increased sample sizes are craved for," noting that "results for all explored diseases are inconsistent." Another 2021 study states this about MRI brain scan studies: "In a reflection on the history and future use of MRI in psychiatry, Etkin commented on the lack of reproducible, diagnosis-specific neuroimaging findings." A 2019 paper says that MRI brain imaging "still has only a minor role in the clinical assessment of patients at early stages of psychosis and whether it should be implemented as routine screening instrument in psychotic patients has continued to generate debate." Another paper says brain lesions of causal relevance occur in only 6% to 10% of schizophrenia patients, and then says that only 3% of secondary schizophrenia arises in the presence of systemic physical illness. The actual numbers are probably less, as estimates of this type (made by neuroscientists who love to suggest neural causes) are typically overestimates. 

In an illuminating article by Bruce E. Levine, we read the following:

"Published in the journal Neuron in 2022, Raymond Dolan—considered one of the most influential neuroscientists in the world—co-authored 'Functional Neuroimaging in Psychiatry and the Case for Failing Better,' concluding, 'Despite three decades of intense neuroimaging research, we still lack a neurobiological account for any psychiatric condition.'  Reflecting on the more than 16,000 neuroimaging articles published during the last 30 years, Dolan and his co-authors concluded: 'It remains difficult to refute a critique that psychiatry’s most fundamental characteristic is its ignorance. . . . Casting a cold eye on the psychiatric neuroimaging literature invites a conclusion that despite 30 years of intense research and considerable technological advances, this enterprise has not delivered a neurobiological account (i.e., a mechanistic explanation) for any psychiatric disorder, nor has it provided a credible imaging-based biomarker of clinical utility.' ”

Below is a recent quote from Allan Levinthal, PhD:

"In stark contrast to the discoveries by medical researchers of biological causation for many physical illnesses, psychiatric researchers have failed to find physiological or genetic causation for the most diagnosed mental disorders—the anxiety disorders and depression—negating the rationale for the prescription of these drugs. This failure has occurred despite (a) the expenditure by the NIMH of tens of billions of research dollars over this same more than century-long time span in a fruitless search for physical causation of these mental disorders and (b) patients spending tens of billions of dollars annually on these prescriptions."

How the Academia-Cyberspace-Pharmaceutical-Biotech-Publishing Complex Incentivizes Bad Brain Research

Countless times on this blog, I have discussed poor quality research about brains. An interesting question to ponder is: why is there so much bad research done about brains? Why do we see so many studies guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and a lack of blinding protocols? Why do many scientific papers make claims about their observations that are not justified by any observations reported in the paper? Why do we have so many misleading stories in the press claiming that some brain research showed something that it did not actually show?

In my previous post "Why the Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex Keeps Giving Misleading Brain Research" I made a fairly good start at answering such questions. I identified a social network I called the academia cyberspace profit complex, and I explained some of the reasons why that complex incentivizes poor quality but interesting-sounding brain research.  Among the factors I identified were these:

• Professors tend to be judged these days by the "easy-to-quantify" metrics of the number of papers they have written or co-written, and the number of citations such papers get, rather than a "hard-to-quantify" metric of  the quality of the research procedures they followed. 
• The more "quick and dirty" studies scientists publish (studies that are relatively easy to produce, but do not involve very high standards of research quality), the higher a "papers published count" a scientist will have. 
• Scientific journals these days have a high bias called "publication bias," a tendency to prefer to publish papers reporting some supposed "positive effect" supposedly involving some causal relation rather than a null result reporting no such causal relation. 
• The more interesting-sounding or important-sounding a paper may be, the greater the likelihood that it will be cited by other scientists, and the higher the "citation count" of the scientist authors will be. 
• The desire to produce interesting-sounding or important-sounding papers reporting "positive effects" rather than null results tends to bias the way papers are written and the way studies are designed and performed, creating an incentive for study designs likely to end up with some "positive result" rather than a null result.  Among the resulting effects is often "cherry picking" of data, so that the paper ends up with a "publishable" positive effect rather than a null result.
• Once a study has been published in a scientific journal, it is announced to the public by means of a university press release or college press release. Nowadays university press offices are notorious for their hype and exaggeration, and routinely make interesting-sounding claims about new research that are not justified by the observations in the scientific paper being announced.  An abundance of such hype helps to glorify universities, keep them in the public's eyes, and helps to justify the very high tuition rates of universities. Misstatements in press releases come both from press office copywriters who are encouraged to glorify and hype new research, but also from scientists quoted in the press releases, who often make unwarranted or false claims about their own research, in an effort to maximize the attention such research will get. 
• There is nowadays an extremely large cyberspace industry that has an incentive to uncritically parrot university press releases, and an additional incentive to further exaggerate and hype the results reported by such press releases.  The incentive comes in the form of web pages containing ads that generate revenue for the owners of web pages.  So we see an enormous "clickbait" effect, in which sensational-sounding headlines appear on web pages, with the headlines being hyperlinks that take the reader to a page filled with ads.  Every time a page with such ads is viewed, money is generated for the owner of the web site.  The "clickbait" headlines often take you to pages discussing research that never justifies the sensational clickbait headline. For example, you may see on some web page a headline "Scientists Make Giant Leap in Understanding Memory." Clicking on that headline will typically take you to some story about merely another very poorly designed study using mice, something that is no actual progress in understanding memory. 
• "Quick and dirty" scientific research helps science journalists fill their quotas of science stories. Knowing that web sites prefer to publish stories with sensational-sounding headlines, science journalists are incentivized to "go with the hype" rather than critically discussing poorly designed research. 
• The increase in "papers published" counts and citation counts resulting from "quick and dirty" research helps scientists meet paper count quotas and citation quotas that may be informally required for their promotion or advancement, and increases their chances of getting profit from things such as book deals and consulting contracts. 

My previous post discussed many of the factors that incentivize poorly designed and executed scientific research. But I left out a discussion of several very important additional factors:

• Nowadays pharmaceutical companies may have a very large incentive to fund and/or promote poorly designed and executed brain research, particularly whenever such research helps to promote some pill that such companies sell. The mental health  pharmaceutical industry is estimated to be a 36 billion dollar industry. 
• Nowadays biotech companies may have a very large incentive to fund and/or promote poorly designed and executed brain research, particularly whenever such research helps to promote some device that such companies sell. Biotech companies include very many companies such as the manufacturers of MRI devices, the manufacturers of EEG equipment, the manufacturers of implantable medical devices, and the manufacturers of noninvasive brain-related devices that a person may put on his head. The biotech industry is a trillion-dollar industry, and many billions of that involves brain-related products. 
• Nowadays the publishers of scientific papers have a very large incentive to publish poorly designed and executed brain research, simply because a profusion of such "quick and dirty" papers means more available newly written papers that can be published. The more papers published, the more journals can be published, and the more journal subscription fees can be charged.  According to one site, "The worldwide revenue from academic publishing stands at over $19 billion per year," and that "out of this figure, over 50% is attributed to 5 major publishing companies – Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE."
• Scientists doing brain research often have conflicts of interest, such as the ownership of shares of corporations that may increase in value if the research reports a particular type of result, or something like a relationship in which the scientists get consulting fees from some corporation whose fate may be affected by the research they are doing. 
• Nowadays much of brain-related research is funded largely or mainly by private corporations interested in having the research find some particular result. 
• The relationship between private industry and brain-related research is so strong that many scientific papers are essentially "ghost written" by anonymous employees of corporations standing to benefit if the research reports a particular result. 

To diagram these complex relations and financial motivations, I must present a diagram much larger than the relation diagram that I presented in my earlier post. The revised diagram is below:

The diagram shows a complex stream of profits that results from scientists starting out by doing "quick and dirty" poorly designed research.  The result is a set of winners and losers.  

The Winners

These are the winners from "quick and dirty" brain-related research:

• The scientists who get some additional paper with their name on it to increase their "papers published" count, and also may get some more of the highly coveted paper citations. Many of these scientists are heavy investors in pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies (or recipients of income from such sources), and indirectly profit when such companies profit in the ways described below. 
• The universities who can announce important-sounding research by some exaggerating press release, thereby helping to maintain their prominent public profile, and their reputation as a center of "cutting edge" research. 
• The science journalists who get some new sensational-sounding press release that they can use as the basis for some interesting-sounding article that will help them fill their quota of articles written. 
• The owners of web pages that will announce the results using clickbait headlines leading to pages containing ads that generate money for the people running the web sites. 
• The pharmaceutical companies that may benefit when a specific product of theirs is favorably mentioned by the new scientific paper, and who also in general benefit when literature keeps people thinking that brains are the source of our minds and our mental problems, and keeps people thinking that the way to solve psychological problems is by taking pills. 
• The biotech device  companies that may benefit when a specific product of theirs is favorably mentioned by the new scientific paper, and who also in general benefit when literature keeps people thinking that brains are the source of our minds and our mental problems, and keeps people thinking that brain-related devices can help solve mental problems or mood problems. 
• The publishers of expensive scientific journals, who can meet their monthly quotas of papers to be published (for such publishers it is financially better for there to be written in any month 800 poorly-written papers describing poorly designed papers and 200 well-written papers describing well-designed papers, than for there to be written in the same month 100 poorly-written papers describing poorly designed papers and 300 well-written papers describing well-designed papers).

The Losers

These are the losers from "quick and dirty" brain-related research:

• All the people in the general public, who keep being misled by "science news" headlines giving them the wrong idea about the source of their minds and the storage place of their memories, and who keep reading research reports which give them the wrong idea that they are mere brains rather than souls, minds or spirits. The resulting psychological, moral and spiritual harm is enormous but incalculable. 
• Very many people with psychological problems or emotional problems or learning problems who are given the wrong idea that the way to help such problems is by fiddling with brains or brain chemistry, rather than by improving education techniques and educational literature, improving access to education and counseling,  improving social conditions, improving social justice, improving family relations or improving worldviews and positive attitudes about selves by properly educating people so that they learn about the most important facts and observations related to who they are and how they got here. 

In a classic essay, the distinguished military officer Smedley Butler stated this: "War is a racket...It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many." It is true to say exactly that about junk science research.  The production of such research is a racket, for the benefit of the few beneficiaries listed above, at the expense of everyone else. 

Long story short, if you want to know why so much junk research gets published about brains, follow the money and ponder who profits. But it would be an oversimplification to suggest that financial interests and career advancement offers a full explanation for why we see so much bad brain-related research and so much bad reporting about such research. Another important factor is that poorly-designed, poorly-executed and poorly-described research relating to brains helps to provide what can be regarded as belief system justification. We should not forget that those behind such research are members of a belief community with cherished dogmas that they keep claiming are facts but which are very much unproven, such as the dogma that your brain produces your mind and thinking, and the dogma that your brain stores your beliefs and memories.  Members of such a community get a non-financial mental reward whenever there appears research which they can claim as evidence their beliefs are correct. In cases when unfounded beliefs are held and cherished,  poorly-designed poorly-executed and inaccurately-described research can provide a comforting feeling of assurance that well-designed well-executed and accurately-described research might never be able to provide. 

Covering the Biotech Startup "Prophetic," Slate Fails to Mention a Failed Replication Attempt

A recent article at the widely ready site www.slate.com gives coverage about a brain-zapping startup called Prophetic. The article is entitled "It Uses A.I. It Goes on Your Head. Can It Induce Lucid Dreams?" But on the site the headline leading you to the article sounds more encouraging, saying, "They Raised $1 Million for a Device That Gives You Lucid Dreams. There’s Just One Problem."  We read, "Within just four months, Wollberg and Berry’s new company, Prophetic, raised more than $1 million in funding for a consumer device—the 'Halo'—from venture capital heavy hitters and acquired advisers who’d worked in neurotech at Apple."

We get a visual of a head device that the company Prophetic is developing, one that it claims will be able to give you lucid dreams. Lucid dream are dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming. Supposedly lucid dreams can be quite pleasurable for certain people who are able to steer the dreams towards desired content.  You can imagine how fun it would be, for example, to will your dream to show you naked movie stars, or maybe will your dreams towards some scene in which you are swimming in a beautiful lagoon in Tahiti. 

I have little doubt that if a head device caused you to start lucid dreaming, it might be highly profitable. But is there evidence that zapping the brain with some energy can help produce lucid dreams? 

Both the Slate article and the website of Prophetic showcase a 2014 study by Voss and others entitled "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity." That paper appears at the top of the "Lucid Dreaming Research" page at the website of Prophetic:

 The Slate article says this about the 2014 Voss paper, claiming an increase in lucid dreams after zapping brains at a frequency of about 40 Hz:

"That study found that it was possible to induce lucid dreams using electric currents. Wollberg and Berry plan to build a headset that utilizes a different kind of 'noninvasive neurostimulation'—a transcranial focused ultrasound. This emerging technology activates highly specific regions of the brain, through the skull, using high-frequency sound waves."

We hear nothing in the Slate article disputing the 2014 study "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity" by Voss and others.  But, very importantly, there was a later study that failed to reproduce their results.  The later study was the 2020 study "Attempted induction of signalled lucid dreaming by transcranial alternating current stimulation." 

The study concludes this:

"Results do not support the conclusion that frontal 40 Hz tAC stimulation heightens dreamed self-awareness. Our findings further cast doubt on whether 40 Hz frontal brain activity in REM sleep is a reliable index of lucid dreaming as previously claimed (Voss et al., 2014). Not only is our observed lack of an effect of 40 Hz frontal stimulation on lucid dreaming inconsistent with that claim, but other findings similarly question it. Specifically, Dodet, Chavez, Leu-Semenescu, Golmard, and Arnulf (2015) did not see distinct 40 Hz activity in frontal regions or any other regions in a sample of 14 lucid dreams from 7 patients with narcolepsy who were frequent lucid dreamers."

There is no link to this study on the "Lucid Dreaming Research" page on the web site of the Prophetic startup.  We get a page that begin with a link to the 2014 Voss study "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity," but no link to the 2020 study quoted above, one failing to reproduce the results of the 2014 Voss study. Investors should beware of startups offering pages of scientific results on their web sites. The studies mentioned may be cherry-picked. 

The writer of the Slate story at least did right by reaching out to two brain experts who are quoted as saying that there is no evidence yet that brain stimulation can produce lucid dreaming. But the Slate story ends by saying this about the Prophetic startup's "Halo" device: "Still, their headset seems more promising than some of the other lucid-dreaming products out there." No justification is given for this dubious claim. 

The situation seems to be this:

(1) A 2014 study ("Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity" by Voss and others) claimed that electrical stimulation could help produce lucid dreams. 

(2) A 2020  study  ("Attempted induction of signalled lucid dreaming by transcranial alternating current stimulation") tried to reproduce the results of the 2014 Voss study, but failed to do so. 

(3) The Prophetic startup's "Halo" device does not even use the electrical stimulation technique attempted by the 2014 Voss study that was not replicated by the 2020 study, but a different technique of ultrasound. 

(4) There are apparently no studies showing that ultrasound can cause lucid dreaming. None of the seven studies listed on the "Lucid dreaming research" page of the Prophetic startup website refer to ultrasound. The site has another page listing seven studies pertaining to ultrasound, but none of them have titles mentioning dreaming. The site seems to list no scientific paper referring to both ultrasound and dreaming in its title. 

(5) Doing a Google Scholar search for "ultrasound and dreaming" seems to show no results (on the first two pages of search results) mentioning any study involving dreaming effects of ultrasound stimulation. 

(6) There is no robust evidence that dreaming is produced by the brain, and some evidence that may hint that dreaming is not produced by the brain, as I discuss in my post here.  A study cited on the Prophetic web site ("Frequent lucid dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity between frontopolar cortex and temporoparietal association areas") is not robust evidence for a brain involvement in lucid dreaming. Not limited itself to some exact hypothesis by using pre-registration, the study attempted to find some difference in the brains between a small set of lucid dreamers (about 14) and about 14 controls. Since there are 1001 ways to analyze brain features, it is always possible to find differences using brain scans of two groups of about a dozen people. There are countless different ways in which neuroscientists attempt to quantify "brain connectivity."   

Before investing in a startup such as Prophetic, I would wait for the appearance of a solid scientific study suggesting that there is reality behind its premise that lucid dreaming can be stimulated by ultrasound. 

The Lack of Evidence That Brains Produce Dreaming, and Some Evidence Hinting They Don't

In a year 2020 "Dream Catcher" study described here and the scientific paper here, EEG recordings were made of subjects while they were sleeping. The subjects were awakened at random times, and asked to state whether or not they were dreaming.  Then some scientists ("blind" to which EEG reading were from the dreamers) were asked to guess whether particular subjects were dreaming. The result was a null result. There was no evidence that by studying EEG recordings you can tell whether a person is dreaming.  

Scientists apparently delayed the release of these results for years. A 2015 paper describes results just like those of the Dream Catcher study, but results that had apparently not yet been published:

"When data from serial awakenings of 9 subjects had been collected, these data were divided. Introspective reports and electroencephalographic recordings were analysed by different judges who were ignorant of which EEG sequences had led to dream reports and which ones had not. An external EEG research group used a number of statistical methods to identify the signature of the recordings that were followed by dream reports. But the accuracy of their predictions turned out to be no better than chance. A doctoral researcher presenting these findings at a conference explained that there were 4 different explanations for this failure: ‘Subjective experience is a) not in the brain, b) is in the brain, but not in the EEG, c) is in the EEG, but not in our data, or d) is in the data, but needs more complex and novel methods of analysis.’" 

The paper then quotes someone from 2008 saying this:

"We still haven’t found any objective sign indicating the presence or absence of consciousness in the dreaming brain. Maybe that’s something that Descartes would have predicted: that you cannot objectively capture consciousness because it is this immaterial, non-spatial, and imperceptible thing ... We haven’t been able to disprove the Cartesian position ... The dream catcher experiment is a test of the whole emergent materialist position ... We will continue our analysis, but if we can’t find anything then we have a real problem where to go."

The result suggested the brain is not the source of our dreams. There is another reason for thinking such a thing. There is no robust evidence that removing or damaging some part of the brain causes a cessation of dreaming. The paper "Dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms" is an example of one of the countless neuroscience papers that make claims not established by the research that is cited. The paper claims "Dreaming is eliminated by forebrain lesions which completely spare the brain stem."  The paper claims that "108 further cases with complete (or nearly complete) loss of dreaming in association with focal forebrain lesions have been published."  The use of the phrase "or nearly complete" should alert us that no good evidence has been given that "dreaming is eliminated by forebrain lesions."  The claim of 108 cases referred to were cherry-picked from dozens of papers that each mentioned only a few cases; but neuroscientists often make incorrect citations claiming that papers said things the papers did not show or state. The paper does not even give the titles of the papers it claims contained such cases. The paper then claims that dreaming is lost by damage near the "parieto-temporo-occipital (PTO) junction."  But a 1985 paper "Dream Recall After Sleep Interruption in Brain-Injured Patients" had found successful dream recall in  6 out 8 brain-damaged patients that were identified as having lesions in just such a "parieto-temporo-occipital" region (Table 1). 

A 2004 press release is entitled "The (Brain) Stuff Of Which Dreams Are Made." It describes a case of a woman who had a stroke, and then reported she no longer dreamed several times a week, as she did before. The story is referred to by a 2015 Psychology Today article, as if it was evidence that brains create dreams. What the Psychology Today article fails to mention is that the press release had told us that the woman's dreaming ability returned, with dreams occurring as often as once a week. The facts in the 2004 press release are misrepresented by the Psychology Today article, which falsely tells us "her vision issues improved after several days, but her dreaming remained suspended." 

Another example of the literature misleading us is a 1951 paper entitled "Cessation of Dreaming After Brain Injury." The paper reports three cases of brain injury, and in two of them there was actually no "cessation" but merely a self-reported reduction in dream activity. In one of the three cases someone reported a complete cessation of dream activity. But we don't know how accurate such a report was. A 2014 paper tells us that "the inability to recall dreams and the loss of dream experience are rare in stroke patients," something we would not expect if brains produce dreams.  

Anecdotal reports of dream cessation are not very reliable, and papers reporting dream cessation after brain damage tend to have unreliable standards for reporting such a cessation. Someone may be asked "Do you recall any dreams you recently had?" and the answer may be "no."  Such a person may then be described in a paper as someone who lost his ability to recall dreams, even though no good evidence yet exists the person has had such a loss.  We can imagine something like this sometimes occurring:

Neurologist: So can you recall any dreams you had last night?

Patient: No. 

Neurologist: Well, I'm real interested in people with brain damage who can't recall dreams, because that helps to show that the brain causes dreaming. Can I put you down as one of those people?

Patient: Sure. Whatever. 

Memories of dreams usually fade very rapidly, so asking someone whether they recall dreams (at a time 30 minutes or more after they woke up) in not a reliable way of judging whether they are dreaming. The only reliable way to test whether someone has lost dreaming ability is to do something a lot more rigorous, like waking someone up many different times at random intervals (preferably after REM activity had been detected), and to immediately ask whether he recalled having any dream that night. If such a test failed after 30-different sudden wake-up events on ten different nights, that might be good evidence that the person had lost the ability to dream.  But I doubt whether a test as rigorous as this has been applied to most of the people described as brain damaged people who lost the ability to dream. 

A 2017 paper was entitled "The Neural Correlates of Dreaming." The paper was disputed by a 2020 commentary entitled "The Neural Correlates of Dreaming Have Not Been Identified Yet. Commentary on 'The Neural Correlates of Dreaming. Nat Neurosci. 2017.' "

No one has ever given a credible account of any natural reason why humans would have developed the ability to dream, something that has no survival value or reproduction value. Accounts that attempt to describe biological reasons for dreaming are usually examples of mere hand waving. Studies cited to support the claim that dreaming helps consolidate memories are typically bad examples of junk science. For example, we often get people claiming that rodent studies have suggested an idea, with a reference to the paper "Reactivation of Hippocampal Ensemble Memories During Sleep." But the paper seems like p-hacking science shlock, as it  involves a way-too-small study group size of only 3 rodents, and reporting unimpressive statistical significance of merely p < 0.05. 

There have been some studies that had people in a lab engage in some video game task in the hour before falling asleep, and then had the subjects woken up at various times at night to be asked about what they were dreaming about. It was claimed that the people dreamed more frequently about the task they had done before sleeping,  but anyone being a subject in such a study might tend to interpret dreams as having some relation to some task he did before sleeping, knowing or suspecting that this was the result desired by the scientists. Claims of better performance by those who dreamed of the task are unimpressive, involving small study group sizes and unimpressive statistical significance.  

My own personal experience is that for the past three years I have been playing video games for about an hour in the ninety minutes before sleeping, and I have also been also been rigorously recording my dreams during the past three years, recording them at night on a notepad just after awaking after the numerous random times during the night in which I would wake up. My very extensive account of such dreams is here. Among the thousands of dreams I have recorded during these three years, there never seemed to be a single dream in which I was replaying or rehearsing any of the tasks that were occurring in a video game I had played, nor did there ever seem to be a single dream that contained any of the content or characters or challenges of the video games I was playing.  Based on this experience, I am very skeptical of all claims that dreaming serves to consolidate memories. 

What I have seen after three years of recording most of my dreams is an effect completely at odds with claims that dreams are random content produced by the brain.  During the past three years my dreams have very strongly seemed to express thematic content, with more than 400 dreams seeming to suggest themes of life after death.  There is another very meaningful theme that has occurred more than 300 times in my dreams, one I have not listed in my published dream log, because it is too personal to make public. That theme is also related to life after death.  Counting dreams I have listed as related to life after death in my published dream log, and 300 additional dreams also related to life after death that I have not published, the total number of dreams I have had in the past three years that seemed to refer to life after death (often through symbolism) is in excess of 700. In addition to such dreams, I have also had over 600 dreams of deceased people during the past three years. Besides such dreams I sometimes have dreams with extremely subtle and sophisticated philosophical concepts, dreams that leave me thinking "such a dream could not have come from a sleeping brain." 

There has been considerable evidence (experimental or anecdotal) for telepathic effects or clairvoyant effects occurring during dreaming.  You can read here about some of the laboratory evidence for ESP during dreaming, which was mainly collected at the Maimonides laboratory in the 20th century.  The meta-analysis here finds highly significant evidence for ESP during dreaming.  Such evidence is inconsistent with claims that dreams are products of the brain. All evidence of ESP is evidence against claims that the brain is the source of the mind, as no one can conceive of how telepathy could occur by any action of the brain.  That is part of the reason why we see such a strong effect in academia of psi denialism, in which professors stubbornly deny two centuries of strong evidence for psi effects such as ESP,  including very strong laboratory evidence gathered in the past hundred years (some examples are discussed here, here and here). 

There are many cases of dreams seeming to foretell a death, as I describe in my posts here, here and here.  A reasonable hypothesis consistent with such reports is the idea that when people get old or come within a few years of death, they may start to get content in their dreams alerting them (often through symbolism) of the transition ahead of them, in which they will go from this earthly realm to some afterlife realm.  My dream experience during the past three years has strongly supported such a hypothesis.  The evidence for ESP during dreams is consistent with such a hypothesis. A dreaming mind may get dream content through ESP from residents of some afterlife realm.  To further substantiate such a hypothesis, more old people or dying people should keep long-term dream logs like those I have kept.  There have been some studies done  on dreams of the dying, which tend to support or be consistent with the hypothesis I mentioned.  But such studies have usually been affairs in which people in hospices were simply asked what dreams they remembered.  A more vigorous way to study the topic is to have older people maintain long-term dream logs, in which they write down on a notepad all dreams while waking up in the middle of the night, and then publish the results, while trying to categorize what they think the dreams suggest.