He Had Almost No Brain, But Was Bilingual With Near-Normal Verbal Skills

Neuroscientists are members of a belief community dedicated to preserving the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. So when neuroscientists discover case histories that seem to defy such a dogma, neuroscientists tend to write up the results with papers having a title not likely to be noticed. An example of this was when neuroscientists discovered that a French civil servant had almost no brain. The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet with a paper having the title "Brain of a White Collar Worker," as if the authors were trying to get as few readers as possible by creating the dullest-sounding title they could create.  The paper had the visual below, in which missing parts of the brain are shown in black:

The 2007 paper told us that the subject had an overall IQ of 75 and a verbal IQ of 84, and that he was a father employed as a civil servant (a government worker). Such occupational success with so little brain defies claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. The Reuters story here discusses the case. 

An equally dramatic case of high mental function and very little brain was discussed in a 2018 paper with a title that also seemed chosen to attract as little attention as possible. The title of the paper (which can be read here) was "Volumetric MRI Analysis of a Case of Severe Ventriculomegaly," a title that sounds as dull as dishwater. But the case is a fascinating one. We read of a bilingual 60-year-old man with near-normal verbal skills but very little brain. 

We are given the visual below, which shows on the left the brain of the 60-year-old man, and on the right what a normal brain looks like. The black areas are areas in which normal brain tissue is gone, having been replaced by fluid. 

We read this about tests performed on the person whose brain is 

"The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III; Wechsler, 1997) revealed a borderline IQ of 79, with a verbal IQ of 88, non-verbal performance IQ of 74, poor working memory IQ of 71, verbal comprehension IQ of 93, and visual-spatial IQ of 80. The patient had difficulty completing tasks requiring working memory, which was in the 3rd percentile, and processing speed was extremely slow (in the 1st percentile)."

A verbal IQ of 88 is near-normal, and a normal verbal IQ is about 100. 

We read that this person with little brain tissue was bilingual (in other words, someone who could speak two languages). We read that he "plays guitar well." We hear some vague, vacuous speculation trying (in the thinnest way) to offer a bit of explanation of how someone with so little brain could have "preserved function, including being fluent in two languages and mastering playing a musical instrument."

I have another example of a neuroscientist paper with a dull-as-dishwater title but a sensational case of high mental function and little brain tissue. It is the paper "Colpocephaly in adults" which you can read here. We read of a 60-year-old woman who had the great majority of her brain destroyed by a congenital disease, apparently one present from birth or from early childhood. We read this:

"Growing up, she had a reading learning disability; however, she graduated from high school with average grades, married in her 20s and had one child. She worked in a factory and most recently as a home health aide. At the time of presentation...She was alert, appropriately oriented and had normal language function."  

Below is what the woman's brain looked like. The black areas are areas hollowed out by the congenital disease. 

The cases discussed here are only a fraction of the cases of high mental function despite extremely severe brain loss. You can read of many more such cases in my post here. Collectively the cases provide one of the strongest reasons for thinking that the brain is not the source of the human mind. 

The Reckless Foolishness of Brain-Scanning Healthy Babies in Neuroscience Experiments

 A recent article in Scientific American by neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies.  In a previous post, I documented the untruth of the article's claims that two people could not form memories because of damage to their hippocampus. Let us now look at other aspects of the article that are just as dubious and misleading. 

Turk-Browne makes this untrue claim: "Scientists were able to retrieve an otherwise forgotten memory by stimulating neurons in the hippocampus that had been active during an early experience." His only support for this untrue claim is a link to an interview with neuroscientist Tomas Ryan. In the interview Ryan claims, "We found out we could optically stimulate the engrams for forgotten memories -- and the memories were recalled." In the text of the interview that statement by Ryan has a link to Ryan's very low-quality paper "Engram Cells Retain Memory Under Retrograde Amnesia." That is a junk science paper guilty of several examples of bad research practices, such as the use of an unreliable method of trying to judge recall in rodents (the worthless "freezing behavior" method"), and also the use of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 8 mice or 10 mice. Contrary to the groundless boasts of Turk-Browne and Ryan, no evidence was produced by experiments of this type that a forgotten memory can be artificially reactivated.  

What goes on in poorly designed experiments of this type is that mice are brain-zapped using light stimulation (optogenetics), and scientists claim the mice are "freezing in fear" because they are recalling a memory of a fearful experience, one "artificially activated" by the optogenetic light stimulation. But it is known that such optogenetic stimulation by itself causes "freezing behavior." A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing in rodents by stimulating a wide variety of regions. It says, "It is possible to induce freezing by activating a variety of brain areas and projections, including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012), lateral, basal and central amygdala (Ciocchi et al., 2010); Johansen et al., 2010;  Gore et al., 2015a), periaqueductal gray (Tovote et al., 2016), motor and primary sensory cortices (Kass et al., 2013), prefrontal projections (Rajasethupathy et al., 2015) and retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014).”

So no actual evidence is being produced of an artificial evocation of a memory stored in a brain when you use optogenetic stimulation of a brain region. All that is going on is that mice are allegedly becoming more immobile while they are brain-zapped, which does not tell us anything about memory. I say "allegedly" because there are no standards when it comes to judging whether mice were more immobile when exposed to some stimulus, with the reports of immobility typically being subjective, unreliable ratings by observers who did not follow a blinding protocol and who are free to choose any time span for judging immobility (30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, two minutes or three minutes), whichever time span best seems to support a claim of "higher freezing behavior." 

I later read a claim in the Scientific American article that shocked me. It was this statement: "My lab has been on a decade long quixotic adventure to study awake infants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a form of brain imaging that can measure activity from regions deep in the brain such as the hippocampus." When we examine the history of MRI scans, we see a history of overconfidence, and authorities dogmatically asserting that "MRI scans are perfectly safe," when they did not actually know whether they were perfectly safe. The 2009 study here ("Genotoxic effects of 3 T magnetic resonance imaging in cultured human lymphocytes") cautions about the use of a high-intensity("3T and above") MRI, and states that "potential health risks are implied in the MRI and especially HF MRI environment due to high-static magnetic  fields, fast gradient magnetic fields, and strong radiofrequency electromagnetic fields," also noting that "these results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human  lymphocytes," referring to effects  that may cause cancer. The experiment discussed below used just such a 3 T MRI scanner. 

There is a rule-of-thumb about things that may increase a person's risk of cancer. The rule is that the younger a person is, the more likely some possibly carcinogenic effect is to produce cancer in someone.  Some particular stimulus might give you a 1% greater chance of cancer per year. But if you are 75 years, that is very unlikely to cause cancer in you. Conversely, if you are ten years old, that stimulus might have a very substantial chance or likelihood of producing cancer in you, if it increases your chance of getting cancer by 1% per year. 

So the rule in medicine is: take the greatest caution to avoid exposing children to any possible cancer risk. We should then be horrified to hear of some neuroscientist subjecting infants to unnecessary fMRI scans. There is not merely a substantial cancer risk from fMRI scans to infants. There are also other risks. Less than 30 days ago someone was killed by an fMRI machine after being magnetically sucked into the machine.  In 2001 a six-year-old boy was killed by an fMRI machine after its powerful magnets caused an oxygen cannister to hit his head. 

Historical headlines of MRI deaths in the past

Turk-Browne tells us that he has conducted 400 fMRI sessions, making this sound like 400 experimental sessions with infants. None of the parents who allowed this should have agreed to allow such MRI scans on their infant children, unless there was a medical necessity for such work. Subjecting infants to potentially hazardous experiments sounds like  neuroscience research gone far astray, an example of morally reckless inanity.  

Turk-Browne makes an unfounded boast, claiming "A team at my lab led by Tristan Yates...used this method to discover that the infant hippocampus can store memories beginning around one year of age." The claim is untrue. The claim has a link to the very low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne.  You can read the paper here. The paper provides not the slightest evidence of any such thing as an encoding or storage of memory in the hippocampus or anywhere else. The study group sizes are only 13, too small for any reliable result to be claimed. 

The authors of the paper try to make use of an analysis of a "subsequent memory effect." That is an unreliable neuroscience method that is usually pure pareidolia. It works like this: you scan someone's brain when he is being exposed to some stimulus, and also scan the person's brain when that person is asked to recall that stimulus. (For example, you might scan a person's brain while he is looking at some word pair he is asked to memorize, and then scan the same person's brain when he is asked to recall the second word, given only the first.) Then a neuroscientist looks for some region of the brain that showed "superior activation" both during the exposure to the stimulus, and the recall of the stimulus. This is an example of noise-mining. Regions of the brain randomly undergo tiny fluctuations in activity. So anyone analyzing brain scans can always find some tiny little region that was, say, 1% more active during the exposure to the visual stimulus and the later recall of the stimulus. We would expect you to be able to find such regions even if brains do not store memories. Similarly, if I eagerly analyze rain puddles in Chicago when the New England Patriots are playing football and rain puddles in Chicago when the Kansas City Chiefs are playing football, I may be able to find some little part of Chicago where there was an increased number of rain puddles during both of these types of games. But that does nothing to show that such football games have any causal relation to rain puddles in Chicago. 

The paper "Identifying Causal Subsequent Memory Effects" reported that "we are unable to identify any signal that reliably predicts subsequent memory after adjusting for confounding variables, bringing into doubt the causal status of these effects." In other words, when properly analyzed in the fullest way, there was no evidence for any "subsequent memory effect." 

Any paper claiming a "subsequent memory effect" with any credibility would have to meet various rigorous standards:

(1) The paper would have to be a pre-registered paper dedicated to trying to confirm some very specific hypothesis related to a subsequent memory effect. 

(2) There would have to be a rigorous blinding protocol, to prevent some deal in which the scientists were guilty of "seeing what you are hoping to see." 

(3) The subjects would have to be old enough to follow instructions, so that you could reliably tell what seconds were the learning period (or exposure-to-stimulus) and what seconds were the recall-of-stimulus period. 

(4) Adequate study groups (probably of at least 30 subjects per study group) would be needed. 

(5) A sample size calculation would need to be done to show that the study had used a study group size large enough to produce a high statistical power such as 80%.

None of these things occurred in the low-quality science paper "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants," co-authored by Turk-Browne. There was no pre-registration of a hypothesis to be tested. No substantial blinding protocol was followed, but merely a very limited level of blinding subverted by rater suggestions (as described below), with apparently no blinding occurring for the brain scan analysis. The paper has no discussion of a detailed blinding protocol. The study group sizes were only 13. The subjects were not old enough to follow instructions, being mere babies. No sample size calculation was done.

 Turk-Browne and his colleagues attempt to derive some "subsequent memory effect" through some bizarre method in which they are trying to judge which stimulus a baby was looking at, and trying to guess whether a baby remembered a previously seen photo, based on which he looked at. It's methodological fumbling.  You can't reliably tell which of two photos a baby is looking at, nor does which photo a baby looks at tell you anything about what a baby is recalling.  

We read in the Supplemental Information document that judgments about which directions babies were looking in were made by human raters.  We read this description of the nonsensical procedure:

"Human coders labeled frames of the video recordings of infant gaze during the encoding and test trials as: looking center, right of center, left of center, off-screen (blinking or looking away), or undetected (out of the camera’s field of view or otherwise not visible, such as being blocked by the infant’s arm). During encoding trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking at center' because there was only one image on the screen at center. During test trial frames, coders were instructed that the infant was 'probably looking left or right' because there were two images, left and right of center, respectively."

 Instead of simply judging objectively about which direction the babies were looking at, these "human coders" were pushed to judge in a particular way, like some baseball umpire getting a message in his earphone telling him "that was probably a strike" or "that was probably a ball." These instructions amount to a form of bias injection, and they mean none of the data about which direction the babies were looking at is reliable. Since none of that data is reliable, none of the claimed data about a "subsequent memory effect" is reliable. 

We read in the Supplemental Information file about shady statistical fooling around which sounds like "keep torturing the data until it confesses" shenanigans. Here is only a small part of the impossible-to-justify convoluted rigmarole that went on:

"We used nonparametric bootstrap resampling to test for statistical significance. Specifically, we resampled participants for the contrast of interest with replacement 1000 times and recalculated the average for each iteration. The P value was quantified as the proportion of iterations with the opposite sign of the original subsequent memory effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. This analysis was first performed across the full sample, then separately in median splits of lower and higher average familiarity preference groups and younger and older infant age groups. We similarly quantified age-group differences by: resampling participants from among the younger and older infants, respectively, with replacement; calculating the mean value for each age group; and then subtracting the younger group mean from the older group mean. Again, the P value was the proportion of 1000 iterations that were of the opposite sign as the original group difference, doubled for a two-tailed test. Finally, we tested for a continuous age effect by resampling participants with replacement and recalculating the Spearman’s rank correlation between the subsequent memory effect and age in months over the sampled bivariate data pairs. Again, the P value was calculated as the proportion of resampled coefficients with the opposite sign as the original age effect, doubled for a two-tailed test. In exploratory whole-brain analyses, we performed nonparametric group statistics using the randomise function in FSL."

In the Scientific American article Turk-Browne speaks clearly about his ridiculous methodology when he says this: "If the infant looked longer at the photograph they had seen before, we labeled that image as remembered; otherwise, it was forgotten." That's an absurd procedure. You can't tell whether a baby remembered something by whether he looked longer at a picture on the left or the right, and human raters typically cannot even reliably tell which of two photos placed in front of him a baby is looking longer at. When later in the Scientific American article Turk-Browne claims that "the hippocampus was more active when infants viewed images that they seemed to remember," he is making a groundless statement based on his defective methodology, which provides no reliable data on what infants remembered in his experiments. 

The idea of "familiarity preference" made in the paper (the assumption that babies would be more likely to look at a photo they had seen before) is an idea the exact opposite of the "novelty preference" assumption in many mouse experiments done by neuroscientists, which assume that a rodent will be more likely to explore some compartment they have not explored before. The authors confess "we did not observe a familiarity preference at the group level," which is a confession that helps show how misguided the methods and design of the study was. In other words, judging from the whole data set gathered, babies do not have any tendency to look more at a photo they have seen before. This comes as no surprise to me, having co-raised academically high-scoring twin daughters who never paid any attention to anything on the TV screen until they were 20 months old or older. Figure 2 of the paper is laughable, being data gathered from only a single subject. 

The whole experiment is just a horrible-methodology mess of reckless infant endangerment inanity. Nothing has been learned about human memory from this nonsense. What has mainly happened is that some infants have been senselessly put at risk for the sake of a junk science paper. What percent (if any) of the babies endangered here will end up getting cancer because of their needless involvement in this methodological nonsense, because of the genotoxic effects of 3T MRI scanners mentioned in the scientific paper quoted above? We will not know for many years, if ever. The general rule of neuroscientists is  "scan them and forget them." Neuroscientists do not do long-term tracking of health problems arising over a lifetime from subjects who participated in experimental fMRI scanning.  

In the wikipedia.org article for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we read the troubling passage below:

"Genotoxic (i.e., potentially carcinogenic) effects of MRI scanning have been demonstrated in vivo and in vitro, leading a recent review to recommend 'a need for further studies and prudent use in order to avoid unnecessary examinations, according to the precautionary principle'."

A 2011 paper different from the 2009 paper quoted above states this:

"We observed a significant increase in the frequency of single-strand DNA breaks following exposure to a 3 T MRI...These results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human lymphocytes."

A more recent year 2024 study ("Evaluation of the Biological Effects of Exposures to Magnetic Resonance Imaging on Single-Strand DNA: An In-vivo Study") found similar results, finding that MRI scanners only half as powerful as 3T scanners can produce genotoxic effects.  It reported this:

"The DNA single-strand breaks were significant for all tested parameters in both MRI 1.5 T (p<0.01) and 3.0 T (p<0.001)....The percentage of cells destroyed in the group exposed to 3.0 T MRI was increased to 12.65 ± 1.0 after 10 minutes of exposure."

The supplemental information of the "Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants" paper discussed above mentions an average MRI exposure time of 8 minutes using a 3T MRI scanner. Given what is reported in the year 2024 study quoted above, we have every reason to fear that genotoxic effects and cell damage may have occurred in the infants senselessly involved in this poorly designed study. 

A paper tells us the following about the newer twice-as-powerful

3T MRI machines that have been replacing the older 1.5T MRI

machines, suggesting their magnetic fields are much stronger than

the strength needed to lift a car:

"The main magnetic field of a 3T system is 60,000 times

 the earth's magnet field. The strength of electromagnets

 used to pick up cars in junk yards is about the field strength 

of MRI systems with field strengths from 1.5-2.0T.

 It is strong enough to pull fork-lift tires off of machinery,

 pull heavy-duty floor buffers and mop buckets into

 the bore of the magnet, pull stretchers across the room

 and turn oxygen bottles into flying projectiles reaching

 speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour."   

I strongly advise all parents never to let their children participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless a doctor has told them that the brain scan is medically advisable solely for the health of the child.  I advise adults not to participate in any brain scanning experimental study unless they have read something that gives them warrant for believing that the experimenters are following best experimental practices (as experimental neuroscientists rarely do), and that there will not be a very high chance that the adults will be undergoing unnecessary health risks for the sake of some "bad practices" poorly designed "fishing expedition" experiment that does not advance human understanding.  If a neuroscientist looking for research subjects tells you that brain scans are perfectly safe, remember that many neuroscientists often dogmatically make claims that are unproven or doubtful, and often pretend to know things they do not actually know (see the posts of this site for very many examples). 

I also strongly advise anyone who participated in any brain scanning experiment to permanently keep very careful records of their participation, to find out and write down the name of the scientific paper corresponding to the study, to write down and keep the names of any scientists or helpers they were involved with, to permanently keep a copy of any forms they signed, and to keep a careful log of any health problems experienced by the person who had the brain scan.  Such information may be useful should such a person decide to file a lawsuit. 

Misstatements About Lonni Sue Johnson Are Like Misstatements About Henry Molaison

 A recent article in Scientific American is an article entitled "You Don't Remember Being a Baby, But Your Brain Was Making Memories."  The article provides no real evidence that brains create memories, and  its attempts to support such a claim are mostly references to junk science studies. 

The author is a neuroscientist named Nick Turk-Browne who fills up his article with unfounded claims and bad reasoning. First he suggests the reason people cannot remember their first five years is that the hippocampus is not active during those years. That makes no sense. The hippocampus is active during the first five years of life. 

Turk-Browne then repeats the very frequently repeated false claim that patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) suffered hippocampus damage in adulthood that made him unable to form new memories, saying that Henry Molaison was "unable to store memories,"  The claim is not true. 

Henry Molaison (patient H.M.)  was able to remember very many things from his life before his hippocampus damage. 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."

Turk-Browne also makes the claim that because of a bad case of a  hippocampus damage, Lonni Sue Johnson was "unable to store memories."  That claim is also untrue.  Lonni Sue Johnson had very bad brain damage after a case of viral encephalitis. She was discussed at length in a book "The Eternal Now" by Michael D. Lemonick. But on page 13 of the preface of the book, we read a different claim. Instead of someone claiming that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form any new memories, we merely read that "she could no longer form new memories that she'd be able to rely on in the future, except in the most rudimentary way." This is an admission that Loni Sue Johnson could form new memories. 

We can have some skepticism about such a claim, because it is by an author trying to present a compilation of interesting cases of loss of memory, and such a person may be motivated to exaggerate memory loss, to make the story more interesting and the book more marketable. 

Lemonick's makes generalizations that the memory of Lonni Sue Johnson that we should take with some skepticism, because they are not established by formal tests. What seems to often be happening is that Lemonick is making generalizations based on limited anecdotal evidence, generalizations that may be hasty generalizations that would be disproven by extended formal testing.  

Lemonick tells us that Lonnie Sue Johnson had a big hole in the center of her head. That may have affected her recognition memory and her visual acuity.  So when we later read about Lonnie failing to recognize someone she had previously met, that is no proof of an inability to form new memories. It may be mere evidence of a visual problem or a recognition problem. 

So, for example, when Lemonick tells us on page 9 that "if she sees someone new, then sees them again a day later (or even five minutes later, as I discovered for myself), she'll have no idea that she ever saw them before," we do not actually know that this is some inability to form new memories.  It could be some mere difficulty in visual recognition or visual perception. Or, it could be that Lemonick is wrongly making sweeping generalizations based on very little data. If someone does not recognize you after meeting you a few minutes before, that is nowhere close to sufficient evidence that the person is unable to form new memories. 

The claim that Lemonick makes on page 9 that Lonni had lost memory of some of her family members is another claim that we should treat with suspicion. It may be a claim based mainly on a failure of visual recognition. Lemonick makes statements such as "she didn't know Kay, or her daughter Maya," referring to someone who was not Lonni's daughter. But what justification does Lemonick have for such claims?  How does he presume to know what a brain-damaged person did or did not know or remember when seeing some friend or her daughter?  Was the claim based merely on a failure of Lonni to recite their names after seeing them? We don't know. 

What we need here is some systematic procedure to test such a claim that a memory of someone's daughter had been lost. Such a procedure would include both a test of visual recognition, and a transcript of a long interview.  The interview might ask questions such as "Do you remember Kay?" and "Have you ever heard the voice that will speak next?" and "Do you recognize the face you will see next?" and so forth.  But we don't get details of any such a procedure.  We mainly get Lemonick kind of presuming what Lonni did or did not remember, based on thin evidence. 

On the next page (page 10) it becomes clear that the heavily brain-damaged Lonni did not lose all her memories of the past. We read that "she knows Maggi and Aline, but when you show her photographs of her aunts and uncles, she recognizes only some of them." We read that "she does know that she once had two airplanes." When Lemonick claims that Lonni does not remember her wedding day or her divorce, we should treat such claims with great skepticism, because they are not backed up by any quotes that Lemonick gives. And if you have a  quote from someone saying she does not remember some event, that does not well prove that the person has no memory of such an event. Ask the right questions at different times, and the same person may give you some details of the event. For example, ask a person about Napoleon, and she may say, "I don't remember anything about Napoleon." But then ask about Napoleon's final battle, and you may get an answer of "Waterloo." I can hardly overemphasize the importance of this point. Single-statement self-reports by a person about what he remembers on a topic may be very unreliable. And such self-reports coming from brain-damaged persons may be particularly unreliable. 

Often when a person says that he does not remember anything about some topic, it's just a way of indicating that the person does not want to be bothered with trying to recall what he remembers about that topic. Ask an adult what he remembers about the war of 1812, and there's a good chance he may say something like, "I don't remember anything about that." But ask the same person whether he remembers any fire occurring during that war, and there's a good chance the person may give an answer such as, "Yes, I remember the British burnt the White House," referring to an event of that war.  It is easy to imagine possible reasons why someone who got divorced might make some statement sounding like she does not remember her wedding or her divorce (for example, the person might be making an excuse to avoid recalling possibly painful memories of an unsuccessful marriage). 

Later on the same page when Lemonick claims that Lonni had lost "just about every other memory she'd accumulated in fifty-seven years of life," we should doubt very much that Lemonick is speaking correctly. What is the justification for such a claim? Was some formal standard test done to justify such a claim? Or is Lemonick simply making guesses about what Lonni remembers?

I made a search on Google Scholar for scientific papers referring to Lonni Sue Johnson. I was unable to find a single scientific paper that mentioned her using that name. I did find an article by a science writer, one claiming that Lonni "could not form new memories." That does not match the previously quoted statement by Lemonick suggesting that Lonni could form "rudimentary" new memories. The article presents no data supporting this claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. The article refers to "published studies of her memory after the viral attack."  We have some citations at the end of the paper. Only one of the papers cited refers to Lonni Sue Johnson, using the initials L. S. J.  The paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract of the paper does not mention any inability of this L. S. J. to form new memories. 

The claim in the article above does not match what we are told in a 2016 Johns Hopkins article, which merely says that Lonni Sue Johnson had a "severely restricted ability to learn new facts," which is different from being unable to learn new facts. 

The video here shows a picture of Lonni Sue's brain, showing severe damage, with the black areas being places hollowed out by the virus:

We hear a narrator (whose claims should be taken with skepticism) claiming that Lonni Sue lost almost all of her memories. But around the 2:50 mark we hear Lonni Sue successfully and very rapidly reciting all of the letters in the alphabet in correct order, performance seemingly incompatible with the narrator's claim. Around the 3:00 mark the narrator says Lonni Sue has "a little ability to create new memories," contrary to Turk-Browne's claim that she could not form new memories.  At the 3:28 mark we see Lonni Sue playing what looks like a violin very well (the instrument seems to be a viola). Around the 5:36 mark we see very good drawings Lonni Sue made after her brain damage. 

Around the 5:56 mark we hear Lonni Sue speaking like a normal person, saying art "is a language, a visual language, that you can reach everyone of every nationality," and that "writing is fun too." Around the 8:30 mark we hear Lonni Sue sing-speaking, singing in an apparently improvised melody. 

Another video on Lonni Sue has the phony title "The Woman Who Lost All Her Memories," a title not matching the facts of the case described above. The video provides no evidence to support the claim that Lonni Sue could not form new memories. 

In this case we are lacking any systematic evidence for the claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories. For such a claim to be made with credibility, we would need something like a transcript of a long interview, or the results of hours of systematic testing. A failure of someone to recognize a person they had met before is not good evidence of an inability to form new memories.  Such a failure could be due to visual processing defects and visual recognition problems that are mainly related to vision rather than memory. 

Remembering that old slogan "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," we can translate the slogan to mean "you should have very strong evidence before making a claim of the extraordinary."  The claim that Hubert Pearce had extrasensory perception is an extraordinary claim, but it is backed up very well by many hundreds of hours of very careful tests that Professor Joseph Rhine did with Hubert Pearce (tests described here).  The claim that Alexis Didier had powers of clairvoyance is an extraordinary claim, but it is supported by endless successful tests performed of Alexis Didier, some of which are described here. No one should be making a claim that Lonni Sue Johnson could not form new memories unless they have very strong evidence to back up such a claim, such as a long, detailed scientific paper giving the results of very careful tests of her. Such evidence seems nowhere to be found. 

Lack of motivation by someone asked a question is usually a more plausible explanation for a lack of an answer than some explanation of an inability to learn. Claims of an inability to learn would be far more convincing if they were backed up by careful tests repeated many times, in which subjects were strongly motivated to perform highly.  You can imagine all kinds of ways to motivate better performance, such as offering 300 dollars for each item recalled.

He may be wrongly reported as having antegrade amnesia

In my next post in a few days I will discuss other misstatements in the Scientific American article, in which we hear a discussion of   neuroscience experiments done on infants, experiments I will criticize as being goofy and reckless.  We should always remember that when it comes to cases of memory difficulties, the world of neuroscience literature is a "give them an inch, and they'll take a mile" affair. We should remember that there is a very strong incentive for people to make cases of memory difficulties sound worse than they are, because such claims may increase citation counts and book sales and video viewership, in a way that leads to greater profit or success for someone engaging in such exaggerations, and because such claims may be made by those very eager to conjure up claims that may seem to support "brains store memories" dogmas. 

Postscript: One of the earliest papers on Lonnie Sue Juhnson is the paper "The necessity of the mediat temporal lobe for statistical learning,"  which you can read here. In that paper we read about Lonnie Sue Johnson, with the paper using only her initials. The paper claims, "In the autobiographical domain, extensive testing has revealed no memory for specific life events; for example, LSJ is unable to report anything about her 10-year marriage." This statement must be treated with very great skepticism, for a variety of reasons. First, the authors fail to describe in any detailed way any such testing. Secondly, the claim conflicts with statements above, in which Lonnie Sue Johnson does display memories of specific life events.  The most reasonable explanation here is that the authors asked a few questions (or an insufficient number of questions) about autobiographical events and failed to get answers, with the authors unjustifiably jumping to the unjustified conclusion or insinuation that Lonnie Sue Johnson had no memory of autobiographical events.  

I cannot emphasize too strongly the point that someone's failure to answer a small number of questions about autobiographical events is no good evidence for a lack of autobiographical memory. There are 101 reasons why a subject might not answer questions about his life history when asked such questions, reasons other than an absence of autobiographical memory. To have even mere prima facie evidence for a lack of autobiographical memory, some scientific paper author would have to document an exact series of questions and answers asked at different intervals stretching over many different days. Such questions would have to have a variety of different forms, being more than just free recall questions. So, for example, if a subject with a husband named David were to be tested for autobiographical memory, the subject might at some time be asked "tell me about your husband," and at other times asked "tell me about David," and at other times asked "tell me about your marriage," and at other times shown a picture of David, with the question, "Do you recognize this man?" Such questions would have to be repeated on various different days, with the exact questions and answers being documented. Nothing of the sort is documented in this scientific paper "The necessity of the mediat temporal lobe for statistical learning." So we should be very skeptical about its claim that "extensive testing has revealed no memory for specific life events;"  The authors fail to substantiate this claim. The authors tell us this about Lonnie Sue Johnson:

"LSJ scored in the normal range on tests of single-word reading and spelling (Wide Range Achievement Test III, Wilkinson, 1993: 58th and 55th percentile, respectively) and vocabulary (PPVT-R, Dunn & Dunn, 1981: 63rd percentile). Anecdotally, her language comprehension and production seem normal. LSJ’s visuospatial abilities also appear intact: Her performance was normal on the Block Design and Matrix Reasoning subtests of the WAIS-IV (Wechsler, 2008) and on all subtests of the Visual Object and Space Perception Battery (Warrington & James, 1991)."

Seeming to speak in a very inappropriate manner, the authors causally claim that Lonnie Sue Johnson has an "inability to form new memories"; but they fail to discuss any tests demonstrating this claim.  As evidence for this claim, they merely offer weak anecdotal evidence, saying, "Anecdotally, LSJ consistently shows no recollection for tasks when questioned after completing them and expresses no recollection for experimenters across sessions, despite having met them many times."  A lack of facial recognition of some experimenter is not at all adequate evidence for an inability to form new memories. You could only demonstrate an inability to form new memories by conducting the most careful series of tests and documenting the exact responses given during such tests; and the authors have failed to do any such things. 

We should never trust any scientist making a claim about a lack of autobiographical memory or an inability to form new memories unless such a claim is thoroughly documented by a presentation of the exact results of a very careful series of tests designed to demonstrate such claims. Nothing like that has occurred in this case. 

Her Mind Was Normal, Though She Had Almost No Brain

 Neuroscientists are members of a belief community dedicated to preserving the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind. So when neuroscientists discover case histories that seem to defy such a dogma, neuroscientists tend to write up the results with papers having a title not likely to be noticed. An example of this was when neuroscientists discovered that a French civil servant had almost no brain. The case was written up in the British medical journal The Lancet with a paper having the title "Brain of a White Collar Worker," as if the authors were trying to get as few readers as possible by creating the dullest-sounding title they could create.  The paper had the visual below:

The 2007 paper told us that the subject had an overall IQ of 75 and a verbal IQ of 84, and that he was a father employed as a civil servant (a government worker). Such occupational success with so little brain defies claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. 

But occasionally there will be an neuroscience paper by authors brave enough to give a paper a title that correctly describes some case history clashing with the "brains make minds" dogma. One such paper is the paper "Asymptomatic Hydrocephalus" by neurosurgeons Amit R. Persad, Victoria Bass and Kotoo Meguro, a paper you can read here. They report the case of a 72-year-old woman with a very severe case of hydrocephalus, a brain-robbing disease in which brain tissue is replaced by a watery fluid. Brain scans of the woman showed that she little brain tissue. But (as the title tells us) the woman was "asymptomatic," meaning she had no symptoms. Her mind was normal, even though almost all of her brain had been lost. 

Below  is Figure 1 from the paper. We see the "almost gone" brain of a woman who scored "normal" on a standard cognitive test (the MMSE). Photos B and C are closeups of particular brain portions. Photos A, D and E show the full brain from different angles. The black part are cavities filled with watery fluid, where the brain was hollowed out. 

The woman came to the doctor not because of any mental difficulties she was having, but because she had a seizure.  The paper describes the woman's normal mental capabilities and cognition:

"The patient lived independently and had no previous history of seizures or diagnosis of hydrocephalus. Her developmental history was unremarkable; she had finished high school and had worked in various retail jobs. When our team examined her, she was alert and oriented, and did not report headache, visual disturbance or cognitive changes; her neurologic examination (including a Mini-Mental State Examination) was normal. The only pertinent physical finding was a long-standing gait disturbance related to hip dysplasia. An electroencephalogram showed epileptiform discharges, and we prescribed levetiracetam (500 mg administered orally twice daily) and stopped treatment with phenytoin. The patient also had an urinary tract infection (UTI), which was treated with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole. After 2 days in hospital, she was discharged with follow-up in the adult hydrocephalus clinic. She was well at 6-month follow-up, with no further seizures." 

The Mini-Mental State Examination referred to above is the most common test of cognitive performance used by doctors. The link here gives you some of the questions used on the test. An example question is that you are asked to count backwards from 100, going back 7 in each steps (for example, 93, 86, 79,  72, and 65). Another example question is that you are asked to identify where you are, giving the state, county, town, building name and floor number or room number (with each item correctly named scoring 1 point). Or you might also be asked to name the day of week and exact date (day, month and year), as well as the season of the year.  Another example question is that someone points to a watch and asks you to name what type of object it is, with a similar question being asked about a pencil. The MMSE test has a maximum score of 30. Adults with normal cognitive functions will tend to score about 29 on the test. The link here says that a score of 24 or higher is considered "normal."

To get a "normal" score on a Mini-Mental State Examination, a person needs to have almost all of these mental capabilities:

• The ability to understand instructions orally spoken by the person giving the examination;
• the ability to visually recognize common items and name what type of item they are;
• the ability to do simple mathematical operations such as backwards subtraction by 7; 
• the ability to remember details about your current position in time (such as date, month and year); 
• the ability to remember details about your current position in space (such as the current day, month and year, and the day of week); 
• the short-term memory ability to remember words you were asked to speak five minutes ago. 

But how if most of these things are required to get a "normal" score on the MMSE test, how could someone get a normal score when almost all of their brain had been replaced by watery fluid? It would seem that this could only happen if the brain is not the source of the mind. 

The paper discussed above has a citation of a similar type of case, a citation of a 2012 paper entitled "Asymptomatic Giant Arachnoid Cyst" which you can read here. In a brain cyst is a cavity filled with fluid. A giant cyst sounds like a very large cavity in the brain. But the 51-year-old man having the cyst is described as "asymptomatic" (a word meaning having no symptoms), and the man is described as a bricklayer (an occupation requiring procedural exactitude). 

Amazingly, this is not the only published paper with a title of  "Asymptomatic Giant Arachnoid Cyst." A 2003 paper (which you can read here) had the same title, and discusses an entirely different case. We read of a "39-year-old right-handed man, with a high-school education, good social and job functioning, and good command of three foreign languages (English, Spanish, and, in part, Arabic)."  We read that he had "a giant congenital supratentorial arachnoidal cyst occupying the anterior two thirds of the left hemisphere." Two-thirds of the left hemisphere of the man's brain was a mere fluid-filled cavity.  We are given this picture of the man's brain. The white area in the left photo and the black area in the right photo are the areas consisting of only a fluid-filled cavity. We read that "neurologic examination and standardized cognitive assessment revealed normal findings."  Apparently the man's mind was none the worse after such very heavy brain damage. 

There Is No Robust Evidence That Neuron Firing in the Brain's Frontal Lobes Is Information Processing

 On the day I am writing this post I see in some news article a typical statement about the brain. Someone states this

"Our brains process information via a vast network containing many millions of neurons, which can each send and receive chemical and electrical signals. Information is transmitted by nerve impulses that pass from one neuron to the next, thanks to a flow of ions across the neuron’s cell membrane. This results in an experimentally detectable change in electrical potential difference across the membrane known as the 'action potential' or 'spike.' "

But is this an accurate description of what is occurring in the frontal lobes of the brain? It would seem not. Neurons are continually firing in the frontal lobes of the brain, but there is no evidence that such firing is information processing or information transmittal in the sense of data or knowledge being passed around. 

It is true that a certain type of information processing is occurring throughout the brain. The chromosomes of all cells (including neurons) contain DNA, and when that DNA is read, it can be considered a form of information processing. But such information processing is something different from the firing of neurons.

Neuron firing may involve some information processing in two areas of the brain: the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe. These two regions are shown below (the parietal lobe in yellow and the occipital lobe in green, at the back). The occipital lobe is connected to the eyes by the optic nerve, so you might say that this lobe at the back of the brain processes information received from the eyes. The parietal lobe receives inputs such as touch sensations and pain sensations, so you might say that this lobe processes such inputs. 

But what about the frontal lobes at the front of the brain? (I will refer to lobes because there is one such lobe in each hemisphere or half of the brain.) The neurons in the frontal lobes are always firing, at a rate of about 1 action potential per second, to as high as 100 or more action potentials per second. Is there any adequate warrant for claiming that such neuron firing is an example of information processing? There is not. 

We might have a reasonable basis for calling such neuron firing in the frontal lobes "information processing" if someone had been able to decipher some kind of code corresponding to such neuron firing. But no one has been able to do any such thing. There has been all kinds of speculation about some kind of coding system that might be used by firing neurons to transmit information. But that has all been mainly  nothing but speculation. No robust evidence has ever been produced that the firing of neurons in the frontal lobe is any kind of real information processing or information transmittal.  When scientists have tried to produce evidence for such a thing, the results are merely pareidolia, like someone claiming to see the face of Jesus in his toast. 

But, it may be claimed, don't we know that the frontal lobes produce human thought, and does not such human thought qualify as information processing? No, we do not actually know that the frontal lobes of the brain or any part of the brain produce human thought. 

When fMRI scans are taken of the brain during cognitive activity, no strong evidence is produced backing up claims that the frontal lobes of the brain are some "seat of thought." Such scans typically show variations from region to region of only about 1 part in 200. The little regions with 1 part in 200 greater difference are scattered around the brain. Such fMRI scans are actually consistent with the claim that the brain is not the source of human thinking or cognition. because the variations are no greater than you might expect from chance variations. But you might think otherwise after looking at one of those "lying with colors" visuals that tries to make regions that differ by only 1 part in 200 look like they differ by some substantial percentage. 

It is part of the dubious folklore of neuroscientists that the prefrontal cortex or frontal lobes are some center of higher reasoning. But the scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The authors of the scientific paper tried an alternate approach, using a test of so-called "fluid" intelligence on 80 patients with prefrontal damage. They concluded "our findings do not support a connection between fluid intelligence and the frontal lobes." Table 7 of this study reveals that the average intelligence of the 80 patients with prefrontal cortex damage was 99.5 – only a tiny bit lower than the average IQ of 100. Table 8 tells us that two of the  patients with prefrontal cortex damage had genius IQs of higher than 140.

In a similar vein, the paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence (a plausible assumption given that smarter people would be more likely to have smart behavior reducing their chance of injury). Similarly, this study checked the IQ of 7 patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and found that they had an average IQ of 101.

It also should be remembered that brain-damaged patients taking standard IQ tests may have higher intelligence than the test score suggests.  A standard IQ test requires visual perception skill (to read the test book) and finger coordination (to fill in the right answers using a pencil). Brain damage might cause reduced finger coordination and reduced visual perception unrelated to intelligence; and such things might cause a subject to do below-average on a standard IQ test even if his intelligence is normal.  

Using the term "neoplasms" to refer to brain tumors, the 1966 study here states, "Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test."  

In the paper "Neurocognitive outcome after pediatric epilepsy surgery" by Elisabeth M. S. Sherman, we have some discussion of the effects on children of hemispherectomy, surgically removing half of their brains to stop seizures. Such a procedure involves a 50% reduction in the total volume of the frontal lobes of the brain, and a 50% reduction of the prefrontal cortex. We are told this:

Cognitive levels in many children do not appear to be altered significantly by hemispherectomy. Several researchers have also noted increases in the intellectual functioning of some children following this procedure....Explanations for the lack of decline in intellectual function following hemispherectomy have not been well elucidated. 

Referring to a study by Gilliam, the paper states that of 21 children who had parts of their brains removed to treat epilepsy, including 10 who had surgery to the frontal lobe, none of the 10 patients with frontal lobe surgery had a decline in IQ post-operatively, and that two of the children with frontal lobe resections had "an increase in IQ greater than 10 points following surgery." 

The paper here gives precise before and after IQ scores for more than 50 children who had half of their brains removed in a hemispherectomy operation.  For one set of 31 patients, the IQ went down by an average of only 5 points. For another set of 15 patients, the IQ went down less than 1 point. For another set of 7 patients the IQ went up by 6 points. 

A writer at Slate.com states the following: 

"And victims of prefrontal injuries can still pass most neurological exams with flying colors. Pretty much anything you can measure in the lab—memory, language, motor skills, reasoning, intelligence—seems intact in these people."

In 1930 a patient listed as Joe A. in the medical literature underwent a bilateral frontal lobectomy performed by Dr. Walter Dandy, who removed almost all of his frontal lobes. An autopsy in 1949 confirmed that "both frontal lobes had been removed." The paper describing the autopsy said that from 1930 to 1944 Joe A.'s behavior was "virtually unchanged." On page 236 of this source, we read that Dandy said this of three patients including Joe A.: "These three patients with the extirpation of such vast areas of brain tissue without the disclosure of any resulting defect is most disappointing." I could see how it would be disappointing for someone hoping to prove a connection between some brain area and intellectual function. Page 237 of the same source tells us that on casual meeting Joe A. appeared to be mentally normal.  Page 239 of this source states this about Joe A, summarizing the findings of Brickner.:

"Nor was intellectual disturbance primary. The frontal lobes played no essential role in intellectual function; they merely added to intellectual intricacy, and ' were not intellectual centers in any sense except, perhaps, a quantitative one.' " 

A 1939 paper you can read here was entitled "A Study of the Effect of Right Frontal Lobectomy on Intelligence and Temperament." A patient C.J was tested for IQ before and after an operation removing his right frontal lobe. He had the same IQ of 139 before and after the operation. Page 9 says the lobectomy "produced no modification of intellectual or personality functions."  On page 10 we are told this about patients having one of their frontal lobes removed:

"Jefferson (1937) reported a series of eight frontal lobectomies in which the patients were observed for intellectual and emotional deficits following operation. There were five cases of right frontal lobectomy, three of whom were living and well when the article was written. It could be stated definitely that in two of the three cases there were no abnormalities which could be noted by the surgeon, patient, or family, and while the third case showed a mild memory defect, the operation had been too recently performed to judge whether or not the loss would be permanent. The three cases of left frontal excision likewise showed no significant changes, but comment was made that one patient was slightly lacking in reserve, another remained slightly facetious, and the third, who suffered a transient post-operative aphasia, appeared a trifle slow and diffident."

The following excerpt from a scientific paper tells us of additional cases of people who did not seem to suffer much mind damage after massive damage to the frontal lobes or prefrontal cortex. Resection is defined as "the process of cutting out tissue or part of an organ."

"Several well-documented patients have been described with a normal level of consciousness after extensive frontal damage. For example, Patient A (Brickner, 1952) (Fig. 2A), after extensive surgical removal of the frontal lobes bilaterally, including Brodmann areas 8–12, 16, 24, 32, 33, and 45–47, sparing only area 6 and Broca's area (Brickner, 1936), 'toured the Neurological Institute in a party of five, two of whom were distinguished neurologists, and none of them noticed anything unusual until their attention was especially called to A after the passage of more than an hour.'  Patient KM (Hebb and Penfield, 1940) had a near-complete bilateral prefrontal resection for epilepsy surgery (including bilateral Brodmann areas 9–12, 32, and 45–47), after which his IQ improved. Patients undergoing bilateral resection of prefrontal cortical areas for psychosurgery (Mettler et al., 1949), including Brodmann areas 10, 11, 45, 46, 47, or 8, 9, 10, or 44, 45, 46, 10, or area 24 (ventral anterior cingulate), remained fully conscious (see also Penfield and Jasper, 1954; Kozuch, 2014; Tononi et al., 2016b). A young man who had fallen on an iron spike that completely penetrated both frontal lobes, affecting bilateral Brodmann areas 10, 11, 24, 25, 32, and 45–47, and areas 44 and 6 on the right side, went on to marry, raise two children, have a professional life, and never complained of perceptual or other deficits (Mataró et al., 2001)."

Apparently patient KM got smarter after they took out most of his prefrontal cortex. That's a case helping to show that brains don't make minds. The book here discusses intelligence tests done on patients who underwent surgery on the frontal lobes:

"It was natural that the effect of an injury on the frontal lobes, said to be concerned with the higher functions of men, should be measured by these tests of intelligence. The absence of marked effects on mental ability, as measured by these intelligence tests, was, not surprisingly, felt to be puzzling." 

This paper here describes a case of a "modern Phineas Gage": a patient C.D. who suffered massive prefrontal  damage after a penetrating head injury. But C.D's IQ after the injury was measured at 113, well above average.  His verbal IQ after the injury was 119, in the 90th percentile. We read:

"C.D. reported that he did not have any cognitive or emotional problems following the accident. In describing how his thinking skills were completely unaffected, C.D. stated that, 'all the shattered bone was caught in the gray matter in front of the brain.' " 

The paper also tells us, "C.D.’s performances on memory tests were all in the average to above-average ranges in terms of the traditional measure of level of correct responses." 

There is another case of this type. The case is particularly interesting because it helps to discredit the claim that the frontal lobes of the brain are necessary for language and thinking.  The case is reported in the paper "Early bilateral and massive compromise of the frontal lobes."  We read about an amazing case of an 8-year-old girl with good mental skills despite having basically no frontal lobes of the brain. We see an MRI scan showing a gigantic black empty region in the brain corresponding to missing frontal lobes.

We read that a brain scan at age three revealed this:

"GC's first report of frontal compromise at age three. MRI scans revealed no structures in the frontal lobe, covered with cerebrospinal fluid. Weighed-T1 MRI scans showed no recognizable frontal structures, expect for a small portion of the ventral frontal cortex. The mesencephalon, pons, and medulla oblongata were present, and so were all other lobes and the cerebellum."  

We read that a brain scan of the girl at age 8 showed basically the same results, with at most only a tiny of the frontal lobes existing. 

Under a heading of "Neurological and neuropsychological assessment" we read that "she could describe sensory and affective experiences, and reacted to environmental events with apparent emotional and cognitive congruency (e.g., pleasure, tiredness, playfulness, anger, and basic symbolization  Supplementary Video 1, Supplementary Video 2)." The links take us to a page of videos of the young girl. We see her seeming to act pretty much like a normal girl of her age. I recommend watching all of the short videos on the page. The girl with basically no frontal lobes stands, dances, seems to speak normally, and responds to requests to touch parts of her body, and show how she brushes her teeth. The person asking the questions to the girl speaks very rapidly, but the girl seems to have no difficulty understanding the questions, and the girl makes appropriate verbal and manual responses.  Asked to point to the questioner's thumb, the girl points to the right spot. Asked to point to the girl's eyes, the girl points to the right spot. Asked where she would wear a pair of glasses, the girl points to her eyes. Asked where she would wear a pair of shoes, she points to her feet. The girl is able to distinguish between herself and a fantasy character (Minnie Mouse), and says that she is not Minnie (Video 9). 

We see below a visual of the girl's brain, from Supplementary Video 11:

A much better title for the paper would have been "Good cognitive performance despite loss of the frontal lobes."

In this post I have taken selected excerpts from my much longer post "Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex," which you can read here. The post includes most of the evidence discussed above, along with a discussion of many other papers and cases that collectively provide a very strong basis for rejecting common claims that thought or cognition comes from the frontal lobes or prefrontal cortex of the brain. Other posts of mine very relevant to this discussion are my posts discussing how all parts of the brain have an abundance of many types of severe signal noise. 

The truth is that we have no basis for claiming that the neurons firing in the brain's front lobes are either any type of information processing or any type of computation or any type of thinking. What we know is consistent with the idea that the firing of neurons in the frontal lobes is mere noise, no more examples of information processing than the arising of bubbles on the surface of a boiling soup.