Pareidolia Progress: Neuroscientists Get Better and Better at Seeing Things in the Brain That Are Not There

 Our neuroscientists are getting nowhere in trying to show that there is a neural basis for human memory or human thinking. But they have something they can rely on to help hide their lack of progress:  pareidolia. Pareidolia is when you see patterns that aren't really there, like some guy examining his toast every day for years, and then one day saying, "I finally see the face of Jesus in my toast."  A scientist conjuring up some pareidolia can make a nice-sounding progress report when no real progress has been made. I describe some examples of this in my post "Scientists Have a Hundred Ways to Conjure Up Phantasms That Don't Exist." 

There are several factors driving an increase in the ability of neuroscientists to make these pareidolia reports of seeing things in a brain that are not there. They include the following:

(1) Technological improvements have made it more and more easy for neuroscientists to use microelectrodes to record activity from individual neurons. This type of invasive brain intervention yields much more data than you get from the non-invasive technique of reading brain waves by having someone wear an EEG cap with electrodes. Neurons fire randomly at a rate between about 1 time per second and about 300 times per second. Being able to get data from all the individual firings of a large set of neurons randomly firing is almost the perfect seed bed for pareidolia.  The more random, rapidly changing data you get, the easier it is to do noise-mining pareidolia in which you seek for patterns you are eagerly hoping to find. 

(2) Advances in computer programming and AI make it easier-than-ever to create computer programs that manipulate gathered brain data in arbitrary ways. Easy-to-use languages such as Python make it easier for neuroscientists who are not professional programmers to write such programs. AI tools such as ChatGPT allow the creation of artificially generated code that can be used as part of such programs. The easier it is to produce such computer programs, the easier it is to do the kind of "keep torturing the data until it confesses" work that is often the basis of pareidolia, or a pillar of pareidolia. 

(3) Advances in so-called artificial intelligence (AI) and the public accessibility of such techniques make it easier than ever to do noise mining or data mining to extract or construct patterns or claimed patterns that a human might night never be able to find or that humans would never say existed if the humans made a simple, straightforward examination of the data. 

We have a recent example of neuroscientists seeing things that are not really there is the paper "Dynamic coding and sequential integration of multiple reward attributes by primate amygdala neurons" which you can read here. We have two neuroscientists claiming to have found that "neurons frequently signalled reward probability in an abstract, stimulus-independent code." They provide no robust evidence for this claim. To qualify as decent evidence, a study like theirs would have required a study group size of at least 15 subjects. The study group size they used was the way-too-small size of only two subjects, both monkeys. 

Below from Figure 4 of the paper is some of the data gathered from monitoring several hundred neurons of the two monkeys, as they were either resting or presented with some kind of cue. 

The little blips are neuron firing or neuron firing spikes going on while these cues were presented. A human looking at this data will see no pattern. But the authors played around with what we might charitably call "analysis techniques," trying to find some way to squeeze some evidence of a pattern or a code out of this neural noise. In the paper these are called "general linear models" and are given names of GLM 1, GLM 2, GLM 3, GLM 4 and GLM 5. Describing each of these "models," the authors groundlessly claimed that each of them identified a particular neuron encoding in some different way. The claims are never justified, and seem like pure imagination. 

Procedures like this almost invariably involve computer programming code that passes the data through programming loops. It's kind of like what's depicted in the visuals below. 

Normally you get an idea of how objectionable the data processing was by looking at the programming code used by the scientists. There is no excuse for any study of this failing to publish its code, as there are nowadays various platforms and web sites that make it very easy for someone to make their code publicly available online.  Typically in affairs such as this you can examine the programming code, and find some convoluted poorly documented mess that will demonstrate that the data was being monkeyed with in wild and weird ways. If, on the other hand, you were to find some clean, straightforward, well-documented code, it might be a sign of a respectable methodology. 

But often the scientists will not make their programming code publicly available. This is a strong reason for suspecting that the programming code involved is something that the scientists were embarrassed by, some programming horror they were too embarrassed to publish.  In the case of the paper discussed here ("Dynamic coding and sequential integration of multiple reward attributes by primate amygdala neurons" which you can read here), the authors have failed to make their programming code public.  We should have no confidence in any of the author's claims to have found "probability-coding neurons." but we can assume that the authors were not proud of their own coding. 

The authors are just engaging in the most groundless "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia when they make these claims:

"Amygdala neurons frequently signalled reward probability in an abstract, stimulus-independent code that generalized across cue formats. While some probability-coding neurons were insensitive to magnitude, signalling ‘pure’ probability rather than value, many neurons showed biphasic responses that signalled probability and magnitude in a dynamic (temporally-patterned) and flexible (reversible) value code. Specific neurons integrated these reward attributes into risk signals that quantified the uncertainty of expected rewards, distinct from value."

Making these claims the authors are like someone staring at 1000 photos of clouds in the sky, and finally declaring that he sees angel castles and animal ghosts. Among their procedural sins:

(1) They have not done a study with even one seventh of the study group size needed for a study like this to be taken seriously. 

(2) They have not revealed the exact details of their procedural method, because they failed to publish the programming code that their claims are dependent on. 

(3) Instead of testing a single hypothesis and declaring that it either succeeded or failed, they kept playing around with different ways of analyzing data until they found something they thought produced a publishable result. 

All claims that the authors make about finding neurons "encoding" something are spurious and groundless. Their description of the analysis algorithms they fooled around with is a description of a  tangled, tortured gobbledygook rigamarole, some "witches brew" of statistical spaghetti code shenanigans that the authors give no justification for. You could give the data they recorded to 100 neuroscientists and ask them whether they saw anything in the data; and not one of them would claim that they saw any evidence of "probability encoding neurons" unless you primed the pump by mentioning such a notion to them. 

Suspect Malarkey When Someone Theorizes About a "Universal Consciousness Field"

 Neuroscience does a crappy job of explaining human minds. The explanations of neuroscientists lack very many things. For example, they lack:

• Any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert experience into brain states or synapse states when a memory is created;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert brain states or synapse states into thoughts or recollections when a memory is recalled;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly create new memories, something that humans routinely do; 
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory, such as instantly getting just the right answer when someone is asked to identify some person or object or technical term or historical event;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could create an abstract idea such as the idea of a child or the idea of a dog or the idea of a nation;  
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could imagine something such as some invention no one ever built yet;
• any coherent or credible theory as to how there could occur any of the types of anomalous or paranormal things that humans experience -- things such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings and extrasensory perception (ESP). 

Faced with such a shortfall, some try to turn to physics. This is a mistake. Physics does nothing to explain why consciousness or minds exist. We might make a relational claim looking rather like this:

Physics --> Chemistry --> Biology --> Psychology

But in such a claim the "-->" should not be viewed as "explains" but as "is a prerequisite for." The right type of physics (by which I mean a universe with extremely fine-tuned fundamental constants and laws) is a prerequisite for chemistry; and just the right type of chemistry (involving an information-rich wealth of many types of protein molecules) is a prerequisite for biology; and just the right type of biology (such as the vast organization of a human body) is a prerequisite for physical people having psychology or minds like humans have. 

Physics is far-removed from psychology, and does nothing to directly explain human minds or any aspect of human minds. The study of brains involves a little bit of physics when someone may track the electricity of neurons firing in the brain. But neuron firings do nothing to explain mind or memory, contrary to the claims of neuroscientists.  And during near-death experiences occurring during cardiac arrest,  people often have vivid near-death experiences when their brains are electrically shut down.

But in our culture physics has a great deal of prestige. So it is not surprising that some people might try to explain human minds by appealing to physics or using jargon borrowed from physicists. Such attempts are usually dismal failures. The latest such dismal failure is the recent paper "Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy" by materials scientist Maria Strømme.

We should always start out with very great distrust of any document claiming to be advancing something the document describes as a theory of consciousness. Why is that? It is because a human mind is something almost infinitely greater and richer than mere consciousness. Mentally you are not "some consciousness." You are a thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. And you are actually much, much more than the things listed in the previous sentence.  

So any attempt to describe you or a human like you as "consciousness" is an example of what I call shadow-speaking, which is when people describe things as if they mere shadows of what they are.  What kind of person engages in this type of shadow-speaking? It is typically a person who lacks any decent explanation for a human mind. People who lack decent explanations for some reality tend to describe that reality in very diminutive terms, trying to make that reality seem a million times less impressive than it is. 

Strømme is just such a shadow-speaker. Her failure to decently describe human minds is shown by her failure to use the word "memory" in her paper. 

Strømme presents the unbelievable idea of a "universal consciousness field," saying, "Consciousness interacts with physical processes as a fundamental field." She says that "awareness arises from localized perturbations.... that propagate and interact dynamically, analogous to the emergence of structure in quantum field fluctuations."

To get some inkling of what is being theorized, you may do a Google search for "in physics what is a fundamental field?" We are told this:

"According to quantum field theory, the universe is not made of particles, but of fields that fill all of space and time. Particles like electrons and photons are simply localized disturbances or 'vibrations' in these underlying fields."

The "perturbations " Strømme appeals to are similar to the disturbances or vibrations mentioned above.  The same "quantum field theory" is famous for making what is called "the worst prediction in the history of physics."  Quantum field theory allows us to calculate how much energy there should be in the vacuum of space because of quantum fluctuations in the fundamental fields it postulates. The problem is that when scientists do the calculations, they get a number that is ridiculously wrong. According to this page of a UCLA astronomer, quantum field theory gives a prediction that every cubic centimeter of the vacuum should have an energy density of 10⁹¹ grams.  This number is 10 followed by 90 zeroes. That is an amount trillions of times greater than the mass of the entire observable universe, which is estimated to be only about 10⁵⁶ grams.

This means that according to quantum field theory every cubic centimeter of empty space should have more mass-energy than all the mass-energy in the entire observable universe.

How far off is this calculation? It varies on how you do the calculations. According to one type of calculation, the prediction of quantum field theory is wrong by a factor of 10⁶⁰, which is a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times. According to a different way of estimating it, the prediction of quantum field theory is wrong by a factor of 10¹²⁰, which is a factor of a million billion quadrillion quintillion sextillion septillion octillion times.

This prediction has been repeatedly referred to as the worst prediction in the history of physics. It could just as well be called the most wrong prediction in the history of human thought. No zealous apocalyptic doomer ever made a prediction more wrong, not even the preacher who predicted the end of the world would occur in 1844.

The matter is discussed in this well-written post by physicist Matt Strassler, which includes some nice graphics. Scientists don't talk about this matter very much, as it is something of a skeleton in their closet. But when they do discuss the matter, they refer to it as the vacuum catastrophe or the cosmological constant problem. Scientists think that the vacuum does have a very slight energy density (believed to be the main driver of what is called the cosmological constant, which is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate). But that energy density is less than .00000000000000000000000000000000001 percent of the amount predicted by quantum field theory.

So we have a Big Reason #1 for why we should have no confidence in anyone claiming the idea of a "universal consciousness field" and claiming that you and I are vibrations or perturbations of such a field, an idea inspired by the quantum field theory idea that individual particles are vibrations of a fundamental field. It is the reason that we should not be making a theory of consciousness or mind inspired by a physics theory that fails so enormously to correctly predict the reality we observe. 

Then there's a Big Reason #2 why we should have no confidence in anyone claiming the idea of a "universal consciousness field" and claiming that you and I are vibrations of such a field. It is the reason that we should not be treating mind as if were like a physical reality, which it is not. Since consciousness is a non-physical thing, the idea of a vibration of a consciousness field makes no sense, and is like the idea of the weight in kilograms of an idea, or an idea of the cubic volume of a comprehension. 

Then there's Big Reason #3 why we should have no confidence in anyone claiming the idea of a "universal consciousness field" and claiming that you and I are vibrations of such a field. This is simply the idea that the human mind is a reality enormously more complex and diverse than mere consciousness. You are not some consciousness. You are a  thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. So the idea that your mental reality could arise by some vibration of a "consciousness field" is nonsensical. Such an idea is like claiming that a library of intelligible well-written books might arise from vibrations in a warehouse storing stacks of blank paper and buckets of ink. Just as it is enormously misleading nonsense to describe a large library of books as merely "some paper with ink marks," it is enormously misleading nonsense to describe a human mind and human mental experience as mere "consciousness." 

As mentioned above, I did a Google search for "in physics what is a fundamental field?" I are told this:

"According to quantum field theory, the universe is not made of particles, but of fields that fill all of space and time. Particles like electrons and photons are simply localized disturbances or 'vibrations' in these underlying fields."

That does not sound like something impossible, because electrons are very simple things, and so are photons.  Each electron has exactly the same electrical charge (the very exact opposite of the electrical charge on each proton); and each electron has the same rest mass (1/1836 of the rest mass of each proton). Because electrons are so simple and so alike, it does not sound all that farfetched that all electrons might result from tiny vibrations or perturbations in some "fundamental field." But for human minds, the situation is completely different. Every human mind and every human life of mental experience is a very complex thing, consisting of a great wealth and diversity of experiences and characteristics and capabilities. It is nonsensical to suggest that a human mind could arise from some mere "perturbation" or "vibration" of a featureless "universal consciousness field." 

When I do a search for "physics definition of a field" I get an answer of "a physical quantity that has a value at every point in space and time." I am told that a scalar field is one in which each point in space has a single number. Two examples are temperature (which can be measured at any point in space) and air pressure (which can be measured at any point in space). The concept of a "universal consciousness field" seems to make no sense, because consciousness is not a physical quantity, and cannot be measured. You cannot take consciousness readings at different points in space.  

We have as a Figure 1 of the paper a diagram looking like the one below, but with slicker graphics. 

The diagram does not make sense. "Consciousness" is an aspect of mind, or a very diminutive, weak, and minimal way of describing  a mind, which is a huge wealth of capabilities and complexities vastly more than just "consciousness"  (just as "solidity" is an aspect of a human body, or a weak, minimal way of describing a human body, a state of vast organization vastly more than just solidity).  Thought is not a separate thing from mind, but something that minds sometimes produce. A diagram with separate circles for "mind" and "consciousness" and "thought" makes no sense. Conversely, it might make some sense to have a diagram with a large circle labeled "mind" and many smaller circles inside it, with each of the smaller circles having labels such as "consciousness," "recall," "recognition," "learning ability," "insight." and so forth. 

The caption that is given to Figure 1 in the paper (looking like the visual above) is just muddled metaphysical mishmash. It is this: 

"Illustration depicting the integration of mind, consciousness, and thought based on the quantum mechanical concepts described in the paper. Mind represents the universal creative intelligence, the source of all creation. Consciousness represents universal awareness that enables the perception of space, time, and matter. It acts as a substrate, giving structure and form to the formless potential of the mind and bridging the infinite and the physical. Thought represents the creative mechanism converting the infinite potential of the mind and the universal awareness of consciousness into individualized, structured realities."

There may be some language in which a translation of this paragraph makes sense, but the English text above makes no sense. "Mind" is a term referring to the cognitive capabilities and mental experiences of a person. In English the word "mind" does not refer to "the universal creative intelligence, the source of all creation." It is reasonable to postulate a supreme Mind that is the source of all other minds (given the failure of brains to explain minds). But if you do that, you need to introduce some word or phrase more than just the word "mind." The word "consciousness" is a term referring to the awareness of a particular mind that is conscious. The term does not mean "universal awareness." You can speculate about some kind of "universal awareness," but if you do that, you need some word or phrase different from the mere word "consciousness." It makes no sense to say, "Thought represents the creative mechanism converting the infinite potential of the mind and the universal awareness of consciousness into individualized, structured realities." 

The author tries to inject as much physics jargon as she can into her metaphysical speculations. These physics jargon injections mostly sound completely inappropriate. You can get a little taste of the resulting mess in the quote below:

"This analogy reflects how a universal field, initially undifferentiated, can generate stable and diverse structures through the process of symmetry breaking—structures that, in this context, correspond to individual sentient entities. The supplementary material S2 outlines how individual consciousness may emerge as a result of other collapse mechanisms."

This is nonsense. Individual sentient entities such as you and I do not arise by any type of symmetry breaking or any type of "collapse mechanism." Anyone familiar with what a mess is today's swampland of speculation called "quantum gravity" may laugh when the paper makes some gobbledygook statement like the one above, and claims "this resonates with models in quantum gravity." 

Their is a press release describing Strømme's muddled mess, one entitled "Consciousness as the foundation: new theory addresses nature of reality." The press release wrongly describes Strømme's speculations as a "model." In physics a model is something that produces exact numerical outputs from numerical inputs, and no such thing is going on here. Trying to drum up interest, the press release says, "In this model, phenomena that are now perceived as ‘mysterious’ – such as telepathy or near‑death experiences – can be explained as natural consequences of a shared field of consciousness." But, to the contrary, the paper does not mention telepathy or near-death experiences. 

The press release says, "Her theory also suggests that our individual consciousness does not cease at death, but returns to the universal field of consciousness from which it once emerged." That at least mirrors a statement in the paper, the statement "the dissolution of individuality (e.g., through death) does not imply annihilation but rather reintegration into the universal field." Statements like that are basically meaningless, and do not involve an assertion of life after death. Statements like that are no more meaningful than the claim that after death your atoms will be reintegrated into the atom totality of our planet.

Documents such as Strømme's paper are totally dependent upon the trick of shadow-speaking, in which human minds (something enormously more complex than mere consciousness) are described in the most diminutive way possible, using the super-reductive term "consciousness." Once you properly describe a human being and a human mind and its experiences, the idea that a human mind arises as some fluctuation or perturbation from a "universal consciousness field" seems ridiculous, rather like the idea that an encyclopedia could arise from some fluctuation arising from a bathtub of ink. Typically when you examine such metaphysical efforts, you find that they engage in denial of the self or denial of the existence of individuals. What is going on is the grossest dehumanization. When people depict humans as if they were mere animals, that is a grotesque type of dehumanization. When people depict humans as if they were mere "consciousness" or "perturbations of a universal field," that is an equally grotesque type of dehumanization. 

Postscript: An effort similar to  Strømme's, and equally unpersuasive, is the recent paper "Macroscopic quantum effects in the brain: new insights into the fundamental principle underlying conscious processes" by Joachim Keppler. The main difference is that while Strømme's paper has little discussion of neuroscience details, Keppler's paper shows lots of discussion of such details (but not the most relevant details). Keppler's approach seems to be: throw in a whole bunch of discussion of tiny little neuroscience details, and then throw in a whole bunch of discussion of quantum mechanics, and then kind of say, "Voila! Light has been shed on the origin of consciousness!"  Such a paper moves not the tiniest step forward to explaining human minds. There are supposedly quantum effects in everything, including a vacuum, a rock, a ball of gas, and a brain. So describing some quantum effects in the brain does nothing to explain why a brain would produce a mind. The so-called point zero-point field or ZPF is the vacuum of space as described by quantum field theory. We should laugh hard when Keepler states, "A profound new insight takes shape, namely, that the fundamental principle behind the formation of conscious states is the resonant coupling of the brain to the ZPF." I'm reminded of the people who have long-claimed that we will be able to extract limitless energy from the vacuum of space by exploiting the same ZPF or zero-point field. 

Dubious Claims in Announcements of the Lundbeck Foundation's Brain Prizes

 In my previous post "Cognitive Neuroscience Is Floundering, So the Kavli 2024 Neuroscience Prize Went to Low-Quality Research," I discussed how the million-dollar Kavli 2024 Neuroscience Prize was awarded to scientists for doing low-quality research work that failed to establish the boasts made in the prize announcement. Let us now look at two other cases of blunder in giving a big neuroscience research prize.

The Lundbeck Foundation issues an annual million-dollar prize in neuroscience research. The foundation blundered in its announcement of its 2023 Brain Prize. My complaint with the 2023 Brain Prize is not with the research done. My complaint is with how such research was sold as having relevance to memory that it does not have. The document announcing the prize made some claims that simply are not true. 

The document announcing the prize goes wrong right at its beginning. We read Professor Richard Morris making these erroneous claims:

"In order to establish appropriate neural connections during development or to adapt to new challenges in adulthood through learning and memory, brain circuits must be remodeled, and the new patterns of connectivity maintained; processes that require the synthesis of new proteins for those connections. The Brain Prize winners of 2023, Michael Greenberg, Christine Holt, and Erin Schuman have revealed the fundamental principles of how this enigmatic feature of brain function is mediated at the molecular level. Together, the Brain Prize 2023 winners have made ground-breaking discoveries by showing how the synthesis of new proteins is triggered in different neuronal compartments, thereby guiding brain development and plasticity in ways that impact our behavior for a lifetime.”

We have here a statement of untenable neuroscientist dogma, the claim that learning and memory occurs when brain circuits are remodeled. There is no evidence for such a claim, and no one has any understanding of how a change in brain circuits could cause a memory to be stored. There are quite a few strong reasons why the claim above cannot be correct. One of the strongest is the speed at which humans can create new memories, which is a speed way, way too fast to be explained by some idea that brain circuits are being remodeled. Humans can learn new things instantly. If someone walks in and tells you that your father just died from a heart attack, you instantly form a permanent new memory of how your father died. It doesn't take minutes to form such a new memory, as it would take if it required a modification of brain circuits. 

Beginning on page 12 of the 28-page document, we have long statements by each of the prize winners extolling themselves and their work. The first is a long statement by Michael Greenberg, who gives lots of nerdy jargon-filled discussion of the details of his work. Despite dropping a few little hints here and there weakly trying to insinuate that his work had something to do with memory, his long discussion fails to explain how his work had any real relevance to explaining how a brain could store or retrieve a memory. There is then a similar long discussion by Christine Holt, describing her life journey. She fails to explain how her work had any relevance to explaining how a brain could store or retrieve a memory. There is then a similar long discussion by Erin Schuman, describing her life journey. She fails to explain how her work had any relevance to explaining how a brain could store or retrieve a memory. 

What went on here can be summarized like this:

(1) Some scientists made a little progress in understanding protein synthesis that goes on in synapses.

(2) Clinging to the untenable assumption that protein synthesis can explain human memory, such minor progress has been wrongly passed off as being progress in understanding how brains could store memories. 

It's kind of like some scientists making a little progress in understanding cloud formation, and then some other scientists claiming this explains how extraterrestrials are constructing cloud bases in the sky.  No, it sure doesn't. 

There are several giant reasons why protein synthesis cannot explain memory formation. The first is that protein synthesis is a sluggish process typically requiring at least a few minutes, and often requiring many minutes. But humans can learn new things instantly. If someone announces to you how your child or your parent died, you will instantly form a vivid new memory that you will probably remember for the rest of your life. Memory formation could never occur instantly if it required protein synthesis in the brain or remodeling of brain circuits. The second reason why protein synthesis cannot explain memory formation is that memories can last for 60 years or more, but proteins in the brain are short-lived. The average brain protein has a lifetime of less than two weeks, as do synapse proteins. So the length of time that humans can remember is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of brain proteins. Then there's the fact that no one has any understanding of how some fattening up of synapses or remodeling of synapses could ever be a process storing memories. The idea is no more logical than thinking that memories are stored when wind and snowfall jiggle around the shapes of snow drifts. 

See my post "They Memorized Many Times Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do" for many well-documented cases of humans memorizing at astonishingly fast speeds, speeds far too high to be explained as examples of protein synthesis. One example is the man who memorized a full deck of 52 playing cards in 14 seconds. 

An equally great blunder of the Lundbeck Foundation occurred in the announcement of its 2016 prize. The announcement made this false  claim: "The Brain Prize for 2016 was awarded to Timothy Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris for 'their ground-breaking research on the cellular and molecular basis of Long-Term Potentiation and the demonstration that this form of synaptic plasticity underpins spatial memory and learning." No such demonstration has ever occurred. 

The 2016 announcement page has no document justifying the award. We merely have the display of the video. At the start we have some dumb reasoning by one of the winners. Asked to describe his field of research, Timothy Bliss states this:

"Well, what I would say is, a simple question: how does the brain store information? How are memories stored in the brain? Given that we know the brain consists of a huge number of nerve cells and the connections between them, what happens to those connections when you lay down a memory? Something must happen, the brain must change in some way, because it now has this memory that it did not have before. Tomorrow I will look back on this day and remember this interview with you.  And my brain has changed in some way, there has to be a physical change. So the question is: what is that physical change? And Long Term Potentiation is that physical change, a change in the efficiency of the connections between cells in a subset of cells which are stored in this memory."

What we have in this quote is circular reasoning, vacuous hand-waving,  and a false claim. We do not know that memories occur by means of brain changes, and there are the strongest reasons for thinking that such an idea cannot be correct.  The claim "something must happen, the brain must change in some way, because it now has this memory that it did not have before" is saying that the brain must be storing memories because it stores memories. No, we do not know that the brain stores memories; we merely know that people acquire and hold memories. If we are souls or spirits (and there are innumerable reasons for believing that we are), then memory may be a spiritual phenomenon or a psychic phenomenon rather than a brain phenomenon. 

The term "long term potentiation" is a misleading term neuroscientists have long been using. What was called "long-term potentiation" in the first years of using that phrase is actually a very short-term phenomenon. Speaking of long-term potentiation (LTP), and using the term “decays to baseline levels” (which means “disappears”), a scientific paper says, "potentiation almost always decays to baseline levels within a week," while noting that even after considering LTP "we would be at a loss for a brain mechanism for the storage of a long-term memory." Another scientific paper says something similar, although it tells us even more strongly that so-called long-term potentiation (LTP) is really a very short-term affair. For it tells us that “in general LTP decays back to baseline within a few hours.” “Decays back to baseline” means the same as “vanishes.” 

Neuroscientists have long been guilty of profoundly misleading behavior in trying to persuade people that so-called so-called long-term potentiation (LTP) is a "mechanism for memory." Experimentally inducing LTP requires artificial electrode stimulation which synapses do not naturally receive.  Also, human memories can last for sixty years, but LTP is a very short-lived thing.  So why do neuroscientists keep doing LTP experiments, and why do they keep mentioning LTP as if it had something to do with memory? There are two reasons:

(1) It always sounds better if you have some sound bite or catchphrase you can mutter when someone asks how something occurs, rather than saying, "I haven't the slightest idea how it occurs." When scientists can mutter the phrase "LTP" when asked about how memories are created, it makes them sound more knowledgeable, rather than sounding like people who have no understanding of a topic. 

(2) LTP research is an easy-to-conduct "no way to fail" line of research that provides an easy way for a neuroscientist to add to his total of published papers. Scientists love these kind of "no way to fail" research opportunities. Similarly, theoretical physicists keep grinding out speculative papers about string theory or primordial cosmic inflation.  If you have learned how to write such a papers, doing another such paper is a relatively easy and safe way to get another published paper. 

There was "definition creep" in regard to the term LTP (long-term potentiation).  Erroneously claiming that LTP originally referred to a long-lasting increase, a science paper describes how the term changed:

"Originally, LTP referred to a long-lasting increase in the synaptic response (potentiation) resulting from stimulation at high frequency (Bliss and Lomo, 1973). Over the years this term became fuzzy as it has been applied to pretty much any increase in synaptic strength regardless of the specific induction procedure."

The claim made by Bliss in the quote above is nonsensical. There are no signs that memories are written to brains, and if learned knowledge were to be stored in the brain, it would require some almost infinitely complex mechanism almost infinitely more involved than a mere "change in the efficiency of the connections between cells."  Synapse strengthening cannot be memory storage. Complex and very detailed information cannot be stored by a mere strengthening of something. 

The type of evidence typically given for an LTP involvement in memory is bad, unconvincing evidence. An animal's brain will be scanned; the animal will be taught something; and then the animal's brain will be scanned again; and (using a looser definition of LTP as merely "synapse strengthening") some scientist will claim that some synapse was strengthened, and that this was memory storage. But the fact is that many synapses strengthen while many other synapses weaken, with this occurring all the time, regardless of whether you are learning anything. So showing some synapse strengthening occurring somewhere when an animal learned does nothing to show that such strengthening was memory formation. Similarly, my front-yard germaniums can grow while I learn about some type of scientific research; but that sure doesn't show that my geraniums stored such new learning. In a PhD thesis, a scientist says, "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."

Bliss later in the video (at the -2:48 mark) makes the untrue claim that if you block an NMDA receptor, an animal "learns much more slowly, and cannot remember what it has learned." The statement is false.  A 2014 study was entitled "Hippocampal NMDA receptors are important for behavioural inhibition but not for encoding associative spatial memories." And a 2011 study found this:

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

A 2024 study states that it "failed to demonstrate a role for NMDARs [NMDA receptors] in excitatory CA1 and DG neurons in learning about temporal information." A 2011 study tells us that rodents without NMDA receptors are "impaired in a variety of habit-learning tasks, while normal in some other dopamine-modulated functions such as locomotor activities, goal-directed learning, and spatial reference memories."

We have in the video no true statements convincingly backing up the claim that so-called long term potentiation has anything to do with memory. What we mainly have are false claims, hand-waving,  and circular logic. 

The 2011 Brain Prize of the Lundbeck Foundation was announced with the false claim that Gyorgi Buzsaki had discovered that memories are replayed while you sleep by means of "hippocampal sharp wave ripples." This is an example of what is abundant in modern neuroscience research: the spread of groundless achievement legends. The claims made in the video on this announcement page are speculations not well grounded in observations.  

A look at Buzsaki's main paper on this topic (the 2015 paper "Hippocampal Sharp Wave-Ripple: A Cognitive Biomarker for Episodic Memory and Planning") shows a very long paper that has a long discussion of experiments with rodents, but never mentions any decent study group sizes. Alas, it's another example of Questionable Research Practices low-quality science. Mostly Buzsaki just vaguely refers to "mice" or "rodents" without telling us how many mice were tested (whenever this happens you can be 90% sure the study groups sizes were way-too-small). Rarely Buzsaki does tell us how many mice or rodents were used, and in such cases we learn of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 4 rodents or 9 rodents. We have no mention in the text of any blinding protocol being used in these experiments. No robust evidence is provided of memory replay or memory consolidation. 

Buzsaki defines a sharp wave-ripple as a little brain-wave blip lasting less than a tenth of a second. With this definition describing no pattern of any decent length, he is able to see "sharp wave-ripples" under innumerable  conditions, attaching all kinds of deep significance to these fleeting blips. What is mainly occurring is runaway pareidolia. It's like someone assigning deep explanatory significance to every time he has the slightest skin itch. 

Similar Questionable Research Practices occur in a 2017 paper by Buzsaki on sharp-wave ripples, in which the study group is a way-too-small size of only five rodents. And it's the same deal in his 2024 paper on this topic, in which the study group size is a way-too-small size of only six animals. The paper used no blinding protocol. 

In the video on the page Buzsaki makes groundless boasts that tiny fragments of memories are replayed in the brain over and over again in the brain, claiming to have identified this. Such a boast is unfounded, and his research on this topic did not follow sound research practices. Many of the main claims made by the narrator in the video are groundless or untenable claims.  The claim of Buzsaki that these tiny tenth-of-a-second ripples are the tiniest memory recall fragments (rather like individual frames from a 24-frames-per-second movie) is a groundless claim that is not credible.

I will give you a quick look at how claims of a relation between sharp wave ripples and memory consolidation involve appeals to junk science. The paper "Hippocampal ripples and memory consolidation" tells us this:

"More recently however, several studies have revealed a

correlation between SPWRs [sharp wave ripples] and memory. Ripple occurrence rates were shown to increase during the hour

following a training session on an odour-reward association task [51]. A similar increase was observed in rats

learning a radial maze task, concomitant with a significant

improvement in performance [52]. Also, the intrinsic

ripple frequency increased after a change in the task

contingency, such as a variation in the minimum delay

to receive a new reward by lever pressing [53]."

Every one of the references is to a low-quality science paper guilty of Questionable Research Practices. Reference 51 is to a paper "Sustained increase in hippocampal sharp-wave ripple activity during

slow-wave sleep after learning." The paper used way-too-small study group sizes such as only six rodents, and failed to use any blinding protocol.  Reference 52 is to the paper " Reference 52 is to a paper "Hippocampal Sharp Wave/Ripples during Sleep for

Consolidation of Associative Memory."  It's another piece of Questionable Research Practices shlock that uses way-too-small study group sizes such as only four or five rodents; and again we have a complete failure to follow a blinding protocol.  Reference 53 is to a paper "Frequency of network synchronization in the hippocampus

marks learning."  This is also low-quality research with study group sizes such as only 3 rodents or 9 rodents, without any blinding protocol being followed.  None of these studies provide any good evidence for any relation between memory and sharp-wave ripples; they merely provide evidence for how low are the publication standards these days for journals publishing neuroscience research. No rodent-using experimental neuroscience research trying to establish correlations should be taken seriously unless it followed a blinding protocol and also used at least 15 or 20 subjects per study group. 

Poor research practices are the norm in 

today's dysfunctional world of neuroscience

Brains have a great deal of signal noise of many types, and the abundance of such noise is one of many reasons for disbelieving that the brain is the source of human thinking and recall which can occur with incredible accuracy, such as when people perfectly recall very large bodies of text and perfectly perform extremely difficult math calculations without using tools such as computers, pencils or paper. Claims about sharp-wave ripples are made by brain wave analysts analyzing EEG readouts. The analysis of brain waves obtained by EEG devices is an area of science where bad methods, pareidolia and junk analysis is very abundant.  There is an abundance of people trying to use fancy statistical methods to try to extract identifiable "signals" or "signs" from data that is very noisy and polluted. Muscle movements abundantly contaminate EEG readings. Unless a study is very carefully designed and includes things such as a blinding protocol and adequate study group sizes assuring good statistical power, you will typically have some junk paper that is suitable only for tasks such as lining bird cages and wrapping fish. 

A junk-quality  article "How the Brain Decides to Remember"  in Wired Magazine recycles an article on the Quanta Magazine web site, a site notorious for its credulous puff pieces parroting unbelievable boasts by scientists.  In a misleading puff piece about Buzsaki, we have all kinds of claims about scientists establishing grand things they did not actually show, such as the claim that "In 2009 and 2010, two papers, including one led by Zugaro, showed that sharp wave ripples were involved in consolidating memories to endure over the long term."  One of the references is to a low-quality  science paper "Disruption of ripple-associated hippocampal activity during rest impairs spatial learning in the rat" that used only a study group of only five rats. The other reference is to an equally low-quality paper using only seven rats. 

 It is frequently pointed out to neuroscientists that experimental studies involving mice are generally worthless unless they use at least 15 or 20 subjects per study group; but neuroscientists keep senselessly continuing to use ridiculously low study group sizes.  Why do they do that? Because it allows them to "mine noise," and report false alarms that would vanish if a decent study group size was used. It's rather like someone trying to prove his prophetic powers by publishing a test in which he correctly predicted whether merely four consecutive coin flips were "heads" or "tails," conveniently failing to publish a larger test of his powers involving how well he predicted 15 consecutive coin flips.  You can get all kinds of false alarms when you use tiny sample sizes. 

See the paper "The Case Against Memory Consolidation in REM Sleep" for a rebuttal of claims that REM sleep has anything to do with memory consolidation. The paper states, "We believe that the cumulative evidence indicates that REM sleep serves no role in the processing or consolidation of memory."

The awarding of neuroscience prizes plays a large part in the social construction of groundless achievement legends claiming that neuroscientists did grand things they did not actually do. Often the judges who award such prizes are people who did similar research as the research being awarded, and the judges are often doing themselves favors by helping to legitimize poor quality work similar to the work that the judges themselves are performing. 

The Lundbeck Foundation announces its annual Brain Prize on some page with a video. Since the page will have no link to a scientific paper, it then becomes a bit difficult for anyone to dive into the relevant research papers, to find out what whether the research followed good practices. But with some work, you can find when the prizes were awarded foolishly. You can look at the video, find the main scientists mentioned, find the research topic, and look up the authors and the topic on Google Scholar. You can then read the papers and see whether they were merely more examples of the low-quality schlock that is so predominant in today's neuroscience research. 

Trying to Explain Minds and Life, a Neuroscientist Sounds Unconvincing

Recently I read an interview with a neuroscientist (Nikolay Kukushkin) who was promoting his new book. Kukushkin was trying to make it sound like he has some understanding of how minds like ours appeared and how bodies like ours ever appeared. But he said nothing persuasive on this matter. 

Addressing the question of "How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?" Kukushkin gives an answer that is utterly vacuous, as well as being sometimes nonsensical. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"I was having this debate with a philosopher colleague [who questioned], 'How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?' But to me, it's not a problem. Physics is directional — a rock 'wants' to fall down. This potential energy is the gravitation of a system towards an energy minimum, and I think everything is that. It's just a level of complexity. A rock gravitates towards an energy minimum; for a rock, it just means falling down. A cell gravitates towards an energy minimum; for the cell, it might mean predicting the environment in some way. You get to a brain, you form these predictive expectations — millions of neurons talking to one another.

I think what puzzles them [proponents of the top-down definition] is the very directionality of a system towards some state, because they think the default is no directionality. I don't think there is such a default. I think physics, the entire universe, is directionality. Time is this unit of one thing leading to another, this unit of causality. So, if everything consists of these grains of causality, then I don't think it's that puzzling that we are driven towards anything, that there is some sort of drive of the system towards a state."

What a load of nonsense. No, rocks do not "want" to fall down. And the fact that rocks sometimes fall down in rock slides has nothing whatsoever to do with how human mental phenomena could arise from a brain, particularly because human mental phenomena are a huge diversity of capabilities almost infinitely more impressive than a rock falling down. 

I will not quote the next two paragraphs of Kukushkin's answer to the question of "How can the directionality of consciousness arise from the physical facts of the brain being there?" If you read the interview, you will see it is every bit as vacuous as the two paragraphs quoted above. Kukushkin sounds just exactly like someone who has not got any sensible-sounding tale to tell as to how a brain could produce a mind. 

Later in the interview, Kukushkin gives answers just as bad. Talking about computers he says this: "First they form their 'beliefs,' and then they start generating predictions based on those beliefs." No, computers do not have anything like beliefs.  Kukushkin says, "The more friends you have, the bigger your brain has to be, because it's a really uniquely complicated operation to perceive the intentions and the motivations and the emotions of this large group of people."  He calls this "the social brain hypothesis" and claims "It's an explanation for why we're so smart." This does not make any sense as an explanation for why humans are so smart. 

Human brain size has not changed since a time of about 50,000 years ago, when humans lived in very small social groups, such as a small group of about ten people living in a cave. It is true that building cities and living in large social groups of thousands of people requires more intelligence than just being a cave man. But it was not at all a case that human brain size sharply increased as human social group size increased.  Humans had brains just as big as we now have before any cities or towns were built, when the average human social group was tiny. So "you need more intelligence to live in cities" is not any explanation for why humans would be smart enough to build cities and live well in cities. 

Kukushkin notes that humans have unique language abilities, but he says nothing substantive to explain how such abilities could have arose, stating only this:

"There is no equivalent, as far as we know, in the animal kingdom of an infinitely generative system of communication. It's passed from human to human, like this cognitive virus, and there must have been a moment when this passage has become stable — when it took off, essentially. We have this natural tendency to create a language and pass it on....I think that the reason why we developed this language is fundamentally social. We wouldn't have developed it if we were solitary creatures."

Neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation for the origin of language, and their failure to explain such a thing is one of the biggest reasons for rejecting their underlying dogmas. Humans have all sorts of mental capabilities that neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists cannot credibly explain, partially because they are of no use to creatures living in the wild. Some of those capabilities are mentioned below. 

Kukushkin repeats the groundless fairly tale of endosymbiosis, the claim that the first eukaryotic cell arose from some miraculous accident in which much simpler prokaryotic cells combined to become a eukaryotic cell.  Nothing like that has ever been observed by humans, and scientists actually lack any credible explanation for the origin of eukaryotic cells.  Kukushkin then offers this explanation for how there could have occurred an evolution from single-celled life to large, complex visible organisms:

'That gives eukaryotes access to unprecedented quantities of energy and sets in motion this evolutionary arms race. They get greedy on this energy; they build up these massive, impressive, energetically expensive cells. But now these cells depend on a constant supply of prey, of somebody to eat. It will perish unless you keep adding more energy, and everybody else around you has the same problem. They need to eat and not be eaten. That sets in motion this evolution of even more complicated cells, of even more convoluted defense or offense, and then teeth and claws and shells." 

The appearance of multicellular visible organisms with very complex anatomy is actually not something we should ever expect to occur from the mere existence of single-cell microscopic life. The fact that individual cells "need to eat and not to be eaten" does nothing to explain how there might arise fantastically organized visible creatures containing hierarchical organizations of cells such as mobile organisms with claws and shells. 

Whenever Darwinists refer to an "arms race" in discussing evolution, they are using a very misleading analogy. An arms race is when the leaders of two different nations purposefully decide to improve their weapons, to try to engineer and manufacture weapons so that one nation surpasses the weapon systems of the other nation. It is never legitimate to refer to such an arms race (an example of purposeful design) when referring to blind, unguided processes of nature such as Darwinian evolution. 

Kukushkin engages below in some "something arose because it was useful" reasoning, which is never a convincing explanation of why some great biological innovation (requiring a very special arrangement of many parts) could have arisen: 

"But as your organisms become more complex, they become really vulnerable. We started investing into more ways for these organisms to avoid danger, to be self-guided. Maybe to prevent their accidental death, give them a brain to make sure that it can tell where danger is, and so it can avoid that death."

Kukushkin gives this very vacuous attempt to explain "how you eventually get to us." 

"The whole point of a brain is that it needs to learn for itself. Once you create that, this organism starts thinking for itself. It starts acquiring its own motivations that are not prescribed in genes. It starts developing its own thoughts, and that's how you eventually get to us."

The interview ends with Kukushkin stating one line that is extremely false, followed by another line that contradicts the first line. He states this: 

"There wasn't anything special about our lineage, our line of evolution, compared to everything else. Eukaryotes compared to bacteria and archaea are special in precisely the same way as humans are special amongst all the creatures around us."

The first line makes the gigantically false claim that "there wasn't anything special" about humans. The second line contradicts that line by suggesting that the difference between human and other organisms is like the difference between eukaryotic cells and the prokaryotic cells of bacteria, which are cells gigantically simpler. 

Kukushkin's interview is the most unconvincing mess. Nowhere does he give any statement that sounds like he has the least bit of a convincing explanation for the physical wonders of biology or the mental wonders of human minds. 

Here's an idea that makes some sense: we live in a very precisely fine-tuned habitable universe utterly beyond what chance could ever produce, inhabiting marvelously engineered physical bodies of the most gigantic accidentally unachievable organization packed with the most stunning stochastically inexplicable  wealth of well-arranged interdependent components, while having minds and memories utterly beyond the explanation of anything in such bodies, because some higher power wanted us to live lives something like the lives we experience, and to have the opportunity to win glory for ourselves by facing hard challenges something like the challenges we face, because that was all part of some grand and very complex plan beyond our current understanding, partially because such a plan involves not just this earthly stage but also some other realm of imperishable existence to which we will all progress. 

Postscript: LiveScience.com has a long article written by Kukushkin, one which sounds as vacuous from an explanatory standpoint as the interview mentioned above. He incorrectly states, "Our entire essence is to carry tens and even hundreds of peers inside our brains, to navigate the vicissitudes of their emotions and relationships, to derive both meaning and joy from living life together. " No, what he refers to is less than a hundredth of what it is to be a human being. 

He states this: 

"All primates share the relationship between group size and the cerebral cortex, which means that it always took a large brain to handle many peers. And that, in turn, means that sooner or later, something like a human was inevitable."

This is vacuous as an explanation for why humans have such powerful minds with so many capabilities they did not need  in the wild. Human brain size reached its peak when humans were living in only tiny social groups, before towns or cities were built. 

There is no accuracy in Kukushkin's  statement below: 

"When eukaryotes first started extracting energy from other organisms, this set the trajectory toward the human species — eventually there was bound to be someone who could control fire and even nuclear fission. There's something similar that the social brain hypothesis points to, at the deepest level. Once primates were swept in a drive to enlarge their groups and brains, eventually there was bound to be someone with groups large enough and with brains advanced enough to start talking to each other, inventing symbols and abstract categories — and from that, finally, there was bound to arise some form of culture, art, and civilization."

None of this is true. The existence of large, visible organisms with bodies as enormously organized as human bodies is not at all something predictable or to be expected from the mere existence of one-celled eukaryotes.  And the existence of humans building "culture, art, and civilization" is not at all something predictable or to be expected from the mere existence of primates that do not speak and do not use symbols. There are very many types of low-intelligence organisms with big social groups (such as birds, ants and honeybees), so having a big social group does not explain intelligence.