Intriguing Claims of Alexis Didier, Master Clairvoyant

Some of the most astonishing nineteenth century evidence for ESP comes in accounts involving Alexis Didier.  The original accounts can be read in the pages of the nineteenth century journal The Zoist, which can be read here.  At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. My post "Still More Nineteenth Century Evidence for ESP" has many quotes from this account, one entitled "Reports of Various Trials of the Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier, Last Summer, in London." 

Alexis Didier was by trade an engraver and artist, but also a skillful writer who produced a work in French describing his experiences with clairvoyance. The book has some very striking and beautifully written passages that I will quote in English. I used the Google Translate utility to produce the translations. 

Alexis Didier

Didier's displays of clairvoyance would often occur after he was hypnotized into a trance-like state. On page 15 Didier discusses being hypnotized. Hypnotism originally went under names such as animal magnetism and artificial somnambulism.  The "magnetic fluid" Didier refers to below is a speculative idea about some invisible fluid that can be manipulated by a hypnotist. We read this complex assertion, which must be one of the most remarkable claims I have ever read:

"When I feel invaded by the magnetic fluid, something indefinable happens within me that delights me, transports me, tenses and convulses my nerves, twists my limbs, upsets my entire inner being, seizes me, possesses me and painfully tears me away from the realities of earthly life that surround me, to open before the inner eye of my mind, endless horizons; this first sensation, always painful, is succeeded by a feeling of well-being; material obstacles becoming more transparent than crystal, no longer block my vision. The entire Universe is before me, and I can transport myself from one pole to the other with the speed of lightning; I can converse with the Kaffirs, walk in China, descend into the mines of Australia, enter the harem of the Sultan in less than an hour, without fatigue; for the soul, daughter of God, has only to will in order to be, like her father, everywhere; this power which triumphs over space and allows the soul to transport itself from one place to another, is nothing in comparison with that which makes it victorious over time and which makes all the centuries present to my sight. The vanished generations, which, more numerous than the grains of sand of the sea, have lived on earth, appear at my will or at the evocation of the consultant, in their perfect individuality, having the costumes, the features, the morals, the habits, the character which distinguished them during their stay here below. The past for me is not dead, it is living. There is a pious belief that makes one religiously preserve, enshrined in gold and precious stones, the relics of the saints, and that makes one believe that there remains something of their soul, their spirit; of their heart, in a word, of their personality, in these fragments of their dead body. For me, I see them, re-existing entirely in body, in soul, in spirit, in holiness, under the smallest particle of an object that they touched during their life, and I enjoy their real presence, as if they were still on this earth."

On page 20 Alexis tells us this:

"When I touch, I feel, I breathe, I see this vital essence, it is the man or woman from whom it emanates and that it contains only by an electrical contact that incorporates me so to speak to them, that I touch, that I feel, that I breathe, that I see; it is this that makes me enter into direct communion of thought, of feeling, of sensation with those who are in relation with me; with the help of a simple lock of hair or a letter, I touch them, I feel them, I see them, I hear them, they live in me their life, I feel myself suffering from their pain, enjoying their enjoyment, loving their love; my soul, freed from the bonds of the flesh, touches them unites in spirit with them."

One of the strangest phenomena reported under hypnotism is a phenomenon called the transposition of the senses. When the phenomenon occurs, a hypnotized person may report receiving sensations from parts of the body other than the eye. He may report seeing through the epigastrium (the upper central part of the abdomen), or seeing through his fingertips. You can read accounts of this strange "transposition of the senses" phenomenon in my seven posts here.  Using the term "lucidity" to mean clairvoyance, and the term "sleepwalker" to mean a hypnotized person, Didier reports the following on page 22:

"In the state of upheaval in which lucidity occurs, the sleepwalker no longer has recourse to the ordinary organs of sight. Thus, I sometimes read with the epigastrium, when I feel that my soul, removed from the empire of the flesh, radiates spiritually through this organ. This sight is painful, it only operates with jolts and electric tremors. It is called second sight, because it appears second place and that it is only the privilege of a few beings on earth, who owe it to a certain unhealthy disposition."

On page 38 Didier tells us this, using the term "sleepwalkers" for hypnotized subjects obtaining clairvoyance, which he calls "lucidity":

"The soul is an immaterial though substantial being, created by God in each man at the moment of his birth, of the nature of the angels and immortal like them; it is invisible to the senses and can only be seen by sleepwalkers gifted with a very high lucidity; it is enclosed in the body as in a prison...The soul is therefore a simple being emanating from God, without participating in its nature and without proceeding from it. It is sovereignly, actively and essentially intelligent, from the moment when, returned so to speak to itself, it is separated from the body; because then it knows everything, sees everything, flies from one end of the universe to the other, walks in time as in its domain, and reanimates at will the vanished generations; nothing is hidden from him any more, because what limits the faculties of man is the imperfection of the material organs, limited, finite and often altered, which serve him in the usual operations of life."

On page 54 Didier speculates about a kind of spiritual fluid or energy that permeates nature, rather sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking about the Force: 

"There exists spread throughout the world a subtle, luminous, imponderable fluid, which mysteriously animates all the parts of creation where it maintains movement and to which it gives invisible life to the eye of the senses; we feel its presence, but we see it only in the state of lucidity where it appears a breath of light taking in turn all the colors of the rainbow; it is it which makes plants vegetate, it is it which makes animals and men live. This spiritual fluid is one, but it modifies its nature differently according to the body which it animates; its absence produces death in the parts where its presence maintained life."

On page 68 Didier talks about what it is like to be clairvoyant when hypnotized: 

"For me, under the convulsive action of the magnetic fluid, I feel, so to speak, completely transformed: it seems to me that life has withdrawn within me and has awakened an inner being who enjoys infinitely more extensive faculties; I feel myself endowed with organs infinitely more exquisite and more perfected than in the waking state, and the most audacious enterprises seem to me child's play, for I feel a force, a light which act powerfully in me and allow me to accomplish, without hesitation, the most extreme desires of my consultants.

As soon as I have in my hands a lock of hair impregnated with the vital fluid of an individual living here below, with the electric rapidity with which the sensation operates, my spirit finds itself carried away in space and reunited with that of this individual; I have sought a name to describe this astonishing marvel which instantly unites me in spirit with the persons whose clothing is given to me or a lock of hair, and I have not found one more expressive than that of communion. Indeed, my spirit, triumphing over space with incalculable rapidity, will unite with the one whose fluid I feel in the part of the world where he is at the moment when I am put in contact with him, and I am so well present in spirit in the same place as him, that I hear the language of the people who surround him without understanding it, if the language is unknown to me, and that I am able to describe, in their most minute details, the beauties or the particularities of the sites or monuments which surround him.

If I like, to paint this miraculous union of spirits across space with an electric instantaneity, to use the word communion, it is because I feel completely identified with the individual with whom I am in contact; my presence, although invisible, is so real, that not only can I look through the windows of the apartment he lives in, hear what is said to him and what he answers, see what he does, read what he writes, but also because I suffer from the illness from which he suffers, I am worried by his worries, happy with his joys; my face sometimes takes on the air of his face, and my writing becomes his writing. I know perfectly well that everything I write here is so magical in appearance, although true in reality, that if I had not witnessed these phenomena and convinced the most intelligent men of this century of their reality, I would not dare to have it printed."

Later a medical doctor named Joseph Bodes Buchanan would publish  a long book called Manual of Psychometry: Dawn of a New Civilization, a book which claimed to document many examples of what is described by Didier above: an ability of someone to obtain information about someone in an anomalous way merely by touching something the person had once owned or worn, or perhaps touching a lock of the person's hair. For example, he claims on this page: "Thus, a lock of hair, or an article of clothing, may be made the means of forming a correct diagnosis." 

On page 84 Didier tells about clairvoyance (which he calls "lucidity") obtained by hypnotized subjects, which he refers to as magnetized subjects ("animal magnetism" being the word used for hypnotism before the word hypnotism came into common use):

"The first characteristic of lucidity is to allow magnetized subjects to see distinctly, with closed eyes and even blindfolded, the objects which are presented to them, with the epigastrium or the tips of the fingers. The second consists in penetrating the most opaque bodies, in seeing what a closed box contains, in reading in an uncut book which is totally unknown to them, the page which is indicated to them, in perceiving objects through a piece of furniture or a wall, as if the walls of the wall and the piece of furniture had become transparent to them like a sheet of glass; in going in spirit to all the countries of the world, to enter into communion with the individuals with whom they have been put in contact, so that they can give news of them. Lucidity has as its characteristic the faculty that we have just enumerated. It is certain that with such powerful means of informing oneself, the somnambulist must enjoy an intelligence and a science as profound as superior. "

On page 158 Didier discusses some of the philosophical relevance of the displays of clairvoyance he so successfully produced on so many occasions. Again, the term "lucidity" is used for clairvoyance:

"These facts, some of which I have cited, have been repeated often enough for my name to enjoy, in public opinion, a great reputation for lucidity. I take advantage of this celebrity to make known to man, not the dogmas of a new philosophy, but to explain to him one of the most elementary truths of all religions, the existence and immortality of the soul. There is no doubt that, if I did not possess within me an immaterial principle, I could not launch myself into space, to an immense distance, and contemplate what takes place in the most distant countries. There is, moreover, no doubt that this principle, being immaterial, is indecomposable, and must resist and survive this crisis of decomposition that we call death."

Below is a 19th-century newspaper article about Alexis Didier:

An 1875 newspaper account complains about the failure of spiritualists to find a missing person named Charley Ross. We read this reference to a feat of clairvoyance by Alexis Didier:

"If the spiritualists wish to secure believers they should find Charley Ross. That is a magnificent opening for clairvoyance, or mediumship, or whatever it may happen to be. We are the more surprised at their utter failure in that case for the reason that  professional clairvoyants, such as Alexis Didier, have actually solved much more difficult problems than that. He once really discovered a child who had been abducted, murdered, and the body conveyed to a distant province (it was in France) and concealed at the bottom of a disused dry well."

At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. On pages 158 to 162 of Edwin Lee's 1866 book Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism, you can read five pages of description of the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier.  We are told that Alexis could play cards "while his eyes were padded over and bandaged." We read Lee state this:

"Alexis also described my room in the hotel, and stated that there was something white on the night table close to the bed, which I denied, believing there was nothing of the kind ; but on my return I found a large piece of the white bed-curtain covering  the top of the night-table. On another occasion he described minutely the  particulars of my apartment in London, even to two engravings (representing the story of Mazeppa)."

On another page of Lee's book we read this:

"During his sojourn at Brighton, Alexis gave numerous proofs of his extraordinary clairvoyant and perspective power as regarded his being able to designate cards while with their faces to the table, to read lines from any book opened at random, the opened page being placed on his forehead, on the top or back of his head. He was frequently requested by one or other of the company assembled at the seances to read some words or lines at ten, fifteen, or any stated number of pages further on than where the book was opened. He then took a pen or pencil, drew a line at some part of the page, saying that the words which he wrote down would be found at the corresponding level of the page indicated, and he was seldom wrong as to the words, though he was not unfrequently as to the precise number of pages ; the words, though on the same level, being sometimes found a page or two nearer or further on than that specified. On one occasion the trial was made with a book, the leaves of which were uncut, and which had to be cut open to ascertain the accordance of the printed words with those which the clairvoyant had written."

I have never heard anyone mention the relevance of HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) to the topic of clairvoyance. The first topic is quite relevant to the second. Cases of  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) are cases of rare humans with the most astonishing ability to recall details of almost every day of their adult life. Evidence for such cases is documented in my posts here. From HSAM subjects such as Jill Price, we know that small numbers of humans have memory powers very dramatically beyond those possessed by the average human. Given such a HSAM reality (not disputed by scientists), it seems all the more reasonable to believe that some humans have powers of clairvoyance beyond anything experienced by the great majority of humans -- particularly given that the evidence for clairvoyance is vastly deeper than the evidence for  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory). I can recall only one HSAM case from the nineteenth century (the very well-documented case of Daniel McCartney described here). But well-documented cases of clairvoyance from the 19th century are very many (and you can read about some of them in my series of posts here). 

Powers such as HSAM and clairvoyance are unthinkable if you are a brain, but powers we can believe in, because you are a soul, not a brain. We know various physical limits and physical shortfalls of all brains (limits which should actually prevent anyone from ever being able to instantly recall using a brain or instantly learn by means of a brain). We understand no physical limits of souls.

Once Again, the Nobel Prize Organization Blunders

 My 2018 post "'Nobel's Razor' as a Rule of Thumb for Judging Science Claims" rather naively suggested a "rule of thumb" for judging whether something is top-notch well-established science, a rule based on whether some scientific claim or research has won a Nobel Prize. At the time I wrote that post in 2018, I was not aware of some cases of the Nobel Prize committee bungling in its granting of awards, and bungling in its statements announcing awards, cases I have since learned about, some of which I describe in my 2024 post here and my 2025 post here. I have now added at the end of that 2018 post a statement retracting my claim that we should trust any research that has won a Nobel Prize, and modifying my recommendation, suggesting that such a "Nobel's Razor" principle works as only a very rough rule of thumb, with there  being notable exceptions. 

I now regard the awarding the Nobel Prizes with significantly greater skepticism than I had in 2018. I have come to realize that the awarding of a Nobel Prize (along with the announcements of such prizes) may often be part of the social construction of some unfounded triumphal legend that serves the misguided agenda of materialists. Let us look at some Nobel Prize awards that should not have been awarded, or that were accompanied by incorrect statements by a Nobel Prize committee when the award was made. 

• In 2014 a Nobel Prize committee made the big mistake of awarding a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology to John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."  There is no robust evidence that any such positioning system exists in the brain. The reference to cells is a reference to cells that are wrongly referred to as "place cells" (a catchy cell nickname that went viral).  My post here discusses how the research of these three failed to provide any good evidence for place cells or a navigation system in the brain. The original "place cell" papers of John O'Keefe are badly guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes. For example, a 1993 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Phase Relationship Between Hippocampal Place Units and the EEG Theta Rhythm." The paper used way-too-small study group sizes of only three rats and two rats.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some wavy-line analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary. To give another example, a 2008 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory." The paper used a way-too-small study group size of only two rats. No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. Scientists claiming "place cells" in the brain are guilty of "see what you hoped to see" pareidolia that is a kind of "seeing Jesus in the toast" affair. 
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• A Nobel Prize organization made the big mistake of giving Christian Anfinsen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.  The 2022 paper "The Anfinsen Dogma: Intriguing Details Sixty-Five Years Later" tried to reproduce Anfinsen's experiment that got him that prize, but was unable to reproduce them.  That paper tells us about some of the false claims made about Anfinsen's work. We read, "The statement reported in many textbooks that Anfinsen removed denaturing and reducing agents by means of dialysis has no confirmation in the literature."  The authors state flatly that the main research result claimed by Anfinsen (a claim that got him the Nobel Prize) -- the result that "RNase refolds spontaneously into correct secondary and tertiary structures" is a result that "must be completely refused" (in other words, a result that is dead wrong). 
• In 1999 a Nobel Prize committee bungled by awarding a Nobel Prize to Gunter Blobel, "for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell." We do not know how protein molecules end up in the right places in a cell, and do not know how the right type of cells end up in the right positions in a body. No one has ever discovered signals that "govern" such a transportation. The verbs "govern," "regulate" and "guide" are words that are enormously misused in the fields of biochemistry and biology, to try to suggest that little things such as genes have powers of control or guidance or construction that they do not have. Engaging in "give me an inch, and I'll take a mile" nonsense, a page on the Nobel Prize web site makes this untrue claim: "In 1975 Günter Blobel showed that in certain cases amino acids in a protein serve as an address label that determines where a protein is to be delivered." Cells have no addressing system, and proteins do not have any addresses or address labels. Claims to the contrary based on very limited studies of yeast cells are "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" examples of pareidolia and wishful-thinking speculation. 

• In 1995 a Nobel Prize committee made an inappropriate award to Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus “for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development." A gene merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Genes do not have any specification of anything larger than a protein molecule, and it was incorrect to claim "a genetic control of early embryonic development." 

On the website of the Nobel Prize organization, there is a list of prize winners in each category. The list has prize descriptions that tend to be very concise, consisting of a single sentence. Such descriptions are mostly unobjectionable. But if you click near the description of an award for a particular year, you will go to other pages on the site that contain incorrect information, which may be in either a press release or some biography of one of the prize winners. 

So, for example, the entry for the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for the year 2000 has the sparse claim that the prize was awarded to Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel “for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system.” That's a modest claim. But each of these names has a link to a biography, and clicking on the link for Eric Kandel takes you to a dogma-infected page on the Nobel Prize site. We have the untrue claim that brain signals "control our bodies and behavior." That's wrong; we control our bodies and behavior. We have the false claim that "short-term and long-term memories are formed by different signals," and the assurance that this is true "in all animals that learn, from molluscs to man." Scientists do not have any understanding of how a brain could cause a human to learn, and they do not at all understand how a signal could cause memory storage in a brain.

Kandel's work on snails did nothing to prove that learning occurs by the modification or strengthening of synapses. Synapses randomly change in strength and size and number, partially because they are made of proteins with average lifetimes of only a few weeks and are attached to dendritic spines that tend not to last for months. So it is always possible to examine a few synapses and claim that they strengthened when learning occurred; but such claims are never robust evidence that the learning caused the change in some synapses. And the tiny size of a synaptic cleft (about 1000 times smaller than a neuron soma width) makes it all-but-impossible to reliably measure the strength of synapses. 

Now let me finally explain why this post has the title "Once Again, the Nobel Prize Organization Blunders." The latest blunder I am referring to is mainly the awarding of the year 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. That award went to Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth for some research that used a light-zapping technique called optogenetics.  The choice was a poor one. The research of these figures was not very important research; and although widely used these days, optogenetics has done very little to substantially increase our understanding of brains or minds. 

I can give some background information. Optogenetics is some technique in which a tiny wire is inserted into an organism, to send light to some part of an organism (often an organism that has been genetically modified to be more sensitive to such light manipulation). The technique has been used for a wide variety of research, much of it very low-quality research guilty of procedural sins such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes. 

In their press release on the latest Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, the Nobel Prize organization has made the very bad mistake of failing to distinguish between good research using optogenetics and bad research using optogenetics. The very first sentence of the press release is this bogus boast: "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 is awarded for optogenetics — a method that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain." No robust research using optogenetics did anything to show that "nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviors in the living brain."

Neuroscience research using optogenetics has tended to be very low-quality research. Some examples of such poorly-designed experiments are discussed in my posts here and here. The Nobel Prize press release makes this groundless claim: "Using optogenetics, researchers have been able to reveal neural circuits governing specific memories, feelings, and behaviours relevant for neurological and psychiatric disorders." No such thing occurred. The Nobel Prize press release fails to link to any scientific papers that back up such a claim  A Google search or Google Scholar search will reveal various memory-related papers using optogenetics, but such papers tend to be low in quality. 

I can give a sketch of a typical optogenetics experiment. A small number of mice fewer than 20 (sometimes genetically modified to be more sensitive to light zapping) will be trained to fear a shock plate. A little optogenetic wire will be inserted into the brains of these mice, with the scientists guessing about where the memory of the shock plate was stored.  Then these mice will be put in a cage. and some energy will be sent down the optogenetic wire. The mobility of the mice (how often they move during some arbitrary time unit) will be measured, and compared to the mobility of mice in a similar cage, who were not brain-zapped using optogenetics. If lesser mobility is seen in the brain-zapped mice, this will be claimed as evidence that the optogenetic stimulation caused the mice to remember the shock they received, so that they "froze in fear."  This is the idea of artificial memory reactivation. An example of a very low-quality paper using a method like this can be found here. The study group sizes are 5 and 12, way-too-small for any strong evidence to be claimed. The paper fails to report any sample size calculation, a failure typical in junk science experimental studies. 

This research design is nonsensical. First of all, you would have no good evidence of an artificial elicitation of a memory unless the experiment used at least 15 or 20 rodents per study group; but experiments of this type usually use only a way-too-small study group size maybe half as large as that (with the expense of optogenetics used as an excuse for the tiny study group size). Second, you do not show that a fearful memory is being recalled by showing that some group of mice getting optogenetic stimulation was less mobile than some other group not getting such stimulation. This "freezing behavior" technique is a worthless technique for judging whether a rodent remembered something, for reasons I explain at length in my post here. Third, it is unreliable to a particularly strong degree to be combining the unreliable "freezing behavior" method with optogenetic stimulation, as the very act of stimulation may itself be causing an increase in "freezing behavior," because mice being brain-zapped may be more likely to be immobile (i.e. "freeze"), regardless of what they are recalling. 

What often goes on is that optogenetics is being used as a kind of hi-tech gloss, a "glamor spray" to give an aura of respectability to crappy-design studies that we should not respect because they are guilty of multiple forms of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study groups, and the use of unreliable techniques for measuring fear or recall in rodents. 

What the Nobel Prize organization has done this year is to issue the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for a method of research (optogenetics) that is by now thoroughly entangled with junk science research and very highly associated with bad methods, Questionable Research Practices and poor design in experiments. That does not make sense, because in the fields of medicine and physiology there are so many researchers who follow good practices, researchers who produced important results so much better than almost anything that has come from the soggy swampland that is optogenetics research, which is a kind of "play around by zapping cells" sandbox or playground that is fun for zapping-fixated neuroscientists, but of little clear value to the advancement of medicine or physiology. 

There are hundreds of types of things scientists should be doing that are far more useful in understanding brains and minds than zapping parts of the brain with optogenetics or zapping particular cells with optogenetics. One of those things is adequately studying medical case histories that contradict "brains make minds" dogma and "brains store memories" dogma. Another of those things is adequately studying cases of exceptional human mental performance (discussed here, here, here and here), and pondering whether such cases are compatible with "brains make minds" dogma and "brain store memories" claims, given all of the many physical shortfalls in all brains, which neuroscientists fail to adequately study and pay attention to. 

This year the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Francis Halzen  "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin." This was another poor choice by the Nobel Prize organization. No very important discovery has come from such an observatory. Neutrinos are particles of no significance to the current existence of life or Earth's habitability, in the sense that all of us would get along just fine without neutrinos. We have long known that neutrinos constantly flow very abundantly from the sun, and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory discovered a few dozen cases of neutrinos coming from high-energy sources outside of the solar system. Such a not-at-all-surprising discovery is of no great significance. It has been known for several decades that there are rare places beyond our solar system that are high-energy sources of intense radiation, so being able to detect some neutrinos from a few sources beyond the solar system is a "just what we expected" type of thing. Most of these claimed neutrino detections from outside the solar system are mere "statistical significance" things that are not solid proof, and apparently only a handful of these detections are "solid proof" type of things.  

There were hopes that much grander things than run-of-the-mill neutrinos would be discovered by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, things such as "sterile neutrinos" or the direct detection of dark matter of maybe some evidence for string theory. But such hopes have not been realized. Given such a shortfall  and given "count on the fingers of your hands" observational results (counting only the firmly established observations), it is puzzling that  Halzen got a Nobel Prize. 

Postscript: I will give another example of a low-quality research paper that uses optogenetics. The paper is "Labelling and optical erasure of synaptic memory traces in the motor cortex," a paper that (like so many neuroscience papers) has a title that makes a groundless boast of doing something that was not done. Examining mice, the authors claim to have identified some dendritic spines that changed during a learning activity. Because mice have billions of dendritic spines, and because most such dendritic spines have short lifetimes and are constantly changing in size, there is zero reason to believe that the few dendritic spines the authors chose are any such things as "synaptic memory traces" or memory traces of any kind. The authors used optogenetics to zap their selected spines, and claim that following this, there was a weakened memory performance. There is no reason to assume any causal relation between such an activity and the claimed decrease in memory performance, particularly since the number of cells and dendrites involved was very small (less than 20).  The number of mice used is never clearly specified in the paper, and when that occurs there is typically a high probability that the study group sizes were some way-too-small number such as less than 10 mice. My best guess looking at the figures was that the study groups had an average size of only about six mice (way too small for the author's claims to be taken seriously). No claims of a sample size calculation is made. No use was made of a blinding protocol, and no use is made of a control group. The graphs provide no clear evidence of a significant change in memory produced by the optogenetic zapping. This is very low-quality science. 

Instead of fancy new zap-the-brain technology such as optogenetics, what neuroscience needs is good old-fashioned best practices and methodological rigor -- things such as adequate study group sizes, adequate statistical power, high reproducibility, proper blinding protocols, pre-registration, and sound methods for measuring things such as memory and recall. Such things are very badly missing in a large fraction of all neuroscience studies today, which are written by investigators who seem more interested in increasing their citation counts (by making unwarranted but sensational claims) than in following sound scientific methods for revealing truth. 

Looking Back at My Blogging Activity, Part 4: The Year 2016

This is the fourth in a series of occasional posts in which I will look back at particular years of my blogging activity. In this post I will look at my blogging activity in the year 2016. 

My January 2016 post "The Possibility of a Paraverse" is one well worth reading. The concept of a multiverse is that there are many other universes very different from our own, which have no causal interaction with our own universe. I explained why the concept of a multiverse is of no explanatory value. I contrasted that idea with the different idea of what I called a paraverse, another realm of existence parallel to our own, with there being a two-way interaction between our universe and that other realm of existence. The idea is illustrated below, in which the arrows represent causal interaction. 

My January 2016 science fiction story "Immortal Survival" is one of my better sci-fi yarns, one about the ultimate "winner-take-all" reality TV show. It had the visual below. 

My February 2016 post "The Gigantic Missing Link of Biological Life" was one of the first posts I published on the issue of whether DNA or its genes have any such thing as a blueprint, recipe or specification for making a human body.  In the post I argue that DNA and its genes were no such thing. I now consider this issue to be of great philosophical importance.  One reason is that mainstream claims that humans are the result of accidental random mutations are claims that are  discredited once we realize that DNA and its genes have no such thing as a blueprint, program or recipe for making a human body or any of its cells. 

My March 2016 post "Are We All Blindfolded Lab Rats In Their Big Gene Gamble?" is one that warned about the risks of experimenting with genomes. The concerns I expressed now seem very reasonable, given that multiple US intelligence agencies concluded (with varying degrees of confidence) that the COVID-19 epidemic resulted from a lab leak after bungling genetic experimentation. 

My March 2016 post "Gene-Spliced Super-Geniuses Are Not on the Horizon"  was one that criticized a ridiculous 2016 Nautilus article groundlessly claiming "Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming," one claiming that scientists will soon be able to genetically engineer humans to have an IQ of 1000. Ten years later it is clear I was on the right side here. There is actually zero basis for believing that genetic engineering will ever produce humans with much higher intelligence.  One reason is that genes do not actually specify the structure of the human brain or any of its cells or any of the organelles of such cells or any of the protein complexes used by such cells. Another reason is that the human brain is not the source of the human mind, and is not a storage place of human memories, for reasons I explain in the greatest detail in the posts of my blog here and in the single book here. 

My June 2016 post "Cloud Computing and the Concept of Non-local Consciousness" was one that showed how I was starting to realize that brains cannot explain humans minds and human memory. I stated this: 

"Faced with the problem of consciousness, and the problem of how our memories our stored, a typical neurologist confines himself to the 'inside the box' assumption that the mind must somehow be generated by the brain. So he keeps thinking about some way that chemicals or neuron patterns or electricity might generate consciousness or store memories. This approach has been futile. After decades of knocking their head against this wall, scientists still have no evidence of physical memory traces inside the brain, nor do they have any real understanding of how things such as concepts can arise from the brain. As Rupert Sheldrake says on page 194 of his excellent book Science Set Free, 'More than a century of intensive, well-funded research has failed to pin down memory traces in brains.' The actual answer to the riddle of consciousness may lie in a non-local solution. Our consciousness might arise not from our brains, from some non-local source."

My August 2016 post "There Is No Plausible Explanation For How Brains Can Store Very Long-Term Memory" discussed the failure of all attempts to explain long term memory by any theory of a brain storage of memories. My next post in that month was entitled "The Navigation Argument Against the Idea That Your Brain Stores All Your Memories." It's an argument that stands up very well to do this day: that if your brain were to be storing your memories, you would never be able to instantly find a particular memory, because of the lack of any addresses, indexes or sorting in the brain. My next post gave another but equally strong argument against the claim of a neural storage of memories: the lack of any encoding system that could possibly explain how the type of things humans learn and experience could ever be converted to neural states or synapse states. 

In the year 2018 I would create a blog site dedicated to expanding on such ideas and reasoning, and presenting the massive evidence against claims that the brain is the source of the mind and that the brain is the storage place of human memories.  I have continued to post regularly at that site since 2018, and the site now has more than 450 posts pertinent to its stated theme. 

My November 2016 science fiction story "Buried Memories of the Distant World" is one of my best. At the time I wrote the story, I never dreamed that the scenario depicted may be of very great philosophical relevance. The story is one about interstellar colonists who lost the memory of the planet they were born on, because they were put in hibernation for a long interstellar voyage. In real life there are dreams and statements by those having near-death experiences that suggest the theory of the nonearthly preexistence of the human soul, a theory I describe in my post here. If such a theory is correct, then we may all be like those I describe in my story "Buried Memories of the Distant World." 

The year 2016 was one of my prime years as a photographer of the spooky and mysterious. In 2016 I added 1697 posts to my "Orb Pro" blog. An example of the type of photos I got in great abundance in 2016 was the photo below from December 28, 2016, showing mysterious blue orbs in Grand Central Terminal in New York. 

The same day I got the photo below showing a green transparent orb. 

You can use the link here to see how very abundant were the mysterious anomalies showing up in my photos of December, 2016. The anomalies you will see include a repetition of stripe patterns in mysterious striped orbs, as shown here.

8 Discoveries and Non-Discoveries That Should Shape Your Worldview

 A video by Nate Hagens has the title "11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview."  He says at the beginning that what he will discuss are "really fundamental learnings, that over time developed and shaped my worldview." The list of things that he gives is a rather poor list. It is below:

1.  "The Power, Finiteness and Externalities of Oil." He basically gives us the Peak Oil thesis, which may be important to man's future. But it is not something very relevant to a person's philosophy about the fundamental nature of things. 
2. "Energy Primacy." No real discovery is discussed. 
3. "The Wanting Is Stronger Than the Having." No real discovery is discussed, just a debatable  generalization.  
4. "We Are All Made of Stars." This "discovery" is an incorrect claim. He claims incorrectly at the 13:42 mark to have realized that he is "recycled star matter," which is a misleading way to describe a human being, physically a state of the most enormous  organization. At the 14:11 mark he most incorrectly states "we are all made of stars." At the 14:40 mark he most incorrectly describes a human as "self-aware stardust." A human being physically is actually a state of vast hierarchical organization and information richness that is the exact opposite of unorganized information-free dust.  Physically, humans are made of cells, not stars. 
5. "Sexual/natural selection and evolutionary psychology." So-called natural selection is a dogma of scientists about a claimed survival-of-the-fittest effect that is not actually selection. Evolutionary psychology is one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason." We have that kind of unconvincing talk around the middle of Hagens' video.
6. "The Importance of Net Energy." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
7. "Money is a CLAIM on Reality." There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
8. "Technology is a 'Straw.' " There's no real discovery mentioned after this concept is mentioned. 
9. "Competition and Cooperation." There's no real discovery mentioned after this phrase is mentioned, and after mentioning the phrase Hagens starts teaching the very dubious doctrine of group selection, which is rejected even by many evolutionary biologists. We have some talk about some chicken experiment, and we should chuckle when Hagen says this experiment "reshaped how I see human behavior and human systems." 
10. "Humanity Is the Ecosystem." There's a transition card that fails to have a title, but this claim is made at the 32:15 mark in the video. There's no real discovery mentioned.
11. "Humans, Humanity and the Superorganism." He claims that over time people in large groups behave more like a "mindless, unthinking economic superorganism" (33:51 mark). There's  no real discovery mentioned.

Hagens had a very good idea for a youtube.com video, one entitled "11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview."  But his video is not very enlightening. In it we hear of no important discoveries that should change a person's worldview. 

Let me take that good title, and use it as an inspiration for a post entitled "8 Discoveries and Non-Discoveries That Should Shape Your Worldview." I will pay attention to both non-discoveries and discoveries, because some of the most important things that should shape your worldview are things that failed to be discovered; and observational failures can be as important as indicators of truth as observational successes. 

Item #1: The Big Bang

The claim that the universe had a sudden beginning in the Big Bang is not a mere claim that arose from armchair reasoning. The claim was forced on scientists by two actual discoveries. The first was the discovery that the universe was expanding, which came about from the measurements of galactic redshifts. If we "rewind the tape" on an expanding universe, you are forced to the conclusion of a sudden beginning of the universe. The second discovery was the discovery around 1964 of the cosmic background radiation, a type of radiation predicted by theorists of the Big Bang.  

The discovery of the Big Bang is very definitely one that should shape your worldview, in two different ways. First, the discovery is one that suggests that the universe was deliberately created. There is no theory of an eternal universe that is credible, given both the Big Bang and scientific conclusions that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. All attempts to fit the Big Bang into some theory of an eternal universe end up failing, because of reasons such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy must increase over large spans of time. The entropy in our universe is sufficiently low for it to be clear that the universe has not existed forever. 

Another way that the Big Bang should influence your worldview is because it should open your door to the consideration of the most mind-boggling and fantastic possibilities. The Big Bang theory describes a universe which at its beginning was packed into a single infinitely dense mathematical point. This is the most paranormal and supernatural-seeming beginning we could imagine for any universe. If we are forced to believe in such a beginning, then our minds should be fully open to the possibility of a hundred other strange possibilities such as ESP, ghosts, out-of-body experiences and communication with the dead. Realizing that the universe apparently began in the strangest way imaginable, we cannot exclude such possibilities by thinking thoughts such as "that's too strange to consider seriously." 

Item #2: Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Below are some quotes by scientists relevant to the topic of cosmic fine-tuning:

• "Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one." -- Physicist Thomas Hertog (link).
• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so.  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."  -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link). 
• "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
• "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link). 
• "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 
• "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." --  Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221. 
• "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony”  p. 235.

The reality of cosmic fine-tuning is one that should shape your worldview. You can let this reality sensibly influence your worldview, or stupidly influence your worldview. An example of letting cosmic fine-tuning stupidly influence your worldview would be if you believed that because of cosmic fine-tuning we should believe there is an infinity or near-infinity of universes.  Such a belief about a multiverse actually does nothing to help explain why our universe is fine-tuned, mostly because you do not increase the chance of success on any one random trial by imagining a greater random number of random trials. Read here and here for why the multiverse concept fails to explain cosmic fine-tuning. 

Item #3: The Vast Organization of Human Bodies

The table below explains the vast hierarchical organization of a human body. 

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS, THE MUSCULAR  SYSTEM  AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains 206 bones. The human body has over 600 muscles.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the cardiovascular    system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain. Other organ systems in the human body include the  digestive system,  the respiratory system, the reproductive system, the endocrine system, the urinary system, the immune/lymphatic system and the integumentary system.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUE CONSISTS OF CELLS.	There are roughly 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OF ORGANELLES.	A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of protein molecules that work together to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex.
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

There are several kinds of ways in which the vast organization of a human body should influence your worldview. The reality of the vast organization of the human body should make you more inclined to believe in a purposeful causal reality beyond material explanations, one that helped to produce fantastically organized biological states of matter (extremely abundant in interdependent fine-tuned very complex components) that materialist theories fail to credibly explain. 

Item #4: Brain Physical Shortfalls

The table below explains some of the main physical shortfalls of brains, and their implications. 

BRAIN FACT	IMPLICATION, RELATED FACT OR OBSERVED CONSEQUENCE	SHORTFALL OF ALL BRAINS	IMPLICATION
Neurons, synapses and dendrites are physically rooted in  fixed spots in the brain, like trees rooted in one spot in a forest	There can be no physical sorting in the brain
Neurons have no addresses and no neuron numbers	There can be no indexing in the brain, as indexes require addresses or position numbers	Brains have no sorting, indexing or addresses	Brains cannot explain instant detailed recall, when someone instantly recalls lots of relevant information when hearing a name or seeing a face. Instantly finding just the right information in a brain would require sorting, indexing or addressing in the brain; but the brain has no such things.
Synapses and dendritic spines are made of proteins with short average lifetimes (< 2 weeks)	Synapses are attached to dendritic spines, observed to be unstable, lasting for less than years	Synapses are not a stable medium for storing human memories that can last reliably for 50+ years	The synaptic theory of brain memory storage is untenable
There is no place in the brain capable of stable information storage for decades, except for the DNA in neurons	DNA has been exhaustively analyzed by big, well-funded projects, and no one has ever found any evidence of episodic memories or school -learned knowledge inside DNA.	Brains do not have any place where episodic memories or school-learned knowledge can be stored for decades	The school-learned knowledge and episodic memories held for 50 years by old people cannot be knowledge stored in brains
There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain	There are no moving anatomical parts in the brain that can be called a writing mechanism or a reading mechanism	Brains have no mechanism for writing learned information or reading learned information	Learning of conceptual knowledge cannot be explained by brain mechanisms, nor can the recall of learned conceptual knowledge
Trans- mission of signals between neurons requires passing through endless chemical synapses (typically hundreds of chemical synapses for every neuron)	An individual chemical synapse does not reliably transmit brain signals (action potentials), transmitting it  successfully only 10% to 50% of the time. Brains have no structure supporting the storage of large learned sequences.	Large amounts of precise sequential information (such as large bodies of text) cannot be reliably transmitted across brain regions	A feat which many humans can perform (the exact retrieval of very large bodies of text such as hundreds of pages) cannot be achieved by a retrieval of stored information in a brain.
Each time a nerve signal (action potential) passes over a chemical synapse, there is a delay of about 5 milliseconds, called a synaptic delay.	Signal transmission over every centimeter of brain tissue requires very many  transmissions over many chemical synapses. The cumulative delay caused by very many transmissions across chemical synapses should result in a very significant delay in brain transmission speed. Moreover dendrites (making up 90% of brain tissue) transmit signals at only about 1 meter per second, or as little as one tenth of a meter per second.	The average signal transmission speed in brain areas such as the cortex must be a speed very many times lower than the "100 meters per second" often quoted: a "snail's pace" speed of roughly 1 centimeter per second.	Brains cannot transmit signals at a speed great enough to explain instant human recall of much relevant information, such as when someone is asked to describe some historical figure, and the person instantly starts describing many details of that person's life.
Every neuron in the brain is connected to many other neurons, by means of dendrites and synapses. For any neuron, there is no "next neuron," but instead multiple nearby connected  neurons that are roughly equidistant.		Unlike DNA (which has a linear structure supporting a sequential retrieval of information), brains do not have any structure allowing a sequential retrieval of information	When humans retrieve very large bodes of memorized text in correct sequential order, this cannot be occurring because of a retrieval of information stored in a brain

The physical shortfalls of brains should very greatly influence your worldview. Such shortfalls are some of the largest reasons for rejecting all claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. The person who adequately studies such shortfalls will tend to realize that he is a soul, not a brain. 

Item #5: The Lack of Any DNA Blueprint, Recipe or Program for Building a Human Body or Any Of Its Cells

This item is not a discovery, but a non-discovery. It is a non-discovery with the most enormous implications. 

After DNA was discovered, scientists eagerly hoped that by analyzing it they might discover some kind of blueprint or program for making a human body. They thought this might help solve the great mystery of how their occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vastly more organized complexity of a full human body.  The human genome was exhaustively analyzed by the Human Genome Project, a highly-funded multi-year project which finished in the year 2003. Nothing like any  blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body was discovered. All that was found in DNA and its genes was low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. 

Before the Human Genome Project had completed, scientists were making groundless claims that a specification for making human bodies would be found in DNA. Once the project completed, without the discovery of any such thing, many scientists just kept on telling the lie that DNA had a body blueprint. But many other scientists confessed that DNA and its genes had no such thing. You can read quotes by 40+ such scientists and medical doctors in my post here. 

The claim that human bodies get built because cells read a body blueprint for building bodies was always a very childish lie, for the simple reason that blueprints do not build things. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when intelligent agents such as construction workers read blueprints, and get ideas about how to build things. 

The non-discovery in DNA of any blueprint, recipe or program for building a human body or any of its cells is a non-discovery with the most gigantic implications. What it implies (along with Item #3 in this list) is that every adult human body is a miracle of organization utterly beyond any mechanistic explanation, a wonder of organization that requires a transcendent explanation.  

Item #6: The Discovery of Paranormal Phenomena

The discovery of paranormal phenomena has occurred steadily over the past two centuries. The observational evidence includes the items listed below, and very much more:

• The accounts of very many thousands of reliable witnesses who had near-death experiences, often reporting the most vivid and life-changing experiences at a time when their heart had stopped and their brain waves had shut down, something that should have prevented any experience according to "brains make minds" dogmas. 
• The accounts of very many people reporting out-of-body experiences in which they observed their own bodies from a position meters away (discussed here, here, and here). 

• The many cases in which medical personnel who did not have such experiences verified the medical resuscitation details recalled by people who had near-death experiences, who recalled medical details that occurred when such people should have been completely unconscious because their hearts had stopped.
• Abundant cases of dying people who reported seeing dead relatives.
• Very many cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, with the witness soon learning the person did die at about the time the apparition was seen (discussed in the 18 posts here). 
• Very many cases when multiple witnesses reported seeing the same apparition (discussed in my series of posts here). 
• A great abundance of reports in the nineteenth century of spiritual manifestations such as mysterious raps that spelled out messages, tables moving when no one touched them, tables half-levitating when no one touched them, and tables fully levitating when no  one touched them (discussed in the series of posts here).  
• Spectacular cases in the history of mediums, with paranormal phenomena often being carefully documented by observing scientists, as in the cases of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Leonora Piper, and Indridi Indridason.
• Two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance in which people could observe things far away or observe things when they were blindfolded or observe things in closed containers such as locked boxes. 
• Abundant photographic evidence for mysterious orbs, including 800 photos of mysterious striped orbs, orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns, and orbs appearing with dramatically repeating patterns while falling water was being photographed. 
• Abundant reports of mysterious orbs being seen with the naked eye, described in the 120+ posts here.
• A great abundance of anecdotal evidence for telepathy, with large fractions of the human population reporting telepathic experiences. 
• More than a century of solid laboratory evidence for telepathy, including cases discussed here, here, and here.  
• A great abundance of evidence for a phenomenon of materialization, involving the mysterious appearance of tangible human forms. 
• Extremely numerous cases in which living people report hard-to-explain events and synchronicity suggesting interaction with survivors of death.

Paranormal phenomena help to clarify the utter failure of "brains make minds" explanations, and help to clarify the reality that each of us is a soul beyond the explanation of physical science. 

Item #7: The Non-Discovery of Extraterrestrial Radio Signals

Around 1960 scientists with a materialist and Darwinist worldview were very confident that within a few decades radio signals would be picked up from extraterrestrial civilizations. Such confidence was based on materialist and Darwinist assumptions, such as the assumption that life would arise from non-life on any planet with the right conditions, and the assumption that once life had arisen on a suitable planet, there would almost inevitably be an evolution to intelligent life that could build radio transmitters.  By now the search for extraterrestrial radio signals has gone on for about 65 years, and has been lavishly funded, with many millions of stars and very many galaxies checked for radio signals. No such radio signals have been found. 

The non-discovery of extraterrestrial radio signals is something that should shape your worldview, by causing you to suspect that some of the assumptions that fueled optimism about SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) are incorrect assumptions. In reality, there is no scientific basis for thinking that even the simplest life (a state of very high organization) would ever arise accidentally from non-life; and there is no scientific basis for thinking that if such microscopic life existed, it would ever be some seed eventually leading to the appearance of intelligent life capable of building radio transmitters. We still lack any credible theory explaining the unguided origin of minds and bodies as complex as humans have. 

Below are the links that held up the SETI optimism of around 1970. The non-discovery of extraterrestrial radio signals suggests that some of these links are false assumptions. 

Don't be fooled by the phony clickbait headline recently at BBC Sky at Night Magazine, one falsely boasting of "radio signals" from another planet. What was detected was mere natural radio waves. The term "radio signals" should only be used for deliberate signals coming from an intelligent source. 

Item #8: The Non-Discovery of Learned Information by Microscopic Examination of Brain Tissue

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

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

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

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

The institute is called the Lieber Institute, and its web site is here. The site says that the  Lieber Institute has 48,000 square feet of laboratory space at Johns Hopkins University.  The Lieber Institute claims to have a repository of about 4000 brains.  On another page of the institute, we are told, "Each brain is donated by a bereaved family just hours after the loss of their loved one."

But microscopic examination of these brains has failed to produce any sign of stored memories in human brains. Elsewhere in the world is an even bigger collection of brains, one that also has failed to substantially support claims of a brain basis for memory storage. The Japan Times tells us this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.  

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

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

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

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

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

The non-discovery of memories or any learned information by the microscopic examination of brain tissue is a non-discovery that should help shape your worldview, by giving you further evidence that you are a soul beyond any neural explanation. You need not worry about the loss of your memories when you die. Such memories never existed in your brain, and will not perish when your brain rots away.