Two Biggest Brain Projects Still Fail to Substantiate the Main Dogmas About Brains

In recent years the two largest brain research projects have been a big US project launched in 2013 called the BRAIN Initiative, and a big European Union project launched in 2013 called the Human Brain Project. The BRAIN Initiative has by now received 3 billion dollars in funding, and the Human Brain Project has received about a billion dollars in funding.  In July 2018 I wrote a post describing how the BRAIN Initiative had failed to substantiate claims that the human brain is a storage place for memories and that the human brain is the source of our thinking, consciousness and imagination.  In December of 2020 I wrote another post noting the same failure as of that date.  Let's take one more look to see whether either of the projects has done anything to substantiate the main claims made about brains (claims that conflict with important facts about brains such as the short lifetimes of synaptic proteins, the rapid turnover of dendritic spines that synapses are attached to, the low reliability of synaptic signal transmission, and the abundance of neural signal noise and severe signal slowing factors in brains). 

On the "Achievements" page of the web site of the BRAIN Initiative we have a big boldface headline screaming "Transformative Advances." No such transformative advances have occurred from this project. We still have no understanding of how a brain could think, imagine, store memories for a lifetime, or instantly recall learned knowledge. It's a sign of how meager the results are that half of the articles we see on this "Achievements" page are articles mainly referring  to art contests.  

Clicking on the top link on this "Achievements" page, and going to a page entitled "A look back on the BRAIN Initiative in 2022 (and a look ahead to 2023)," I find that the first paragraph of the first article refers to zapping brains with electricity. We have in the first sentence of this paragraph a link to a story entitled "Jolting the brain’s circuits with electricity is moving from radical to almost mainstream therapy." Seriously, guys, that's your best result? Claims that you can do anything to help someone by zapping their brains with electricity are mainly poorly founded, with there being lots of studies with way-too-small study group sizes, studies that probably report mainly placebo effects. If you have some neuroscientist in a white coat telling someone, "Put this apparatus on your brain -- we think it may help you," you will probably get people to report improvements, just as they would if someone in a white coat said, "Try this wonderful new pill," and gave merely a sugar pill. If your memories were stored in your brain, you would never improve things by zapping your brain with electricity. Try using a taser on your computer, and you will find it probably destroys your computer's data. 

Later on the same page of the BRAIN Initiative, we have an unfounded claim: 

"A study on memory supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative was published in March in Nature. Through this work, researchers uncovered information on how the brain forms, organizes, and recollects memories through a series of tests that showed patients film clips with distinctive transitions."

For a thorough discussion of how this claim was groundless, read my post here, entitled "US Government Gives Us Fake News About Brains and Memory."  Nowhere else on this page (or a page describing 2021 results) do we get references to research that substantiates claims that the brain is the storage place of human memories or the source of the human mind. 

Looking at the web site of the Human Brain Project, I see a page listing "Highlights and Achievements of 2023." It mentions only these two results, neither related to the claims of cognitive neuroscience:

• "Human Brain Project researchers improve Parkinson's disease classification"
• "Personalised brain modeling technique may lead to breakthroughs in clinical epilepsy trial"

The same page lists only these ""Highlights and Achievements of 2022."

• "Human Brain Project researchers improve Parkinson's disease classification
• Personalised brain modeling technique may lead to breakthroughs in clinical epilepsy trial
• New method for measuring brain activity could help multiple sclerosis patients
• Conscious perception of sound is carried by dedicated assemblies of neurons in the brain
• Human Brain Project researchers identify new marker of ALS outcome
• Researchers of the Human Brain Project identify seven new areas in the insular cortex
• Multiscale simulations unveil molecular mechanisms that shape brain plasticity
• Human Brain Project researchers map four new brain areas involved in many cognitive processes
• HBP scientists have simulated how the Parkinson’s brain responds to deep stimulation at multiple scales
• Brain simulation augments machine-learning–based classification of dementia
• Energy Efficiency of Neuromorphic Hardware Practically Proven
• HBP scientists have developed personalised brain models to improve the treatment of depression
• HBP researchers reveal how the volumes of brain regions change in Parkinson’s disease
• New implant offers promise for the paralyzed"

There are no reports here of important progress in cognitive neuroscience. The only one of these links that sounds like something having relevance to the main dogmas about brains is the link entitled "Human Brain Project researchers map four new brain areas involved in many cognitive processes." But clicking on that link merely takes us to a page describing the study of ten brains from dead people. Nothing we see on that page does anything to substantiate the idea that these areas are "involved in many cognitive processes."

The same page lists only these "Highlights and Achievements of 2021."

• "Human Brain Project: Researchers design artificial cerebellum that can learn to control a robot’s movement
• HBP scientists outline in Science how brain research makes new demands on supercomputing
• When algorithms get creative
• Human Brain Project researchers demonstrate highly efficient deep learning on a spiking neuromorphic chip
• EBRAINS shares access to improved laptop-to-supercomputer brain simulator
• A robot on EBRAINS has learned to combine vision and touch
• EBRAINS robot simulation one step closer to in-hand object manipulation
• EBRAINS powers brain simulations to give insight into consciousness and its disorders
• New EBRAINS-enabled tool to help guide surgery in drug-resistant epilepsy patients
• HBP research contributes to new treatment for spinal cord injury."

There are no reports here of important progress in cognitive neuroscience. The contents reported under years earlier than 2021 are described in my earlier post here.  None of the highlights are robust reports of progress in cognitive neuroscience. The main difference between the list of achievements on the web site of the BRAIN Initiative and the web site of the Human Brain Project is that the second has been fully honest and the first has not. The web site on the BRAIN Initiative made the untrue claim that one of its projects "uncovered information on how the brain forms, organizes, and recollects memories," when no such thing was actually done; for the claim refers to some junk science I debunk in my post here, entitled "US Government Gives Us Fake News About Brains and Memory." 

At its beginning the BRAIN Initiative announced grandiose goals such as this: "To map the circuits of the brain, measure the fluctuating patterns of electrical and chemical activity flowing within those circuits, and understand how their interplay creates our unique cognitive and behavioral capabilities."  No such understanding has come. And it never can possibly occur, because such a goal is based on a false idea: that the human mind is the product of the brain. The BRAIN Initiative promised to produce "Systematic theories of how information is encoded in the chemical and electrical activity of the brain." No such theories have been produced. There is not a neuroscientist in the world who has a detailed theory of exactly how a brain could even encode as simple an idea as the statement "my dog has fleas." Theories of memory storage and encoding by such neuroscientist are merely jargon-cluttered and mathematically decorated hand-waving without any precise theoretical examples of exact memory storage in a brain. 

Experimental neuroscience has for many years been in a very poor state in which Questionable Research Practices dominate. Junk science is more the norm than the exception in experimental neuroscience, where we see many bad practices such as:

• Way too-small study group sizes.
• A failure to pre-register what hypothesis an experiment will be testing, and how the experiment will be done, leading to "keep torturing the data until it confesses" kind of situations..
• Publication bias in which positive results are more likely to get published, creating a situation in which negative results are not written up, and data is sliced and diced until some positive result can be reported. 
• Typically a lack of any blinding protocol.
• The use of convoluted arbitrary "make it up as you go along" analysis pathways that do not lead to reproducible results, and often amount to mainly "smoke and mirrors" parlor tricks.
• The use of poor methods such as trying to measure animal fear by arbitrary subjective judgments of "freezing behavior" rather than reliable methods such as measuring heart rate spikes
• A lack of researcher interest in replicating results. 
• Numerous other examples of the 50 Questionable Research Practices listed here. 

A 2017 paper entitled "Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature" states this:

"False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience."

A 2020 paper analyzing neuroscience research complains that "irreproducible, inflated effect sizes were ubiquitous, no matter the method." The 2022 paper here shocks us by mentioning that "there are no completed large-scale replication projects focused on neuroscience."  We read this:

"The only large-scale replication project focused on neuroscience, still in progress, is the #EEGManyLabs project, which aims to replicate findings from 20 of the most influential studies in the field in three or more independent laboratories, with experimental designs and protocols to be reviewed before data collection as registered reports (Pavlov et al., 2021)....Since there are no completed large-scale replication projects focused on neuroscience, one can only guess what the results would be. In the aforementioned replication projects, roughly half of effects reached statistical significance in the same direction as their original studies, and effect sizes were typically half those of the originals, though these results certainly do not necessitate that a neuroscience-focused project would show the same results, and replicability may vary widely across subfields of neuroscience."

Neither the BRAIN Initiative nor the Human Brain Project did anything to change this appalling state of affairs. The quality of experimental neuroscience research was in general poor before these expensive projects started in 2013, and the quality of experimental neuroscience research is now just as bad. There are several reasons why the state of experimental neuroscience is very poor. Besides a system that incentivizes the number of published papers written and the number of paper citations received (rather than the quality and reproducibility of research), one of those reasons is that neuroscientists are trying to prove dogmas about brains that are untrue. The person trying to prove something that is untrue will tend to be guilty of bad methods. 

There can be no great success in projects such as the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, because they were dedicated to proving false ideas, such as the idea that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memory. Trying to prove such things by studying brains was like Don Quixote's project of trying to slay giants by charging at windmills. Here is a quote from the recent paper "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" : "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." Why would that be so after four billion dollars had been spent on brain research projects? Probably because the idea is wrong. As discussed here, there is a fancy new cryogenic electron microscopy technology allowing scientists to inspect synapses in unprecedented detail, but scientists can still find nothing that looks anything like stored information in such synapses. 

Nowadays our science news sites are polluted by misleading press reports that parrot misleading university press releases about neuroscience experiments. Again and again we see the same pattern, as if some template was being followed:

(1) Some experiment will monitor brain activity while some task was being done, either by humans or rodents, and the study group sizes will typically be too small for a result with impressive statistical power. 

(2) Some little difference will be found somewhere in a brain or in brain waves, typically a difference of only about 1 part in 100 or 1 part in 200, the type of difference you would expect to get from random fluctuations, even if brains are not the source of our mind, and do not store memories. 

(3) The story will make some claim such as "scientists shed light on how brains produce ideas" or "research provides new insight on how brains store memories" or "researchers get new hints as to how brains think" or some such claim, even though the research does no such thing. 

Now that more than four billion dollars has been spent on brain projects going down what seems like mostly a dead end, maybe it might make sense to fund a much less expensive Human Mind Project that might do things such as follow up on all the intriguing results of two centuries of research into psychical phenomena, important results that our professors have mostly ignored or swept under the rug.