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"
- "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."
- 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.
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