How Many Are Put At Risk for Junk Brain Scan Experiments?

In brain-related experiments we very often see defective or questionable research practices. To give examples:

• Scientists know that the most reliable way to do an experiment is to first state a detailed hypothesis, how data will be gathered, and how data will be analyzed, using methods called "pre-registered studies" or "registered reports." But most experimental neuroscience studies do not follow such a standard, but instead follow a much less reliable "fishing expedition" technique, in which data is gathered, and then the experimenter is free to slice and dice the data in any way he wants, trying to prove any hypothesis he may dream up after collecting the data. 
• Because very many neuroscience observations are the kind of observations where subjective interpretations may be at play, a detailed and rigorous blinding protocol is an essential part of any reliable neuroscience experiment. But such a blinding protocol is rarely used, and in the minority of neuroscience experiments that claim to use blinding, the blinding will usually be only fragmentary and fractional. 
• It is well-known that neuroscience experiments trying to establish correlations will not be reliable unless they use an adequate sample size. The minimum for a moderately reliable research result is 15 subjects per study group, with each mouse or person used in the person being one such subject. But neuroscience experiments commonly use much smaller study group sizes. It is extremely common to find that a neuroscience experiment used a study group size as small as 13 subjects or 11 subjects or 9 subjects of only 6 subjects. 
• A web site describing the reproducibility crisis in science mentions a person who was told of a neuroscience lab  "where the standard operating mode was to run a permutation analysis by iteratively excluding data points to find the most significant result," and quotes that person saying that there was little difference between such an approach and just making up data out of thin air. 
• A press release says this about brain scans: "Hariri said the researchers recognized that 'the correlation between one scan and a second is not even fair, it’s poor.'...For six out of seven measures of brain function, the correlation between tests taken about four months apart with the same person was weak....Again, they found poor correlation from one test to the next in an individual. The bottom line is that task-based fMRI in its current form can’t tell you what an individual’s brain activation will look like from one test to the next, Hariri said....'We can’t continue with the same old ‘"hot spot" research,' Hariri said. “We could scan the same 1,300 undergrads again and we wouldn’t see the same patterns for each of them.” The press release is talking about a scientific study by Hariri and others that can be read here.  The study is entitled, "What is the test-retest reliability of common task-fMRI measures? New empirical evidence and a meta-analysis." The study says, "We present converging evidence demonstrating poor reliability of task-fMRI measures...A meta-analysis of 90 experiments (N=1,008) revealed poor overall reliability."

About 40%  of neuroscience experiments involve rodents. This will come as a surprise to someone who reads the science news, where the headlines rarely refer to mice when announcing experiments that involved mice. When you study the apalling research practices so common in neuroscience experiments, and the very large prevalence of junk science, you may say something like, "It's largely a sham, but at least only mice or rats are being harmed."

But very many neuroscience experiments involve humans.  The experiments that involve humans may put patients at risk, for the sake of junk science results that do nothing to provide robust evidence for anything.

Let us consider fMRI studies. Neuroscientists love to do fMRI studies that involve brain scans. Such scans are typically healthy subjects, with there being no medical reason at all for the brain scan. 

It is a dogma among neuroscientists that fMRI scans are safe. But we should remember that neuroscientists are very dogmatic creatures who often repeat claims that are dubious and unproven (as you can tell by reading the posts on this blog).  Do we really know that fMRI scans are free of any risk?

One danger of fMRI scans is well-known: the risk of the very strong magnets used by such machines causing some metal object to be hurled at a high speed, causing injury or death.  In 2001 a six-year-old boy was killed in the US during an fMRI scan, when the machine turned an oxygen canister into a flying projectile.  There is also the risk that the more powerful fMRI scans may raise the risk of cancer in the person getting the scan. 

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

"Genotoxic (i.e., potentially carcinogenic) effects of MRI scanning have been demonstrated in vivo and in vitro, leading a recent review to recommend 'a need for further studies and prudent use in order to avoid unnecessary examinations, according to the precautionary principle'. In a comparison of genotoxic effects of MRI compared with those of CT scans, Knuuti et al. reported that even though the DNA damage detected after MRI was at a level comparable to that produced by scans using ionizing radiation (low-dose coronary CT angiography, nuclear imaging, and X-ray angiography), differences in the mechanism by which this damage takes place suggests that the cancer risk of MRI, if any, is unknown.^"

Below are some relevant research papers:

(1) Referring to cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR),

the 2015 study here ("Impact of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

 on human lymphocyte DNA integrity") states, 

"The present findings indicate that CMR should be 

used with caution and that similar restrictions may apply as 

for X-ray-based and nuclear imaging techniques in

order to avoid unnecessary damage of DNA integrity with 

potential carcinogenic effect."

(2) The 2009 study here ("Genotoxic effects of 3 T 

magnetic resonance imaging in cultured human lymphocytes")

cautions about the use of a high-intensity

("3T and above") MRI, and states that 

"potential health risks are implied in the MRI and especially

HF MRI environment due to high-static

magnetic fields, fast gradient magnetic fields, and strong 

radiofrequency electromagnetic fields," also noting that 

"these results suggest that exposure to 3 T MRI induces

 genotoxic effects in human

 lymphocytes," referring to effects that may cause cancer. 

(3) The 2015 study here ("Biological Effects of Cardiac Magnetic 

Resonance  on Human Blood Cells") found that "Unenhanced CMR

is associated with minor but significant immediate blood cell

alterations or activations figuring inflammatory response, as well as 

DNA damage in T lymphocytes observed from day 2

 until the first month but disappearing at 1-year follow-up." The 

study found such worrisome results with the less-powerful 1.5T

scanning, which is being gradually replaced with twice-as-powerful

3T scanning.

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

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

machines, suggesting their magnetic fields are much stronger than

the strength needed to lift a car:

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

 the earth's magnet field. The strength of electromagnets

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

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

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

 pull heavy-duty floor buffers and mop buckets into

 the bore of the magnet, pull stretchers across the room

 and turn oxygen bottles into flying projectiles reaching

 speeds in excess of 40 miles per hour."

Let us look at an example of a morally dubious study recently in the news, a study entitled "Predicting learning and achievement using GABA and glutamate concentrations in human development."  It was a study that attempted to link levels of two brain chemicals (GABA and glutamate) to learning ability and math ability.  As so often happens, a study that failed to produce any impressive result was misleadingly represented in the press as if it had found something important. 

We can see from Figure 2 of the study that no strong correlation was found between levels of these brain chemicals and math ability. In the graphs of Figure 2 we see little circles that are all over the place on the graphs, indicating a lack of any strong correlation.   We read these results, mentioning math achievement (MA):

"In particular, the glutamate concentration in the IPS was negatively associated with MA in younger participants but positively associated with MA in mature participants (Fig 2A, β = .13, t(225) = 4.54, standard error (se) = .03, PHC0 < .0001, R2ADJ = .85, dR2ADJ = .01). In contrast, the opposite relationship was found in the same region with GABA, which was positively associated with MA in younger participants but negatively associated with MA in mature participants (Fig 2B, β = −.14, t(224) = −5.39, se = .03, PHC0 < .0001, R2ADJ = .85, dR2ADJ = .01). Concerning the MFG, glutamate concentration was negatively associated with MA in younger participants but positively associated with MA in mature participants (Fig 2C, β = .11, t(220) = 3.59, se = .03, PHC0 = .0004, R2ADJ = .85, dR2ADJ = .01)."

The funny β characters in the quote above refer to a beta coefficient, which is not much different from a correlation coefficient (a measure of how strong the correlation is between two things).  The results given for the beta coefficients are all weak. They are all less than .15, and some of the correlations are negative.  A strong beta coefficient is something higher than .5.  A press story on this paper glowingly describes an "association" between math ability and these two brain chemicals, conveniently failing to mention that the association reported was so weak and inconsistent that it was not robust evidence of any real causal relation.  Because it found associations so weak, and because of methodology problems discussed below, the GABA and glutamate study has failed to prove anything important. 

This GABA and glutamate study has used a large number of subjects, so it cannot be criticized for using too small a sample size. However, there are other problems in the study, including the following:

• The study was not a pre-registered study that announced beforehand in detail what hypothesis would be tested, and how data would be gathered and analyzed, meaning it did not follow a "best practices" approach.
• The study did not make direct measurements of GABA and glutamate levels, but made indirect estimates using a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy.  Estimates of trace chemicals such as GABA using spectroscopy are subjective, and may be unreliable, because of serious confounding factors such as "spectral overlap."  A study using retesting to test the reliability of such GABA estimates in two different brain regions found only "low-moderate" reliability in estimates involving one of these two regions. 
• Chemicals such as GABA and glutamate fluctuate in the body from week to week. Readings from different parts of the brain may vary. There is no reason to think that a single brain scan  gives you a reliable indication of the average yearly level of GABA and glutamate in a subject. 
• The study fails to mention any blinding protocol that was followed.  Following a carefully defined blinding protocol is an essential for a study like this to be taken seriously as robust evidence for anything.  
• Since some "math savant" humans have shown an ability to perform extremely complex math calculations at blazing near-instantaneous speed, and since neurotransmitters move around slowly in the brain, and since there is no evidence that taking GABA or glutamate supplements improve math ability, it never made any sense to suspect that estimates of GABA and glutamate would be well-correlated with math ability; and the study found no such good correlation.  A previous 2017 study on older people scanned with MRI machines had found no good correlation between cognition and GABA levels, merely finding a very weak correlation, with an R-squared of merely .12. 
• The study made an unnecessary involvement of children. The hypothesis of whether GABA and glutamate affects math ability could have been tested just as well using only adult subjects. 

The most troubling thing about the study is that it needlessly  subjected hundreds of children to high-field 3T magnetic resonance imaging. These were not children who had any medical need for such imaging, and the paper says these subjects were recruited, lured by very small monetary incentives.  The study tells us, "All MRI data were acquired using a 3T Siemens MAGNETOM Prisma MRI System equipped with a 32 channel receive-only head coil."  The study here cautions that "exposure to 3 T MRI induces genotoxic effects in human lymphocytes," referring to potentially cancer-causing effects of using 3T MRI scanners.  

How long were these children scanned using this high-powered 3T MRI scanner?  We are told "the imaging session lasted approximately 60" minutes. A typical MRI scan for medical reasons very often takes only about 15 minutes. The paper tells us in Supplemental Table 1 that the brain scans were done on 51 six-year-olds, 51 ten-year-olds,  50 14-year-olds, and 49 16-year-olds. The younger a person is, the more likely he will be to be affected by possible cancer-causing things.  The subjects were induced to participate by giving them trifling sums of money such as 25 pounds  (about 35 dollars), and given such low compensation we may assume that a large fraction of the participants were from impoverished families.  Will some of these children who participated in this poorly-designed insignificant study end up with cancer decades from now because they were subjected to 60 minutes of unneeded 3T MRI scanning which "induces genotoxic effects" according to the previously cited paper? 

We'll probably never know, because neuroscientists don't seem to keep track of the long-term health results of the people they have brain-scanned in their experiments. It's kind of a policy of "scan 'em and forget 'em." Our neuroscientists are fond of saying there is "no proof" that fMRI imaging can be harmful, but that's because they are not doing the long-term patient health followup tracking to determine whether fMRI imaging produces a greater risk of cancer over 30 years or 40 years. 

The GABA and glutamate brain-scanning study I have discussed was very unusual in having a high number of subjects (more than 200). What is very much more common in neuroscience studies is to do brain imaging experiments involving fewer than 15 subjects. Almost all such experiments are pretty worthless, because we should have no confidence in studies that used fewer than 15 subjects per study group (the chance of false alarms is too high when fewer than 15 subjects are used).  Very many people may have suffered a needless cancer health risk from participating in the usually worthless "fewer than 15 subjects" human experimental studies that are so common in modern neuroscience research. 

Don't put me down as being anti-fMRI (I've had an fMRI myself, after being advised by a doctor to do so).  In countless medical treatment cases, the benefits of an fMRI scan are greater than the small risks. But people should not be put at risk by getting unnecessary brain scans solely for the sake of poorly designed studies that fail to prove anything because they followed Questionable Research Practices. 

I am not at all suggesting anyone should avoid an fMRI scan when a doctor recommends such a thing as medically advisable. But it is rather clear that in their zeal to load up their resumes with more and more brain scanning studies, our neuroscientists are rounding up too many paid subjects for unnecessary and potentially harmful brain scans.  What is really tragic is that such a large fraction of experimental brain scan studies follow Questionable Research Practices so badly that they qualify as "junk science studies" failing to provide any robust evidence for anything important.  It seems that very often human research subjects may be needlessly put at increased risk of cancer and other health dangers by being brain-scanned in scanners such as 3T MRIs, merely so that neuroscientists can round up more subjects for badly designed studies that do nothing to advance science because they fall very short of meeting the standards of good experimental science.   

When neuroscientists say brain scans are safe, they are referring to how much health trouble is now observed in people whose brains are scanned. No one has done some 25-year longitudinal study on the topic of whether people whose brains were scanned with 3T MRIs have a higher chance of  cancer 25 or 30 years in the future.  3T MRIs were only approved by the FDA in the year 2000, and the Siemens MAGNETOM Prisma MRI System used by the GABA and glutamate brain-scanning study was only approved in 2013. 

A scientific paper states this, referring to 3T MRIs:

"An insufficient number of validated studies have been carried out to demonstrate the safety of high strength static magnetic field exposure (Shellock, 2009). While MRI has been used for many years in the clinic, at higher Tesla levels (over 3 Tesla) the technology is relatively novel. Even less information about potential negative health effects exists for specific populations such as pregnant women and children." 

If I were an ethical advisor asked to approve proposals for brain experiments, I would have the following rules:

• I would never approve the use of human brain scanning for any experimental study that used fewer than 15 subjects for any of its study groups, because such studies are way too likely to produce false alarms. 
• I would never approve the use of human brain scanning for any experimental study that had not published publicly a detailed research plan, including a precise hypothesis to be tested, along with a very exact and detailed description of how data would be gathered and analyzed. We should not be putting people at risk for studies that do not follow best practices. 
• I would never approve the use of human brain scanning for any experimental study that had not published publicly a detailed blinding protocol to be followed, discussing exactly how blinding techniques would be used to reduce the risk of experimenter bias in which the experimenter "sees what he wants to see." We should not be putting people at risk for studies that do not follow best practices. 
• I would insist that any consent form signed by a subject to be brain scanned would include a detailed discussion of the reasons why brain scanning might be potentially hazardous, with negative effects appearing far in the future, along with a fair discusssion of the scientific literature suggesting such hazards. Currently a large fraction of such consent forms fail to frankly discuss such risk. 
•  I would never approve the use of any brain scanning on children in an experiment that did not absolutely require the participation of children. 

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

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

When we examine the history of MRI scans, we see a history of overconfidence, and authorities dogmatically asserting that "MRI scans are perfectly safe," when they did not actually know whether they were perfectly safe.  Not many years ago there arose the great "contrast agent" scandal.  Scientists began to learn that what are called "contrast agent" MRI scans (given to 30 million people annually) may not be so safe. In such "contrast agent" scans, a subject is given an injection that increases the visual contrast of the MRI scan.  For a long time, the main substance in such an injection was gadolinium.  A mainstream cancer web site states, "Tissue and autopsy reports have also confirmed that gadolinium can accumulate in the brain and other organs." The results can be a health disaster, as described here. A 2019 Science Daily story says, "New contrast agent could make MRIs safer," letting us know that many of them previously were not so safe. On the same Science Daily web site, we read a 2017 news story with the title "MRI contrast agents accumulate in the brain."  A 2020 paper ("Side Effect of Gadolinium MRI Contrast Agents") says this:

"Until recently, it was believed that gadolinium is effectively cleared within 24 hours after intravenous injection, and that it does not have any harmful effects on the human body. However, recent studies on animals and analyses of clinical data have indicated that gadolinium is retained in the body for many years post-administration, and may cause various diseases."

Neuroscientists extensively used such contrast agents (as described here), very often putting human subjects at risk for the sake of junk poorly designed studies falling far short of the best experimental practices. All the while,  many of our experts were making the untrue claim that "MRI scans are perfectly safe," a statement which was not clearly  true for the large fraction of MRI studies that used gadolinium contrast agents. 

A recent article gives us a clue as to why so many junk science studies are occurring. It seems the number of PhD's is quite a few times greater than the number of available tenure-track positions, creating a pressure for not-yet-tenured PhD's to compromise on research standards, so that they get more published papers and paper citations. The article says, "Fifty-eight per cent of respondents to the survey are aware of scientists feeling tempted or under pressure to compromise on research integrity and standards."

The Two Biggest Brain Projects Have Failed to Bolster 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. 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.  Looking at an article on the BRAIN Initiative's web site recapping what the big project did in 2019, I see no reason for thinking that the situation has changed very much. 

It's rather a bad sign when this "2019 Highlights" article starts off by mentioning some silly experiment in which signs of activity were looked for in the brains of dead pigs a few hours after they died.  After some discussion of some research that merely classified cell types and mapped brain circuits,  there is mention of a study indicating that the human mind can perform well when one half of the brain is removed. But that isn't a discovery of the BRAIN Initiative, and was proven by hemispherectomy operations that occurred long before the BRAIN Initiative started.  Moreover, the finding that he human mind can perform well when one half of the brain is removed is one that is diametrically opposed to the dogmas that the BRAIN Initiative has been trying to prove, claims that the brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of your memories.

Next in the "2019 Highlights" article we have a huge visual of a Science  cover talking about the neurobiology of singing mice, along with a claim that some scientist "measured brain activity in musical mice while they sang duets."  This is not something that should inspire our confidence, since mice can't really sing.  There is no further discussion in the "2019 Highlights" article of anything that  backs up the main dogmatic claims that neuroscientists keep making about brains.  Judging from the article, the BRAIN Initiative is not making very dramatic progress. 

I looked at a News page of the BRAIN Initiative site, to see signs of any recent progress it may have made in trying to prove the things it is trying to prove. I get some links to unimpressive research papers such as this one, "The Anterior Cingulate Cortex Predicts Future States to Mediate Model-Based Action Selection." The paper does not actually provide any good evidence that some brain region is predicting anything, because the study suffered from the usual methodological defects of neuroscience experimental studies.  One of the study groups consisted of only 4 animals, another study group consisted of only 2 animals, and three other study groups consisted of only 8 animals. The chance of a false alarm is too high with such tiny study groups. We should ignore most experimental studies that fail to use at least 15 animals for each study group. Moreover, the study makes no mention of any blinding protocol, something important to have for a reliable experimental study; and the study was also was not a pre-registered study that committed itself to testing a particular hypothesis with a particular methodology.  With so many shortcomings in the study, the BRAIN Initiative should not have had a headline of "Brain Region Implicated in Predicting the Consequences of Actions" to describe this study, since the study did not provide robust evidence of such a thing.

Looking back through all the articles listed on the News page, and going back all the way to July 2019, I can find no sign of any research that substantiates in any robust way any of the dogmas that the BRAIN Initiative has been trying to prove, such as the very dubious claim that the "brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information." While we know that humans can acquire memories and retrieve memories, and we know that brain cells (like all cells) store genetic information, there is no robust evidence that the brain stores or retrieves memory information, and no credible detailed theory of how any neural storage or instant retrieval of human episodic memory information could occur. The proteins in synapses and brain tissue are so short-lived (having an average lifetime of less than two weeks) that the brain cannot be a place where memories could be stored for 50 years or more. 

On one page of the BRAIN Initiative site, we have a long discussion of some year 2020 symposium featuring speakers funded by the BRAIN Initiative, something called the 6th Annual BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting.  There is lots of talk about neuroscience research, but nothing substantially supporting claims that brains produce thinking and store memories. I find no use of the words "thought," "thinking," "consciousness", "imagination," "cognition," "reasoning" or "mind." Here are the only references to memory in the long symposium recap:

"Dr. Nanthia Suthana explained how stimulating and recording deep brain activity could help us understand the neurophysiology of hypervigilance and emotional memory in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder....Dr. Kareem Zhangloul explained the relationship between cortical spiking sequences and memory retrieval in humans."

There's no link to any work by these two, and no one has actually established any relationship between brain spiking sequences and memory retrieval. Searching for a paper by Kareem Zhangloul I find a paper that makes these not very exciting claims:

"Bursts of spikes organized into sequences during memory formation. These sequences were replayed during successful memory retrieval. The extent of sequence replay during correct recall was related to the extent to which cortical spiking activity was coupled with ripples in the medial temporal lobe."

Given the fact that the brain is a constant source of electrical activity, with most of its billions of neurons firing more than once per second, we should expect to be able to find by chance some sequences of spikes that occurred both during memory formation and memory retrieval, regardless of whether memories are stored in brains.  So such research does not qualify as evidence that memories are retrieved from brains. The type of pareidolia going on in such analysis is rather like what would be going on if you had random fluctuation seismograph readings from hundreds of worldwide sites, and found (upon diligent searching) similar patterns during several different Sunday games when the Pittsburgh Steelers played football. 

The BRAIN Initiative page here is entitled "Key Moments in Brain Research." The subtitle is "Explore major milestones in the history of the field, including those stemming from BRAIN-related research programs."  But while there's lots of discussion of about administrative milestones and funding milestones, there's no mention of any research accomplishments of the BRAIN Initiative other than a mention of a classification of brain cell types. There is a mention of a Nobel prize, but that was for research done before the BRAIN Initiative started.   

Like the BRAIN Initiative, the EU's Human Brain Project has announced goals of proving conventional dogmas about the brain. At the page here we read that "the HBP is conducting a coordinated series of experiments to identify the neuronal mechanisms behind episodic memory, and validate them by computational models and robotic systems."  This is an assertion of the unproven dogma that episodic memory can be explained by brain processes; and it is a strange statement, given how silly it is to think that such a dogma could be validated by doing computer models or research into robots.  One of the main tabs of the Human Brain Project has the silly title of "Silicon Brains." No such things exist; brains are brains, and computers are computers. The brain bears no resemblance to a digital computer, and has none of the seven things that a computer uses to store and retrieve information.  Another page of the Human Brain Project has a title of "Understanding Cognition," but makes no mention of any study or experiment backing up the claim that cognition is produced by brains. 

The page here on the Human Brain Project site is entitled "Highlights and Achievements."  But while the page refers to many different scientific studies between 2017 and 2020, it provides no good evidence that the Human Brain Project has done anything to substantiate claims that the brain stores memories or that the brain produces consciousness, selfhood, thinking, creativity or imagination.  Below are some of the studies mentioned.

• There is a link to a page entitled "Dendrite Activity May Boost Brain Processing Power." But the page confesses, "Neurologically speaking, the physiology that makes the human brain so particularly special and capable remains poorly understood," which makes it sound as if neuroscientists have no factual claims backing up their dogmas about the brain. 
• There is a link to a page entitled "The Way of Making Memories." But the page does not discuss any substantial progress in understanding memory, but merely mentions some hardly-worth-mentioning paper entitled, "Regulation of adenylyl cyclase 5 in striatal neurons confers the ability to detect coincident neuromodulatory signals." 
• There is a link to a page entitled "Brains of smarter people have bigger and faster neurons." The page merely refers to a scientific study that fails to establish such a claim. The study only provided data on brain characteristics and IQ for about 25 subjects, and merely found weak correlations such as r= .37 and r= .46 and r = .51.  The site here says, "The relationship between two variables is generally considered strong when their r value is larger than 0.7." Having such a small study group and such not-very-strong correlations, the study does not justify the claim that brains of smarter people have bigger and faster neurons. It is very easy to get by chance a not-very-strong correlation such as .5 between two unrelated things such as hair length and intelligence, from a check of only a small number of subjects (the likelihood of getting a correlation between unrelated things decreases as the number of subjects rises). The study was not a pre-registered study, so we have no idea whether the authors were checking 50 different things, and reporting on a few cases where a not-very-strong correlation was found by chance variation.  To have confidence in a study like this (which could so easily go wrong through subjective analysis), the study would have to have a detailed discussion  of how a full-fledged blinding protocol was followed. Instead there is merely a one sentence mention of some half measures to produce a blinding effect. The study lists six patients who scored above 100 in IQ tests just before surgery for brain tumors, which in not what we would expect if brains were producing human intelligence. 
• There is a link to a page entitled "How brain cells work together to remember and imagine places." But the page does not discuss any evidence for a brain storage of memories or a brain explanation for imagination. It merely discusses a "computational model."
• There is a link to a page entitled, "Individual Brain Charting: A high-resolution brain map of cognitive functions." But the title is misleading, because it merely discusses some brain scans taken when 12 people were doing particular things.  The page has the typical misleading language about such scans, saying, "The images obtained make it possible to specify which regions of the brain are activated during a given task." All regions of the brain are active at all times, and brain scans merely show tiny variations such as half of one percent from one region to another, which could easily be chance fluctuations. It is misleading to say that a region showing less than 1% greater activity are "activated during a different task." 
• There is a link to a page entitled, "A First Principles Approach to Memory Recall." But we get no evidence that neuroscientists understand memory recall, something that has never been credibly explained as a brain process. On the page a neuroscientist states this:

“In Neuroscience, there is nothing you can really predict. We do not know how things really work, and the brain is so complex. Both these things mean you cannot make quantitative predictions."

This creates no impression at all that neuroscientists have facts that prove the dogmas they keep spouting about the brain. 

We should not be impressed by occasional studies that may create some superficial impression that the main assumptions of neuroscientists are correct. Given a huge army of experimental neuroscientists funded each year with so many millions of dollars, it is inevitable that now and then a few weak signals might come forth suggesting some reality behind their assumptions, no matter how wrong they are. Similarly, if you recruit some huge army of people who believe that some clouds are the ghosts of dead animals, and you fund such people with many millions of research money each year, you might occasionally get photos of clouds that might make you think, "Wow, that really looks like the ghost of a dead animal."

The Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative continue to get very many millions of dollars of funding every year. But the web site of the BRAIN Initiative and the web site of the Human Brain Project very much suggest that these lavishly funded projects are failing to substantiate the dogmatic claims about the brain that they are attempting to prove.  Such a failure should surprise no one, because these dogmatic claims (such as the claim that brains store memories and the claims that brains produce minds) are implausible, and are contradicted by many neuroscience facts that have already been established, such as:

• the very short lifetime of brain proteins, only a thousandth of the longest length of time that humans can reliably remember things (60 years);
• the lack of any indexing system or position notation system in a brain that might make possible instant memory recall;
• the failure to discover any proteins or brain mechanisms capable of translating human learned knowledge or episodic memories into synapse states or neuron states;
•  the ability of minds to function and remember very well when half of brains are removed;
• the ability of minds to function very well during near-death experiences occuring during cardiac arrest when brains are shut down;
• the very high levels of noise (and very low levels of synaptic signal transmission reliability) in brains, which should preclude a brain from being able to achieve accurate recall of any detailed memory information; 
• the lack of any mechanism in the brain for reading or writing memories, and the lack of anything analagous to the read/write head of a computer hard disk;
• the slow speed at which brain signals travel across dendrites and synapses, which should prevent any instant recall of memories;
• the failure to find any permanent encoded information in brains other than the genetic DNA information in all cells.

The physical reality of your brain

The paper here discusses some big Chinese multi-year brain project. There is no mention of any research strategy that offers any real hope of backing up standard dogmas about the brain.  In a section entitled "Neural Circuit Mechansims of Cognition," which tries to sell the groundless idea that cognition might be understood through the study of neural circuits, the author states, "Optimists among us may expect within the next two decades the completion of mesoscopic mapping of neural circuits and their activity patterns, and perhaps even the underlying logic and mechanisms, of cognitive processes in animal models such as Drosophila, zebrafish, and rodents."  Clearly our neuroscientists have no understanding of how neural circuits can explain human cognition. Such scientists merely have the hope that two decades of additional study of neural circuits might throw some light on cognition in animals like rats.  There is no reason to suspect that studying the exact way electricity moves around in the brain (the study of neural circuits) will ever explain human mental phenomena such as thought, memory, insight, self-hood and imagination. 

Neural Correlation Studies Often Lie With Colors

A very interesting question is whether there are particular parts of the brain that are strongly associated with particular facets of human mental functionality. Are there, for example, regions of the brain that work much harder when you learn something, or remember something, or feel something? The idea that there are such areas is a hypothesis called localization.

Some claim that this idea of localization is supported by brain imaging studies. It is claimed that quite a few studies tell us about the neural correlates of conscious experiences. In a typical study of this type, people will have their brains scanned by some instrument such as an MRI machine. Then scientists will look for certain parts of the brain which showed more activity (such as blood flow) when some particular type of mental activity was occurring.

But there are reasons for thinking that such studies tell us very little. For one thing, brain imaging studies on the neural correlates of consciousness typically involve only small numbers of participants (often fewer than 25). Making generalizations from such small samples is dubious.

Also, claims that particular regions of the brain show larger activity during certain mental activities are typically not well-replicated in followup studies. A book by a cognitive scientist states this (page 174-175):

The empirical literature on brain correlates of emotion is wildly inconsistent, with every part of the brain showing some activity correlated with some aspect of emotional behavior. Those experiments that do report a few limited areas are usually in conflict with each other....There is little consensus about what is the actual role of a particular region. It is likely that the entire brain operates in a coordinated fashion, complexly interconnected, so that much of the research on individual components is misleading and inconclusive.

There have been statistical critiques of brain imaging studies. One critique found a common statistical error that “inflates correlations.” The paper stated, “The underlying problems described here appear to be common in fMRI research of many kinds—not just in studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition.”

Another critique of neuroimaging found a “double dipping” statistical error that was very common. New Scientist reported a software problem, saying “Thousands of fMRI brain studies in doubt due to software flaws.”

Considering the question of “How Much of the Neuroimaging Literature Should We Discard?” a PhD and lab director states, “Personally I’d say I don’t really believe about 95% of what gets published...I think claims of 'selective' activation are almost without exception completely baseless ”

Another huge reason for being skeptical about brain imaging studies is that such studies very often use very misleading visual presentations, creating false impressions. What very frequently goes on is something like this. A series of brain scans will show a very small difference between brain activity in different parts of the brain – typically only 1%. A Stanford scientific paper on fMRI uses this 1% figure, making an exception only for small parts of the brain (“visual and auditory cortices”) associated with seeing and hearing. The paper makes this generalization: “While cognitive effects give signal changes on the order of 1% (and larger in the visual and auditory cortices), signal variations of over 10% may arise from motion and other artifacts in the data.” In other words, people moving their heads (and other misleading signals) may create the impression that there is a higher variation in the non-sensory parts of the brain, but the real variation in the signal changes is only something like 1%. A similar generalization is made in this scientific discussion, where we are told the following:

For example, most cognitive experiments should show maximal contrasts of about 1% (except in visual cortex),  hence, if estimates for a single subject are much larger than that, then the estimates are likely to be bad. Poor estimates can arise from head motion, or sporadic breathing patterns by the subject, or sometimes from a poor design matrix that is ill-conditioned.

But again and again studies on neural correlations will produce a visual which grossly exaggerates this very small difference of 1%, making it look like a great big difference. This is lying with colors. 
 

To explain why this is highly deceptive, let's consider some examples of displaying visual information: an honest presentation and a misleading presentation. Imagine you have a home for sale, and you are preparing a web page or brochure that describes your house's selling points. One of the key factors in selling houses is the quality of the local school district. Anyone with children will want to buy a house in a neighborhood with better schools.

Imagine you've got the average school stores for your home's school district, and the data looks like this:

District	Average Reading Score
District 1	80
District 2	80
District 3	80
District 4 (yours)	81
District 5	80
District 6	80
District 7	80
District 8	80

Now imagine you wanted to present a school district map highlighting the higher score of your home's school district. For you to honestly present such information, you would have to follow this rule: the difference in the color shade should be no different than the differences in the data that you have.

So if you were to present an honest school district map, color-coded school scores, it would have to look something like this:

This would be an honest map. It honestly indicates only a very slight difference between the school scores in your home's school district and the nearby districts. But you might be tempted to present the data differently. You might present it like the map below.

This map would be better from the standpoint of selling your house, since it would leave someone with the impression that your house's school district has much higher scores than the nearby districts. But given the actual data showing only a 1% difference, it would be utterly misleading to present a map like this. The map would incorrectly give someone the idea that your home's school district had scores maybe 30% better than surrounding districts. Presenting a map like this would be an example of lying with colors.

It is exactly such lying with colors that goes on again and again in brain imaging studies on the neural correlates of consciousness. Again and again, such studies will show visuals that depict differences of only 1% or less between blood flow in different regions of the brain. But such regions will be shown as red regions in brain images, with all of the other areas having a grayish “black and white” color. When you see such an image, you inevitably get the impression that the highlighted part of the brain has much higher activity than other regions. But such a conclusion is not what the data is showing.

So, for example, a study finding 1% higher brain activity in a region near the corpus callosum (under some activity that we may call Activity X) might release a very misleading image looking like the image below, in which the area of 1% greater activity is colored in red.

But such an image is lying with colors. If there is only a 1% greater activity in this region, an honest diagram would look like the one below.

With this diagram, the same region shown in red in the first diagram is shown as only 1% darker. You can't actually tell by looking at the diagram which region has the 1% greater activity when Activity X occurs. But that's no problem. The diagram above leaves the reader with the correct story: none of the brain regions differ in activity by more than 1% when Activity X occurs. Contrast this with the first image, which creates the very misleading idea that one part of the brain is much more active than the others when Activity X occurs.

You might complain that with such a visual, you cannot tell which regions have the slightly greater activity. But there are various ways to highlight particular regions of a brain visual, such as circling, pointing arrows, outlining, and so forth. For example, the following shows a region of high activity without misleading the viewer by creating the impression of much higher activity:

The misleading diagrams of brain imaging studies seem all the more appalling when you consider that the images in such studies are typically the only thing that laymen use to form an opinion about localization in the brain. The text of brain imaging studies is typically written in thick jargon that only a neuroscientist can understand. Frustrated by this very hard-to-understand jargon and unclear writing, every layman reading these studies forms his opinions based on the visuals. When such visuals deceive us by lying with colors (as they so often do), the whole study ends up being something that has the effect of creating misleading ideas.

At 4:47 in this online course, we are told that the blood changes in the brain are quite small when observed with an MRI, between 0.1% and 5% (based on two previous comments I quoted, the higher value seems to be only found in the auditory cortex or the visual cortex). The speaker in this course tells us that if we were to just watch a movie of the fMRI scans, we wouldn't be able to notice the changes between different brain regions. But the visuals in neural correlation studies misrepresent this minimal change, making it look like a great big change. These cases of lying with colors give readers a very misleading impression that brain activity involving thinking and memory recall is very localized, and tightly correlated with mental activity.

How closely your brain is correlated with your mind is important from a philosophical standpoint. If different parts of our brains surge dramatically with blood when we think or recall memories, that is a point favoring the idea that your mind is just a product of your brain. But if different parts of your brain look pretty much the same when you think or recall memories, that's a point in favor of the idea that your mind and memories may involve something much more than your brain, perhaps some soul or some higher cosmic consciousness infrastructure. The actual data from brain imaging is the second of these cases: different parts of the brain show about the same activity when thinking or memory recall occurs. But by doing neural correlation studies that visually make tiny changes look like huge changes, our neuroscientists almost seem to be trying to fool us into thinking that a very different thing is going on, that particular parts of our brain light up dramatically when our higher mental functions are engaged. To such neuroscientists we should say: visually represent your own data honestly, and stop lying with colors.