There Was No "How" in SciAm's "How Matter Becomes Mind"

The July 2019 cover of Scientific American was dominated by a big headline stating, "How the Mind Arises." Inside we had a long article entitled "How Matter Becomes Mind."  The article did nothing to actually explain how a mind could ever arise from a brain.

The article by Max Bertolero and Danielle S. Bassett tried to sell us on something called "network neuroscience,"  a term that hasn't been around for many years. The article is behind a paywall, but in other articles that you can freely read online, we can read about the claims of people who are adherents of this academic discipline.  For example, in the article here ("Inside the Network Neuroscience Theory of Human Intelligence") and the article here ("Network Neuroscience Theory of Human Intelligence" by Aron K. Barbey) we can read theorizing similar to that in the Scientific American article.

At the top of the "Network Neuroscience Theory of Human Intelligence" article by Barbey, we have a claim that "general intelligence, g, emerges from individual differences in the network architecture of the human brain."  This claim makes no sense. Let us consider a single human being in isolation, not considering any other humans. There has to be some reason why this particular person has intelligence, understanding and consciousness. It makes no sense to claim that his intelligence arises from differences between his brain and the brains of other people.  If all of the people in the world were destroyed by some giant asteroid colliding with Earth, and a single astronaut was left in a space station, then there would be no brain differences between this person and other humans; for there would be only one human left. But the surviving human would still be intelligent. So what sense does it make to claim that intelligence arises from "individual differences" in brains? 

This seems to be the general approach of adherents of "network neuroscience":

(1) They start out by claiming or insinuating that individual parts of the brain can be strongly associated with particular mental functions.
(2) They do various forms of "network analysis" using the mathematics of network analysis that has grown up over recent decades, mainly in reference to computer networks. In their analysis, regions of the brain are considered as nodes in a network. 
(3) These thinkers claim that something in their network analysis provides insight as to how brains could think or understand things. 

There are several serious problems with this approach. The first is that there is no good evidence that particular parts of the brain are causes of particular mental functions relating to thinking or understanding.  In his paper Barbey states, "Converging evidence from resting-state fMRI and human lesion studies strongly implicates the frontoparietal network in cognitive control, demonstrating that this network accounts for individual differences in adaptive reasoning and problem-solving – as assessed by fMRI measures of global efficiency and structural measures of brain integrity."  The term "frontoparietal network" basically refers to the front part of the brain.  This kind of claim that thought comes from the front part of the brain is debunked in my lengthy post "The Dubious Dogma That Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex," which includes links to many neuroscience papers. 

When making the claim I just quoted, Barbey gives references for several neuroscience papers. One of those papers is a 2010 paper by Barbey and two others, entitled "Dorsolateral prefrontal contributions to human intelligence."  That paper found an average IQ of 91 for some 19 patients who had lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. But the study here with a much larger sample tells us that 37 patients with damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex had an average IQ of 97.4, only very slightly below average (Table 1 and Table 2).  There is no truth to insinuations that we can tell from fMRI studies that some particular part of the brain is responsible for some intellectual function. Contrary to the misleading visuals so often given by neuroscientists, it is not at all true that particular parts of the brain are activated far more strongly than other regions when some particular intellectual task is done (outside of the occipital lobe used for vision, the differences tend to be only about a half of one percent, about what we would expect from random fluctuations). 

In the article Barbey starts talking about small-world networks. The wikipedia.org article on small world networks describe them as a type of network in which "most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps." 

A small-world network

Barbey tries to persuade us that a brain is a small-world network. This analysis is incorrect. The only natural and straightforward way to analyze the brain from a network perspective is to consider individual neurons as the nodes of the network.  Considered in that way, the brain is not at all a small-world network. As this paper says, "If considered at the cellular level, brain networks are also unlikely to form classical small-world networks."  The actual number of hops needed to travel from one end of the brain to another is in the hundreds or thousands, and it is not at all a small number such as five or six. 

Figure 12 in the paper here gives a graph comparing connection probability between two neurons and distance. The graph shows that at a distance of 500 microns, this connection probability falls to essentially zero.  Now, a human brain is 15 centimeters across, which is 150,000 microns.  Such a distance is equal to 300 lengths of 500 microns. So we can very roughly calculate that the number of hops to get from one side of the brain to another is 300 or more. Considering such facts, we cannot at all judge the brain to be a small-world network, which can be traversed by fewer than 10 hops (as in the visual above). 

So how do people such as Barbey state claims that the brain is a small-world network? Rather than judging a neuron to be a node of a brain network, which is the natural way to consider things, they artificially and arbitrarily declare certain regions of the brain to be the nodes.  

Barbey states this:

"Recent advances in network neuroscience further elucidate the functions afforded by a small-world architecture, motivating new insights about how brain network topology and dynamics account for individual differences in specific and broad facets of general intelligence, represented by the Network Neuroscience Theory."

Claiming that the brain is a small-world network is erroneous, unless you decide that the nodes of a brain should be some regions of the brain that you have arbitrarily selected, rather than a neuron, which is the real natural node of a brain.  Even if the brain was a small-world network, or any other type of network, that would not clarify how a brain could generate a thought or a concept or a belief or some understanding of something. 

In Barbey's paper there is a diagram with the strange title "Hierarchical structure of general intelligence."  There is actually nothing hierarchical or structural about general intelligence.  It is an unstructured thing without anything like the parent-child relations that are found in hierarchies. 

After defining an ICN as an "intrinsic connectivity network," Barbey towards the end of his paper tries to put his theory in a nutshell. He states, "In summary, Network Neuroscience Theory proposes that general intelligence depends on the dynamic reorganization of ICNs – modifying their topology and community structure in the service of system-wide flexibility and adaptation." This has no weight as an explanation for how a brain could produce a mind, or how neurons could produce thought or understanding. I could give countless examples of cells below the neck that dynamically reorganize, and people don't believe that such cells cause thought. There is no reason why we should think that some reorganization effect in a brain can explain thinking or intelligence or understanding.  Moreover, there isn't very much physical evidence for reorganization effects in a brain (although there are many cases of minds rebounding after severe brain damage, there is little physical visual evidence of brains restructuring to achieve such a rebound).   

The Scientific American article "How Matter Becomes Mind" 
by Bertolero and Bassett offered similar content that did nothing to explain how it is that a brain could produce a thought, an idea, or some understanding of something.  The article had some dubious poorly substantiated claims that the brain consists of modules. It sounded somewhat like the discredited old theory known as phrenology, which is described in a wikipedia.org article as being "based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules."

The authors say, "It is the music your brain plays that makes you you." If that were true, then each day you would be a different you, because each day your brain "plays different music" by transmitting different electrical signals. But you stay you with remarkable constancy from year to year, despite such daily fluctuations in "brain music."   And in many cases, a heart of someone will stop, and their brain will "stop playing music" as its electrical activity very quickly ceases. But in such cases a person will often continue to have vivid experiences (what are called near-death experiences). So you can't be some "music" your brain is playing.  

After making the statement above, the authors went on and on with a musical analogy, continuing it for several paragraphs. Previously the authors had referred to "massive orchestras of neurons."  Now they referred to "musical compositions" played by brain modules,   they referred to "the symphony in our head," and they referred to "the brain's music." This is all worthless for explaining how matter could give rise to mind, or how a brain could produce an idea, or how neurons could produce a thought.  Music is a sound, not a thought, an idea or understanding. If if were true that the brain is constantly "playing music," this would do nothing to explain how matter could give rise to mind, or how a brain could produce an idea, or how neurons could produce a thought.  A modern computerized keyboard can be set on a continuous loop, to continuously play music; but the keyboard doesn't have mind or thoughts or understanding to the slightest degree. 

The Scientific American article by Bertolero and Bassett refers us to some brain scanning data they used. They state, "To better understand what was happening, we used publicly available data from a landmark study known as MyConnectome, in which Stanford University professor Russell Poldrack personally underwent imaging and cognitive appraisals three times a week for more than a year."  They seem to have drawn a conclusion (about re-routing of brain connections) based on some brain scans of a single individual, and that's kind of like drawing a conclusion about baseball hitters based on how often your spouse gets a base hit. 

Connections and networks do nothing to explain cognition.  Let us imagine a System X which is a dense network of 100 trillion nodes (each consisting of a chip or transistor). Imagine that in System X each node is connected to a billion other nodes.  In this System X the number of nodes is greater than the number of cells in the brain; and also the number of connections per node is many thousands of times greater than in the brain. But despite all this network connectivity which is so much greater than in the brain, there would not be the slightest reason for thinking that this System X would be capable of having a thought or an idea or an actual understanding of something.  See my post "Physical Connections Do Nothing to Explain Cognition" for more on the futility of trying to use connections or networks to explain the human mind. 

In the articles I have mentioned, there is some reference to some studies that try to show that some small fraction of intelligence can be predicted by some analysis of brains or brain networks or brain connections.  Such studies are typically dubious for a variety of reasons.  The scientists involved in the studies will typically be free to play around with any of hundreds of different ways of analyzing brain scans and crunching the fMRI data, until they find one that may seem to predict a small fraction of intelligence.  If one such way is found, it is not very impressive; for we might expect them to get a little success on some tiny fraction of the analytic permutations, purely by chance. 

Consider two theories. The first (call it Theory A) is that your mind is produced by your neurons and the connections between them. The second (call it Theory B) is that your mind is not at all produced by your brain, and that your mind is an aspect of your immaterial soul. Under this Theory B it might be that the brain acts as a kind of valve to limit your mind.  Without our brains we might have minds fit for godlike thoughts and brilliant cosmic contemplation, but our brains may limit our minds so that we feel comfortable doing mainly the tiny little chores of earthly living.  Under such a case, it is quite possible that brain parameters might affect intelligence, for they might affect how much of a "valving effect" occurs to limit your intelligence. So if you were to show some limited relation exists between brain states (or brain wiring) and intelligence, you do nothing at all to show that the brain is the source of the human mind. Such a finding would be equally compatible with Theory A and Theory B.   A study purporting to give such a finding would neither show how matter could produce a mind, nor would it actually support the claim that matter does produce a mind. 

As if to try to compensate for the weakness of their explanations, the article made sure to use a gigantic font for the title "How Matter Becomes Mind."  I've never seen a font so big in a magazine; the font was so big the title took up half of the page.  I offer this advice to scientists: don't so often claim to understand things you do not, and if you make such claims, don't state them in a gigantic font. 

Eight Reasons for Doubting Your Brain Makes Decisions

Neuroscientists like to claim that thoughts and ideas come from your brain, that your memories are stored in your brain, and that when you remember you are retrieving information from your brain. I have discussed in other posts why such claims are not well founded in observations, and why there are strong reasons for rejecting or doubting all such claims. In this post I will discuss another dogmatic claim made about the brain: the claim that the brain is the source of human decisions. I will discuss eight reasons for thinking that this claim is no better founded than dogmatic claims about the brain being the storage place of memories or the source of human abstract thoughts.

Reason #1: Scientists have no understanding of how neurons could make a decision.

When they try to present low-level explanations for a how a brain could do some of the things that they attribute to brains, our neuroscientists falter and fail. An example is their complete failure to credibly explain either how memories could be encoded in neural states, how memories could be permanently stored in brains, or how memories could be instantly recalled by brains. Neuroscientists also cannot credibly explain how a person could make a decision when faced with multiple choices. 

When I did a Google search for "what happens in the brain when a decision is made," I got a bunch of articles with confident sounding titles. But reading the stories I read mainly what sounded like  bluffing, hype, promissory sounds,  and the kind of talk someone uses to persuade you he understands something he doesn't actually understand (along with some references to brain scanning studies that aren't robust for reasons discussed later in this post).  At no one point in these articles do we ever reach someone who makes us think, "This guy really understands how a brain could reach a decision." 

Let us consider a simple example. Joe says to himself, “Today I can either go to the library or go to see a movie.” He then decides to go to the library, and then starts walking towards the library.

To explain this neurally, we would have to explain several different things:

Item 1: How Joe's brain could hold two different ideas, the idea about the possibility of going to the movie, and the idea of going to the library.

Item 2: The appearance in Joe's brain of a third idea, an idea that he will go today to the library.

Item 3: Some neural act that causes his muscles to move in a way corresponding to his idea about going to a library.

The first two of these things cannot be credibly explained through any low-level explanation involving neurons or synapses. See my post “No One Understands How a Brain Could Generate Ideas” for a discussion of the failure of neuroscientists to present any credible explanations of how brains could generate ideas. In that post, I cite some “expert answers” pages on which the experts address exactly the question of how a brain could generate ideas, and sound exactly as if they have no understanding of such a thing.

On one of the “expert answers” pages that I cite, we have this revealing answer:

“ 'How does the 'brain' forms new ideas?' is the wrong question. We don't actually know how the brain codes old ideas.”

That is correct, which means that neither Item 1 in my list above can be explained neurally, nor Item 2. Since we do not understand how a brain could either hold ideas or form new ideas, we do not have any understanding of how a brain could make a decision.

Reason #2: Hemispherectomy patients can still make decisions just fine.

Hemispherectomy is an operation done on patients with severe epileptic seizures. In an hemispherectomy operation, half of the brain is removed. I can find no studies that have specifically studied decision-making ability in hemispherectomy patients. However, I have cited here and here and here and here scientific papers that show results for intelligence tests taken “before” and “after” a hemispherectomy operation. Such papers show, surprisingly, that removing half of a brain has little effect on intelligence as measured in IQ tests.

Written IQ tests are typically tests of not just intelligence but also decision making ability. For example, the Wechsler IQ test is by far the most common one used by scientists, and it is a multiple-choice test. Every single time a person has to pencil in one of the little ovals in a multiple-choice test, he has to make a decision. So standard IQ tests are very much tests of not just intelligence but also decision-making ability (which may be considered an aspect of intelligence).

Since IQ tests done on hemispherectomy patients show little damage to IQ scores after removing half of a brain, we can only conclude that removing half of a brain has little or no effect on decision making ability. We would not expect such a thing to be true if your brain is what makes your decisions.

Reason #3: Some people who lost most of their brains could still make decisions normally.

Cases of removal of half of the brain by surgical hemispherectomy are not at all the most dramatic cases of brain damage known to us. There are cases of patients who lost almost all of their brains due to diseases such as hydrocephalus, a disease that converts brain tissue to a watery fluid. Many such cases were studied by the physician John Lorber. He found that most of his patients were actually of above-average intelligence. Similarly, a French person working as a civil servant was found in recent years to have almost no functional brain.

Such cases seem to show that you can lose more than 75% of your brain and still have a normal decision making ability. This argues against claims that your brain is what is making your decisions.

Reason #4: Split brain patients don't have their decision making harmed.

The two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a set of thick fibers called the corpus callosum. In rare operations this set of fibers is surgically severed. The result is what called a split-brain patient. Despite the erroneous claims that are sometimes made about this topic, the fact is that such an operation absolutely does not result in anything like a split personality or a split consciousness or a split mind. Such an operation does not result in two minds causing conflicting decisions.

The scientific paper here (entitled "The Myth of Dual Consciousness in the Brain") sets the record straight, as did a scientific study published in 2017. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”  Their study (entitled "Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness") can be read here. “We have shown that severing the cortical connections between the two brain hemispheres does not seem to lead to two independent conscious agents within one brain,” the researchers said.

In 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

“In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults.”

In the video here we see a split-brain patient who seems like a pretty normal person, not at all someone with “two minds." And at the beginning of the video here the same patient says that after such a split-brain operation “you don't notice it” and that you don't feel any different than you did before – hardly what someone would say if the operation had produced “two minds” in someone. And the video here about a person with a split brain from birth shows us what is clearly someone with one mind, not two. In these interviews, every single time the split-brain patients answer questions normally, they are showing their ability to make decisions normally. The mere act of answering questions always involves decisions about what to say and how to say it.

But this is not at all what we should expect from the assumption that the brain is the source of our decisions. If that assumption were true, a split-brain operation should cause two independent sources of decision-making that would have a tendency to conflict with each other.

Reason #5: “Decision zig-zag" is almost never observed in pressure situations, but we would expect it to be very common if different parts of the brain (or halves of the brain) were causing decisions. 

Here's a quick mental test I'd like you to try. If you can answer all the questions real quickly, in a small number of seconds, it will tend to show you're a smart person who can think fast.  Try it. 

1. Pick a color.

2. Pick a number between 1 and 10. 

3. Pick a planet.  

4. Pick a continent.

5. Pick a city.

Did you skip the test? No fair. It's easy -- go back and try it. 

Now, if you are like 90% of my readers, you were able to do this exercise real quickly, in less than 10 or 15 seconds. But we would not expect such a thing to be possible if your brain was making your decisions. For in that case, we would expect that different parts of the brain would be coughing up different decisions, leading to a result rather like this:

Pick a color? Uh, red -- no green - no blue - okay, red! 

Pick a number? Uh, 8! No, 6 ! No -- uh, 4!  No, 2!

Pick a planet? Merc -- no Jupiter -- no, Earth, no wait...

Pick a continent?  North -- no South -- no Eur -- no Afri -- no Asia!

Pick a city? New ... uh, no Shang... no Paris -- oops, no Moscow! 

As mentioned above, people who have half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations can make decisions normally. It therefore cannot be maintained that a decision requires a full brain. If you think that brains make decisions, you are forced to the idea that part of a brain (half a brain or less) can make a decision. But such an idea makes us ask: should not then people be overwhelmed by conflicting decision signals, sent by different parts of a brain? 

Consider the organization of the brain. There are two identical halves. Under the hypothesis that a half of a brain or less can make a decision, we would therefore expect to see very often something that we can call "decision zig-zag."  This would involve behavior in which an organism was flipping back and forth between two possible decisions, as if two physical areas of the brain were conflicting with each other, coming to separate decisions. We would expect to see this particularly often in "coin flip" kind of decisions in which one choice is not obviously better than another. 

But we rarely see such behavior in humans, whenever there is time pressure. It is true that given some important choice, and given the luxury of time to deliberate, a person may kind of go back-and-forth in his mind about what to do. For example, if you are accepted by two different colleges, you may kind of go back-and-forth in your mind, first favoring one choice, then another.  But whenever there is a tight time pressure, and people know there is only a very short time for a decision, humans typically behave with very little indecision. 

Scores on standardized tests such as SAT tests are an excellent gauge of how very infrequently high-performing humans engage in "decision zig-zag" under pressure situations.  In the reading and writing part of an SAT test, a student has to answer more than 100 questions in less than two hours. The questions are multiple choice questions, so doing the test requires making 100 decisions, each a decision about which of the choices to select. Each question typically requires 30 seconds or more of reading.  There is very little time for indecision. Every one who performs very well on the test (in the 90th percentile or higher) is making 100 or more decisions (about which answer to choose) with very little indecision.  Under such pressure situations, humans do not at all perform like they would perform if different halves or different parts of your brain were sending you different signals about what to do.  Humans instead act like beings with a single unified mind.  It would seem that if different parts or halves of a brain were determining what decision to make, there would be so much indecision and "decision zig-zag" that the average SAT score in the US would be at least 200 points lower than it is. 

Reason #6: There is no particular region of the brain that seems to be crucial to non-muscular decision making.

Some particular regions of the brain have been strongly associated with particular functions. For example, we know that the brain stem is strongly associated with autonomic activity that keeps the heart and lungs working. Any major damage to the brain stem usually causes death. We also know that the visual cortex is strongly associated with vision. But no strong associations have been established between any part of the brain and calm non-muscular decision making.  By "non-muscular decision making" I mean the type of thing that goes on when you silently pick a number between 1 and 10 or silently choose in the morning what you will eat for dinner.  

To get an idea of how weak is the neuroscience case that your brain makes decisions, we can look at an article in Psychology Today entitled “The Neuroscience of Making a Decision.” After referring to some brain region that might be involved in addiction, which has no general relevance to the issue of whether brains make decisions, we are referred to a study claiming that the striatum is involved in decision-making. It's a study used that only 7 rats, Since this is less half of the minimum number of animals per study group recommended for a modestly convincing result, the study provides no good evidence for a neural involvement in decision making.

Then the Psychology Today article refers to a brain-scanning study attempting to show that regions called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex have something to do with decision making. These are the two regions that are most commonly cited as being involved in decision making. A brain scanning study could only give robust evidence for some region being heavily involved in some activity if it were to show a strong percent signal change, rather than the weak signal change of only 1% or less that brain scanning studies typically show. In this case, the study does not even give a figure for the percent signal change. So it does not provide any robust evidence that the the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the ventromedial prefrontal cortex have something to do with decision making

Our Psychology Today article then concludes, having provided no real evidence that there is any such thing as a “neuroscience of decision making.”

This study examined six patients with damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and found that they had an average IQ of 104, above the average of 100. Since filling out a written IQ test requires many cases of decision making (in regard to the answer given), such a result is incompatible with claims that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is some part of the brain particularly involved in decision making. This study says, “We have studied numerous patients with bilateral lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal (VM) cortex” and that “most of these patients retain normal intellect, memory and problem-solving ability in laboratory settings.” The meta-analysis here says that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain "most commonly implicated in moral decision making," but says that there is a "lack of a significant cluster of activation" in this area, meaning that it doesn't actually light up more during brain scans. 

Failing to report any actual figures for percent signal changes (the number we need to know to judge whether some area of the brain is more involved in an activity), the same meta-analysis notes differences between its findings and the findings of other studies, highlighting how much these brain scan studies tend to conflict with each other. We read the following:

"As previously stated, Bzdok et al. (2012) found a cluster of activation in the rTPJ (BA 39), which we did not find. Another discrepancy between our ME activation clusters and Bzdok et al.’s (2012) for moral cognition are that they found a cluster of activation in the left amygdala, which we did not find. Also, Bzdok et al. (2012) reported activation in the precuneus, which was not found to be a cluster of significant activation for the ME experiments in our analysis."

Another example of a report of a supposed “neuroscience of decision making” is a Neuroscience News article here entitled, “Researchers Discover Decision Making Center of Brain.” We again have a reference to a mere brain scanning study. But this time the study has a graph that gives us the percent signal change that we need to judge whether robust evidence has been found. The graph shows that the percent signal change picked up by the brain scanning is only about a fraction of one percent, about 1 part in 300. That's no good evidence for anything, and could easily be the result of pure chance fluctuations.

Similarly weak results are found in this study, trying to use brain scanning to find some region of the brain more involved in decision making. The graph shows that the percent signal change picked up the brain scanning is only about a fraction of one percent, about 1 part in 300. That's no good evidence for anything, and could easily be the result of pure chance fluctuations. 

In Figure 3 of the study here, we get a brain scanning result for the percent signal change in activity for the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The graph shows a signal change of only about 1 part in 300 (about .3 percent). That's no good evidence for anything, and could easily be the result of pure chance fluctuations. 

Most of the studies that claim to show neural correlates of decision making are mainly finding either neural correlates of emotion (which can often be entangled with decision making) or neural correlates of muscle activation (often paired with decision making).  When I do a Google search for "neural correlates of motionless decision making," I am unable to find a single study testing such a thing. 

Reason #7: There is no convincing evidence of some type of change of brain state when a calm non-muscular decision is made.

By looking at brain scans, it is impossible to reliably predict when anyone made a non-muscular decision.  We should not be fooled by a certain type of brain scanning experiment with the following characteristics:

(1) The study will not be pre-registered, and will not publish in advance a specification of some particular type of brain activation signal that it is looking for (in some very specific little part of the brain) as a sign of when someone made a decision.

(2) The study will scan the brains of people as they made some decision in their minds. 

(3) Scientists will then examine the brain scans, looking for some particular tiny area of the brain that was more a tiny bit more active when the decisions were made. 

(4) The study will involve only a small number of subjects, maybe 10, 15, 20 or 25. 

Let me explain why this type of study is not at all good evidence for anything.  In any random brain there will be random fluctuations in activity from moment to moment.  Let us suppose a researcher has the freedom to compare any of 200 different little areas of the brain, looking for some area that has an increase in activity during some particular moment (such as when a decision is made). We would expect that purely by chance there would be some area that would show a tiny bit more activity during the particular moment being studied, even if it is not your brain that is making a decision. Similarly, if I use a machine that can detect minute fluctuations in temperature in the livers of 20 people while they are making a decision, and I have the freedom to check 200 different little regions of the liver, I will probably be able to find some tiny liver region which (purely by chance) had a minutely higher temperature when some decision was made. But this would do nothing to show that livers make decisions. 

A discussion of this issue can be found around page 23 of the technical paper here, where we read the following:

"With a plausible population correlation of 0.5, a 1000-voxel whole-brain analysis would require 83 subjects to achieve 80% power. A sample size of 83 is five times greater than the average used in the studies we surveyed: collecting this much data in an fMRI experiment is an enormous expense that is not attempted by any except a few major collaborative networks."

In other words, brain imaging studies tend to use only a fraction of the sample size they need, given the techniques they typically use.  It is possible to do a reliable study with a small sample size, if you limit the analysis to only one small tiny area of the brain. But that is almost never done.  

On page 33 the paper above states the following, giving us a strong reason for skepticism about brain scanning studies:

"In short, our exploration of power suggests that across-subject whole-brain correlation experiments are generally impractical: without adequate multiple comparisons correction they will have false positive rates approaching 100%, with adequate multiple comparisons correction they require 5 times as many subjects than what the typical lab currently utilizes."

The study here is an example of the type of unconvincing study I have just discussed. The authors scanned brains, looking for change in signal strength corresponding to whether some type of decision was made.  Having the freedom to check any of 200 or more brain regions (since their study was not a pre-registered study announcing its intention to look in only one little place in the brain), the authors found one or two tiny regions where there is an extremely small greater activation when a decision was made. The difference in signal strength (as reported in Figure 1 and figure 2) was only about .1 of 1 percent, which is about 1 part in 1000.  But we would expect a result as good as that by chance, because of random variations in little parts of the brain, even if brains do not actually make decisions. So the study does nothing at all to provide evidence that brains are making decisions.  The study say it did "whole brain analyses", but it used only 32 subjects, only a small fraction of the 83 subjects recommended above for a mere 1000-voxel "whole brain analysis" study.  

On page 68 of the book "Casting Light on the Dark Side of Brain Imaging," we read about another problem in brain scanning studies:

"Take a guess at how many ways we can analyze data from a single brain scan. Theoretically countless, practically at least 69,000 ways....Brain imaging data usually requires between 6 and 10 steps of general data preparation and analysis. Researchers can perform any of these steps in a variety of ways....Different choices in data processing and analysis can lead to widely divergent results: small variations can quickly sum to form large discrepancies. In some cases, researchers may run many variations of an analysis, but only report results that support their hypothesis. This practice can lead to biased publications that overestimate true effects." 

Here is the kind of thing we would like to have in order to have convincing evidence of greater brain activity when a non-muscular decision is made:

(1) There would have to be many replicated pre-registered studies that all showed that some particular region of the brain activated at a substantially higher level when a decision was made (more than just a fraction of 1 percent). 

(2) In the pre-registration declarations, published prior to the collection of any data, the study authors would have to announce that they were studying only one small region of the brain to see whether it activates more during decision making, rather than giving themselves the freedom to check any brain region they wanted in a "fishing expedition" kind of approach to produce signal variations we would expect by chance.  

(3) In the same  pre-registration declarations, published prior to the collection of any data, the study authors would have to commit to one exact method of data analysis, precisely spelled out, thereby depriving themselves of the freedom to keep "slicing and dicing" the brain scan data until they got a result supporting their hypothesis. 

 Nothing like this has occurred.  Instead we have a succession of little brain scan studies (usually with low statistical power) showing minute less-than-one-percent activation increases in some region that differs from study to study, studies in which researchers are free to look for some minute signal deviation in any brain region, and free to try dozens of data analysis methods until something that can be called a neural correlation coughs up.  The results of such studies are what what we would expect to get by chance even if brains are not actually making decisions. 

In short, we have no robust evidence that brains make decisions. Nature never told us that decisions are made by brains. It is merely neuroscientists who told us such a thing, without ever having adequate evidence for such a claim. 

Reason #8: Humans can make decisions many times more quickly than they would make if decisions were being made by brains subject to several severe signal slowing factors and severe signal noise. 

Humans can make decisions very, very fast. Every time some one drives in the city, he is making important decisions very quickly, such as whether to brake at a particular moment. Every time some one speaks very quickly in conversation, he is making many instantaneous decisions about what words to use. People such as  quarterbacks and soccer players, standardized test takers,  chess players in special "speed" matches, and players of the Jeopardy TV show are making decisions at a very fast speed, often instantaneously. 

If you tried my previous selection game, you probably made decisions at a rate of about one decision per one or two seconds (each time you picked one of the possibilities, you were making a decision on what to pick).  If it took you 15 seconds to do that test, about two-thirds of that was reading and memory recall; and you were making a decision at a rate of about one decision per second.  A baseball hitter typically makes a decision (on whether to swing) in only a small fraction of a second. According to this scientific paper, "The average speech rate of adults in English is between 150 and 190 words per minute (Tauroza and Allison 1990), although in conversation this figure may rise considerably, reaching 200 wpm (Walker 2010; Laver 1994)."  Someone speaking in conversation at 200 words per minute is making decisions at a rate of three per second, each a decision on which word to use.  

But we have strong reasons for believing that brains should not be fast enough for instantaneous decisions. The "100 meters per second" claim often made about brain signal speed is not at all accurate, as it completely ignores very serious slowing factors such as the 200-times-slower speed of transmission through dendrites, the very serious slowing factor caused by cumulative synaptic delays, and the additional very serious slowing factor caused by what is called synaptic fatigue. A realistic calculation of brain signal speed (such as I have made here) leads to the conclusion that brains should be far too slow to allow extremely rapid or instantaneous decisions, and that if a brain were making a non-muscular decision (not involving a reflex), it should take at least five or ten seconds for any such decision.  

We also know that the brain has multiple sources of very severe signal noise, as discussed here. It would seem that all this noise would be a huge factor preventing different parts of a brain from reaching a single decision quickly, just as it would greatly decrease the chance of a classroom of 30 people reaching the same decision very quickly if all of the people were blaring different podcasts, videos and rock songs from their smartphones. 

An intelligent hypothesis about human decision making is that it comes from an immaterial aspect of human beings, what is commonly called a soul or spirit.  A neuroscientist will protest that it is forbidden to postulate some important reality that we cannot directly see. Such a rule is not at all followed in general by scientists. Astrophysicists and cosmologists nowadays are constantly claiming that most of the universe consists of important realities we cannot see, what they call dark matter and dark energy -- both things that have never been directly observed by any method. 

Integrated Information Theory Is an Explanatory Flop

Neuroscientists have no credible explanations for the most important mental phenomena such as consciousness and memory. All that scientists have in this regard are some mangy speculations that don't hold up to scrutiny. I have often written about the deficiencies of neuroscientist theories about memory. I will now look at the poor quality of one of the theories that is put forth as a “theory that might explain consciousness”: what is called integrated information theory.

Before discussing the theory, I must discuss the general problem with any type of theory postulating that consciousness or human mentality is a product of the brain. We realize this huge problem when we consider that a brain is something material or physical, but consciousness or mentality is something immaterial or mental. There seems nothing wrong with the general idea that a physical cause might produce a physical effect, and we know of many examples of physical effects producing physical causes (such as tsunamis producing flooding or lightning producing electrocution). There also seems nothing wrong with the general idea of a mental cause producing a mental effect (for example, the mental idea or knowledge that you are going to soon die may produce the mental effect of anxiety). But there does seem something wrong with the idea of a physical cause producing a mental phenomenon such as consciousness or imagination or understanding. To many a philosopher, the idea that some particular arrangement of cells might cause an idea to pop up seems no more right than the idea that some arrangement of thoughts might conjure up some animal. It seems no more reasonable that some mere arrangement of atoms might cause an idea to arise than for some arrangement of thoughts in your mind to conjure up physical objects.

Now I will discuss integrated information theory. The theory is presented in this paper, and summarized in this wikipedia.org article. You can expand the visual below to get some reasoning that is the core of integrated information theory (the visual is from the wikipedia.org article). The arrangement mirrors what is presented in the paper on integrated information theory. On the left column is a theory of “axioms” about consciousness, an axiom being something that is self-evidently true.  In the visual, these “axioms” are described as “essential properties of every experience.” The first one is evident, that “consciousness exists.”

From the wikikpedia. org article

But others in this list of “axioms” are not so evident at all. The second “axiom” is that “Consciousness is structured: each experience is composed of phenomenological distinctions.” Most experiences do consist of multiple aspects, but it is quite possible to have an experience that is not structured, and is not composed of multiple aspects. Lying motionless on a bed with my eyes closed, I can think of nothing but the blackness of outer space (or think of  absolutely nothing at all). There is nothing structured about that, and it doesn't consist of multiple aspects.  On the right side of the visual are what are called “postulates.” These are described as “properties that physical systems (elements in a state) must have to account for an experience.”

What is going is just a big example of begging the question, of assuming what was supposed to be proved. The creator of this scheme has simply taken it for granted that some physical system with some set of properties can give rise to a conscious experience. Before looking at such a set of properties, we should reject the underlying assumption. It actually seems there is no physical system that can account for conscious experiences. We can think of no reason why neurons or any groups of neurons should give rise to conscious experience or self-hood. 

I can give an analogy for the type of reasoning that is going on here. Suppose someone were to start trying to explain rock levitation by making a list of the set of properties that a rock levitation incantation would need to succeed. The person might start listing properties such as (a) a specification of which rock to levitate; (2) a specification of how high the rock should be levitated; (3) an appeal to some deity or to spirits of the dead. He might then claim that his rock levitation incantation met all of these properties, and that this explains how he was able to levitate a rock. But before giving much scrutiny to this “set of properties that a rock levitation incantation would need to have,” we should veto such a list at the very beginning, saying, “It's no fair presenting such a list unless you have first proven that rocks can be levitated by incantations.” And similarly, to the person who would start listing “properties that physical systems (elements in a state) must have to account for an experience,” we should not at all concede the possibility of such a thing, but demand first that someone show why we should believe that a physical system could ever account for a conscious experience.

I won't go too much into the details of the “postulates” in the second column of the visual, other than to note that they are as doubtful as some of the axioms in the first column from which these postulates supposedly derive. The paper consists largely of specialized jargon and doubtful mathematics, perhaps to provide some imposing sounds and sparkles to impress the easily impressed.

Integrated information theory claims that all systems with integrated information have some level of consciousness, and that the brain has high consciousness because it has lots of integrated information in the form of stored memories. But there is actually no evidence that integrated information exists in the brain. The claim that memories are stored in brains is simply a speech custom of scientists, a dogma they keep stating without any proof. There are extremely strong reasons for thinking that this dogma cannot be true. They include the following:

1. Synapses (the supposed storage place of memories) are made of proteins with an average lifetime of only a few weeks, which is only a thousandth of the  maximum length of time that humans can remember things.
   
2. There is so much noise in synapses and neurons that accurate recall of large amounts of information should be impossible if you remembered by reading things from your brain.
   
3. There is no credible theory of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory, such as when you instantly recall information about someone after merely hearing their name. Finding such a memory instantly in the brain would be like instantly finding a needle in a haystack. 
4. No one has discovered any actual example of learned knowledge or episodic memories in any bit of brain tissue.
   
5. Brains seem to have neither a mechanism for writing a memory nor a mechanism for reading a memory.
6. No one has conceived of a detailed theory explaining how human knowledge could ever be translated into neural states so that it could be stored in brains.
   

We know there is genome information in each neuron, but that is not integrated information. It's just massively redundant information, with each DNA molecule in a neuron duplicating the same information. As for the claim of integrated information theory that all systems with integrated information are partially conscious, such a claim has absurd implications, such as the implication that your thermostat must be kind of conscious or that your smartphone must be kind of like a person.

Another defect of integrated information theory is that it makes no sense to try to present a "theory of consciousness" in isolation, because the thing that needs to be explained is human mentality in all its aspects, and consciousness is only one of those aspects.  Given all the many aspects and capabilities of the human mind (including memory, imagination, volition, emotion, abstract reasoning, understanding, self-hood, and many others),  trying to explain the human mind with a mere "theory of consciousness" is rather like advancing a theory of the earth's origin which merely explains the earth's shape rather than also explaining the earth's mass, position and composition.  

I can imagine a computer exercise that helps to illustrate how there is no sense at all in the idea that integrated information produces consciousness. Let us imagine that you have a website that is rather like wikipedia. Suppose the web site consists of 10 million pages, each of which has text scanned in from an old encyclopedia. Now, you might want to make this information more integrated. So you might write a computer program that scans through all these web pages, creating hyperlinks that add the integration. After the program finishes running on all these pages, there would then be many millions of hyperlinks integrating the information. So, for example, whenever a reader came to a page with a title of “World War II,” all of the people names, place names, and weapon names would appear as hyperlinks that a reader can click to go to a page discussing that particular person, place or weapon. And in each of those articles there would be a link back to the general article on World War II.

Now, imagine that after testing this program, you then run it on all of your 10 million web pages, creating millions of hyperlinks, and vastly increasing the amount of integrated information. According to integrated information theory, you then would have made your web site more conscious than it was before, because now the information is a lot more integrated. But that's nonsensical. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that your web site would be any more conscious than it was before. And if you had a massive web site with a trillion pages, and you ran such a program to create a quadrillion hyperlinks,  creating a vast mountain of integrated information, there would still not be the slightest reason for thinking that this vast leap in integrated information would have made your web site the slightest bit more conscious than it was before.  

Scott Aaronson (not to be confused with the cartoonist Scott Adams) has stated the following about integrated information theory (IIT):

"In my view, IIT fails to solve the Pretty-Hard Problem because it unavoidably predicts vast amounts of consciousness in physical systems that no sane person would regard as particularly 'conscious' at all: indeed, systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data.  Moreover, IIT predicts not merely that these systems are 'slightly' conscious (which would be fine), but that they can be unboundedly more conscious than humans are."

Information and integrated information are things that can be produced by conscious agents.  Neither information nor integrated information do anything to explain why consciousness exists. Similarly, people make art, but art doesn't do anything to explain why people exist.  

You may object to what I have stated about memory and the brain, pointing out that a few days ago there was an article in the esteemed journal Nature which stated the following:

"Researchers know that memories are encoded in the mammalian brain when the strength of the connection between neurons increases. That connection strength is determined by the amount of a particular type of receptor found at the synapse."

This sounds very confident, but when we read the quote in context, we should lose all confidence in the claim. Here is the full quote:

"Researchers know that memories are encoded in the mammalian brain when the strength of the connection between neurons increases. That connection strength is determined by the amount of a particular type of receptor found at the synapse. Known as AMPA receptors, the presence of these structures must be maintained for a memory to remain intact. 'The problem, Hardt says, 'is that none of these receptors are stable. They are moved in and out of the synapse constantly and turn over in hours or days.' "

The latter part of the quote should cause us to lose all confidence in the first part of the quote.  Given such instability in synapses, they cannot be the storage place for memories that last for decades.  The author of the article is a science journalist, and science journalists have a history of uncritically regurgitating dubious claims by theorists and researchers. 

Rather than making that factually inaccurate claim that "researchers know that memories are encoded in the mammalian brain when the strength of the connection between neurons increases," along with the claim that this occurs at synapses, our science journalist should have noted that this very month in the journal Nature there appeared a scientific paper disputing such a claim. The paper stated the following: "There are nonetheless both theoretical arguments and experimental data against the idea that long-term memory resides in synapses with learning-altered weights," and also, "Whether or not memory is necessarily stored at synapses is still unclear."