"Red Lights Everywhere": Why Brains Must Be Way Too Slow for Instant Recall and Fast Thinking

Claims that brains store memories and produce thinking are not well-established scientific facts, but mere speech customs of neuroscientists who belong to a belief community as dogmatic as the communities of organized religions. Such neuroscientists tend to pay shockingly little attention to the implications of the low-level findings neuroscientists have made about brains.  Replacing its proteins at a rate of about 3% every day, brains are neither stable enough nor fast enough to explain things such as the instant accurate recall of 50-year-old memories.  

People who write about the brain frequently use a trick to make you think that brains are very fast. Such people will tell you that brain signals can travel up to 100 meters per second. But this is the speed when signals pass through the fastest tiny parts of the brain. This is the speed of signals when they travel through what is called a myelinated axon. The mylein sheath around the axon (with a white color) is what makes it so fast. It is interesting that the site here says, "The axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin." Axons without much of a myelin sheath are believed to transmit brain signals about 5 times slower.  According to the diagram here, signals travel across myelinated axons at speeds between about 20 and 120 meters per second (depending on the thickness of the axon), and signals travel between unmyelinated axons between about 5 and 25 meters per second.

But citing a speed of meters per second for the speed of a brain signal is very misleading. It is as misleading as saying that you can drive through New York City very quickly, on the grounds that you can reach a speed of 30 or 40 miles per hour.  Considering only such a maximum speed is misleading, because when you travel through  New York City, you will be slowed down by many red lights.  Similarly, while some microscopic parts of the brain allow a fast transmission of signals, there are very many microscopic parts of the brain which very much slow down brain signals.   You might figuratively put it this way: the brain has billions of red lights all over the place, and each of those spots will slow down the speed of a brain signal.  So while the maximum speed of a brain signal during any millionth of a second may be as high as meters per second, the average speed of a brain signal is much, much slower, something on the order of one centimeter per second or slower. 

The schematic diagram below illustrates the point. We see a diagram of a neuron, one of the billions of cells that make up the brain. Protruding from the main part of the neuron are dendrites. The transmission of signals through dendrites is slow, so next to the dendrites is a snail icon representing how slow such units are. According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons.  Such a speed bump seems more important when we consider a quote by UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta: "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue."  Given such a percentage, and such a conduction speed across dendrites, it would seem that the average transmission speed of a brain must be only a very small fraction of the meters-per-second transmission in axons. 

In the diagram above, we see a chain-like unit in the middle. That part is a myelinated axon, which can transmit a brain signal quickly. So I have put a rabbit icon next to that part, to indicate the relatively speedy signal transmission of that part. 

The bottom right part of the diagram shows some axon terminals that have synapses at their ends. Synapses are a serious "speed bump" for signal transmission in a brain. So I have put a snail icon at the bottom right of the diagram to indicate that slowness. 

How much of a "speed bump" are synapses? There are two types of synapses: slow chemical synapses and relatively fast electrical synapses. The parts of the brain allegedly involved in thought and memory have almost entirely chemical synapses. (The sources here and here and here and here and here refer to electrical synapses as "rare."  The neurosurgeon Jeffrey Schweitzer refers here to electrical synapses as "rare."  The paper here tells us on page 401 that electrical synapses -- also called gap junctions -- have only "been described very rarely" in the neocortex of the brain. This paper says that electrical synapses are a "small minority of synapses in the brain.")

We know of a reason why transmission of a nerve signal across chemical synapses should be relatively sluggish. When a nerve signal comes to the head of a chemical synapse, it can no longer travel across the synapse electrically. It must travel by neurotransmitter molecules diffusing across the gap of the synapse. This is much, much slower than what goes on in an axon.

Diffusion across a synaptic gap

There is a scientific term used for the delay caused when a nerve signal travels across a synapse. The delay is called the synaptic delay. According to this 1965 scientific paper, most synaptic delays are about .5 milliseconds, but there are also quite a few as long as 2 to 4 milliseconds. A more recent (and probably more reliable) estimate was made in a 2000 paper studying the prefrontal monkey cortex. That paper says, "the synaptic delay, estimated from the y-axis intercepts of the linear regressions, was 2.29" milliseconds. It is very important to realize that this synaptic delay is not the total delay caused by a nerve signal as it passes across different synapses. The synaptic delay is the delay caused each and every time that the nerve signal passes across a synapse. 

Such a delay may not seem like too much of a speed bump. But consider just how many such "synaptic delays" would have to occur for a brain signal to travel from one region of the brain to another. It has been estimated that the brain contains 100 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of them).  So it would seem that for a neural signal to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain that is a distance away only 5% or 10% of the length of the brain, that such a signal would have to endure many thousands of such "synaptic delays" resulting in a cumulative synaptic delay of quite a few seconds of time.

The problem is that we know humans can instantly recall obscure pieces of information, and instantly do complex calculations.  We see this on TV shows such as Jeopardy,  where people again and again give correct answers after a delay of only about 1 second when being presented surprise pieces of very obscure information such as "Works of this Nobel Prize winner include Song of Solomon and Beloved," and "This was the city where King Louis XIV died." It is well known that certain people (some called autistic savants) can do things like instantly tell you the day of the week for any day you select in the century. There are some math calculation prodigies who can actually calculate faster than any person using a hand calculator. It is impossible to account for such speed under the theory that your brain stores your memories and your brain produces your thoughts. 

Here are all the time factors we would need to account for under a theory of neural memory storage:

(1) The time needed to find where a memory was in the brain.  Since the brain has no indexing system, no addressing system, no coordinate system, and no position notation system, we can only assume that this would be a very long time, like the time required to find a needle in a haystack. 

(2) The time needed for an encoded memory stored neurally to be decoded and translated into a thought ending up in your mind.  That would take quite a while. We know that it takes quite a while (many seconds) for the brain to do the only type of decoding known to occur in it, the decoding of genetic information stored in DNA (a type of decoding incomparably simpler than the fantastically complex decoding that would be needed to decode some memory encoded as neural states or synapse states). 

(3) The time needed for signals to travel around in your brain. That would take quite a few seconds, because signals would have to travel across thousands of synapses, each of which would produce a synaptic delay (and also thousands of dendrites that would slow down things). 

In short, there are multiple redundant reasons why you would never be able to recall something instantly if memories were stored in your brain.  The slowness of brain signals also means very rapid thinking cannot be a brain effect. An example of rapid thinking is that when asked in a competition what was 869,463,853 times 73, Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash correctly gave the answer of 63,470,861,269 in only 26 seconds. Similarly, Scott Flansburg added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times, in only 15 seconds. Such calculations could never occur that quickly if it were performed by a brain with "red lights all over the place."

I'll give an example of a type of question no one would be able to answer in a short time if recall and thinking were the products of the brain. Consider the question: which Broadway composer may remind you of a children's TV show? Many people my age can answer such a question fairly quickly. But think of how much mental activity it involves:

(1) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of Broadway composers.

(2) Scanning through your very diverse memories of the names of children's TV shows.

(3) Looking for some kind of fuzzy match (not an exact match) between the two different groups of items. 

The correct answer is: Rodgers, because the great Broadway composer Richard Rodgers has a name sound-matching the name in the once-famous children's TV show "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood." It would take you hours or days to answer such a question if you had to use slow synapses and slow dendrites to solve it, searching through a brain without any indexing system or coordinate system; but many people my age could answer such a question in a few seconds. 

It would be very incorrect to suggest that when humans remember, they always only use some memory acquired at one time.  For example, ask a man to describe the difference between modern living and ancient living, and someone might quickly say something like this:

"We use cars not chariots, and fight with armored divisions not legions. We message with emails not carrier pigeons.  We read using  smartphones not scrolls, and wear trousers not togas. We pray to Jesus not Jupiter. We are paid with direct deposits, not coins."

Such a simple response could easily occur in a few seconds, but if brains store our memories, it would require finding, retrieving, understanding and intelligently using information stored in a dozen different little spots in a brain (a brain without an addressing system or indexing allowing fast retrieval). So it would take a long time, and could never occur instantly. 

A scientific paper suggests that neuroscientists are not paying proper attention to signal delays when calculating the speed of brain signals. It says, "Despite their inevitable physiological significance in living systems, propagation delays are usually overlooked in mathematical models, presumably to avoid further complexity."  That's as silly as calculating the time it would take you to drive through the middle of New York City without taking into account the time spent at traffic lights.  

Focal seizures in the brain propagate at a speed of about 1 millimeter per second. We read the following in one paper about the speed of seizures:

"The spread of activity through cortical circuits has been studied in experiments by means of electrical registrations and optical imaging [1–3], and high-density microelectrode arrays [4]. Experiments show slow propagation of an ictal wavefront and fast spread of discharges behind the front [3] [5]. The ictal wavefront progresses through the cortical area at a pace of < 1 mm/s, which is consistent with propagation speeds measured with electrodes and imaging in brain slice models [1, 2, 6–9] and in vivo (0.6 mm/s in [10] with two-photon microscope and 0.5 mm/s in [11] with widefield imaging in mouse neocortex)."

There is no particular reason for thinking that information-transmitting brain signals in the cortex would travel very many times faster than this low speed of about 1 millimeter per second.  The surface area of the brain is about 2500 square centimeters (about 2,500,000 square millimeters), about the size of a pillow case.  The brain can fit in the skull because of extensive folding, rather like a pillow case folded up to fit inside your coat pocket. If brain signals travel about as fast as seizures, it would take something like 1500 seconds (or 25 minutes) for some thought to travel from the middle of one brain half to the middle of another. 

A 2020 paper was entitled "Kilohertz two-photon fluorescence microscopy imaging of neural activity in vivo." It used some fancy new technology to clock the speed of brain signals in a living mouse, a "latest and greatest" technology that takes thousands of snapshots every second. The paper has only one exact mention of a speed: supplementary Figure 5 of the paper refers to a calcium propagating speed of about 25 microns per second, which is a very slow speed of only about 0.0025 centimeters per second (about .02 millimeters per second). If human brain signals travel at anything like such a speed, the brain must be way, way too slow to be the cause of instant recall and fast problem solving. 

We do not think at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We do not recall at anything remotely like the speed of brains. We think and recall at the speed of souls.

Exhibit B Suggesting Scientists Don't Know How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory

In a 2019 post “Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Know How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory,” I took a close look at 68 “expert answers” given on one page of an “expert answers” site, a page with the topic of "how are memories retrieved in the brain?" I argued  that none of the experts had a coherent and convincing answer to the question “how are memories retrieved in the brain?” I maintain that answering such a question convincingly will always be impossible, because human memories are not stored in brains, and nothing in the human brain bears any resemblance to either  a device for retrieving factual information learned during human experience or a device for storing memories for years. In particular, there is not any thing in the human brain that can explain how a human brain can instantly retrieve detailed information learned long ago about about some obscure person, place or event. Since the brain lacks any addressing system, any indexing system, and any position notation system, it should be absolutely impossible for a brain to instantly recall obscure information, such as we see happening on the long-running television quiz show Jeopardy. For example, if someone asks you (for the first time ever in your life) to name three Russian composers, and you instantly answer “Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov,” you are doing something absolutely inexplicable in terms of brain activity.

Now I will give a kind of “Exhibit B” suggesting that scientists don't know how a brain could retrieve a memory: a 2019 paper entitled “The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval.” When we get beyond the hype and unwarranted braggadocio of this paper, we find that it fails to convincingly portray any such foundation at all.

A great deal of the paper is involved with trying to persuade us that experimental studies have made great progress in identifying memory storage sites (called engrams). The authors state, “In the last decade, enormous progress has been made in identifying and manipulating engrams in rodents.” This statement is not at all correct. A few scattered studies have claimed to identify and manipulate such alleged engrams, but such studies have failed to provide any convincing evidence that such engrams really exist. The studies typically suffer from several of the following methodological sins:

Sin #1: assuming or acting as if a memory is stored in some exact speck-sized spot of a brain without any adequate basis for such a “shot in the dark” assumption.

Sin #2: either a lack of a blinding protocol, or no detailed discussion of how an effective technique for blinding was achieved.

Sin #3: inadequate sample sizes, and a failure to do a sample size calculation to determine how large a sample size to test with.

Sin #4: a high occurrence of low statistical significance near the minimum of .05, along with a frequent hiding of such unimpressive results, burying them outside of the main text of a paper rather than placing them in the abstract of the paper.

Sin #5: using presumptuous or loaded language in the paper, such as referring in the paper to the non-movement of an animal as “freezing” and referring to some supposedly "preferentially activated" cell as an "engram cell."

Sin #6: failing to mention or test alternate explanations for the non-movement of an animal (called “freezing”), explanations that have nothing to do with memory recall.

Sin #7: a dependency on arbitrarily analyzed brain scans or an uncorroborated judgment of "freezing behavior" which is not a reliable way of measuring fear.

I fully discuss all of these methodological problems in my post “The Seven Sins of Memory Engram Experiments,” and I give very many examples of how the papers cited as evidence for engrams in rodents are guilty of such procedural sins. So when the authors of the paper “The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval” assert that "enormous progress has been made in identifying and manipulating engrams in rodents,” they do not speak correctly at all. There still exists no robust well-replicated evidence that any such thing as an engram (a neural site of stored learned information) exists in any animal. 

The authors present a lengthy, credulous and uncritical review of weak neuroscience studies that have attempted to find evidence for memory engrams (neural storage sites for memories). Their review repeatedly fails to subject such studies to an appropriate level of scrutiny. The authors  trumpet weak and poorly replicated studies as evidence for the memory engrams that they  want to believe in. We hear no mention of the very many problems in such studies, such as the fact that they typically use unreliable bias-prone techniques for judging the degree of fear in rodents (subjective judgments about "freezing behavior") rather than reliable objective techniques such as heart-rate measurement (the heart rate of a rat dramatically surges when the rat is afraid). 

In the section entitled “Retrieval as neuronal reinstatement,” we have the main part of the authors' ideas about how memory retrieval might work in a brain. Get beyond the dense layers of jargon, digressions and circumlocutions, and we find very little of substance. Their basic idea is that “natural retrieval cues reactivate neural ensembles active at encoding.” “Encoding” is a jargon term used by neuroscientists to describe some process that allegedly occurs when learned information is translated into neural states or synapse states. Despite the fact that the term “encoding” has been constantly used in scientific papers, we have neither any good evidence that such encoding occurs (in the sense of knowledge being translated into neural or synapse states), nor any coherent theory as to how it possibly could occur (there being an ocean of difficulties in the idea that human experience or conceptual knowledge could ever be translated into neural states). We merely have evidence that human beings remember things.

Neuroscientists so often use the term “encoding” that one way to interpret the word is to simply use it as a synonym for learning or memory acquisition. So using that interpretation, we can regard “natural retrieval cues reactivate neural ensembles active at encoding” as simply meaning “when you recall something, your brain reactivates some part of the brain that you used in learning the thing or experiencing the thing recalled.”

When we consider how a brain works, and the fact that all parts of it are constantly active, we can realize that such an explanation for memory retrieval is vacuous or untenable. All neurons in the human brain are constantly firing. Each neuron fires multiple times per minute. So we cannot at all explain a memory recollection as being a case where some tiny part of the brain was “activated,” as if that tiny part was the only part active. All neurons are constantly active.

Brain scanning studies contradict the claim that some little part of the brain (where some memory might be stored) is activated to a higher degree during memory recall.  Excluding the visual cortex that may be to used to kind of visually enhance some memory that was retrieved, such studies show that when humans recall things, there is no brain area that has even a 1% greater activation than any other brain area. Here are some specific numbers from particular studies:

• This brain scan study was entitled “Working Memory Retrieval: Contributions of the Left Prefrontal Cortex, the Left Posterior Parietal Cortex, and the Hippocampus.” Figure 4 and Figure 5 of the study shows that none of the memory retrievals produced more than a .3 percent signal change, so they all involved signal changes of less than 1 part in 333.
• In this study, brain scans were done during recognition activities, looking for signs of increased brain activity in the hippocampus, a region of the brain often described as some center of brain memory involvement. But the percent signal change is never more than .2 percent, that is, never more than 1 part in 500.
• The paper here is entitled, “Functional-anatomic correlates of remembering and knowing.” It shows a graph showing a percent signal change in the brain during memory retrieval that is no greater than .3 percent, less than 1 part in 300.
• The paper here is entitled “The neural correlates of specific versus general autobiographical memory construction and elaboration.” It shows various graphs showing a percent signal change in the brain during memory retrieval that is no greater than .07 percent, less than 1 part in 1000.
• The paper here is entitled “Neural correlates of true memory, false memory, and deception." It shows various graphs showing a percent signal change during memory retrieval that is no greater than .4 percent, 1 part in 250.
• This paper did a review of 12 other brain scanning studies pertaining to the neural correlates of recollection. Figure 3 of the paper shows an average signal change for different parts of the brain of only about .4 percent, 1 part in 250.
• This paper was entitled “Neural correlates of emotional memories: a review of evidence from brain imaging studies.” We learn from Figure 2 that none of the percent signal changes were greater than .4 percent,  1 part in 250.
• This study was entitled “Sex Differences in the Neural Correlates of Specific and General Autobiographical Memory.” Figure 2 shows that none of the differences in brain activity (for men or women) involved a percent signal change of more than .3 percent or 1 part in 333.

So it simply is not true that when you recall something, there is some substantially greater activation of some region of your brain where the memory is stored.  The claim that "natural retrieval cues reactivate neural ensembles active at encoding" basically means merely "your brain uses the information that it stored somewhere," but such an idea doesn't explain how a human brain supposedly storing very many thousands or millions of learned items of information could ever instantly find just the right neurons to use to cause you to instantly recall just the right piece of information when you are asked a specific question such as "What jobs did Ulysses Grant have?" 

There are many seemingly insurmountable problems that would have to be tackled by any theory of neural memory retrieval. The first is what I call the navigation problem. This is the problem that if a memory were to be stored on some exact tiny spot on the brain, it would seem that there would be no way for a brain to instantly find just that little spot. For that to occur would be like someone instantly finding a needle in a mountain-sized haystack, or like someone instantly finding just the right book in a vast library in which books were shelved in random positions. Neurons are not addressable, and have no neuron numbers or neuron addresses. So, for example, we cannot imagine that the brain instantly finds your memory image of Marilyn Monroe (when you hear her name) because the brain knows that such information is stored at neural location #239355235.  There are no such "neural addresses" in the brain. 

Then there is also the fact that the brain seems to have nothing like a read mechanism by which some small group of neurons are given special attention. The hard disk of a computer has a read/write head, but there's nothing like that in the brain. 

Then there is the fact that if memory information were encoded into neural states, the brain would have to decode that encoded information; but such a decoding would seem to require time that would prevent instantaneous recall. When cells do vastly simpler decoding involved in decoding DNA information, it takes cells many seconds or minutes. We would expect that any decoding of encoded information stored in a brain would take many seconds or minutes, preventing any such thing as instantaneous recall of rarely-remembered data items. In addition, we have not the slightest idea of how human learned information (with so many diverse forms) could either be translated or encoded into neural states, or decoded back into thoughts once such translated or encoded knowledge was decoded.  There exist hundreds of genes for the relatively simple job of decoding the genetic information in DNA. If human learned information and experiences (with so many diverse forms) were to be translated into neural or synapse states, so that learned information could be stored in a brain, there would need to be many hundreds or thousands of genes and proteins devoted to so complex a task. But no such genes and proteins seem to exist, and no one has proven that any gene or protein is dedicated to the task of memory encoding or decoding. 

None of these problems are addressed by the paper "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval."  The authors simply ignore the whole speed problem of explaining instant memory recall.  Their paper makes no mention of such a thing, and doesn't use words such as "speed" or "quick" or "fast" or "instant" or "instantaneous."  The authors also ignore the issue of how a brain could decode (during memory retrieval) encoded information stored in a brain. Their paper does not use the words "decode," "decoding" or "translate."  The paper merely refers in passing to some research they claim has "potentially interesting translational implications," but give no details to clarify such a claim.  Nor does the paper have any discussion of some theory of a read mechanism that could be used to read memories from brains. Searching for the word "read" in the paper produces no relevant sentences. 

Any real theory of a neural retrieval of memories would have to also be a theory of the storage and encoding of such memories. There can be no understanding of how some memories could be read from neurons or synapses or decoded unless you had an understanding of how such memories were stored and encoded in neurons or synapses.  But the paper "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval" gives no theory of how a brain could store learned information. The paper does make quite a few uses of the word "encoding," but simply uses that as a synonym for "learning" or "memory acquisition" without doing anything to explain how learned information could be translated into neural states. 

So the paper claiming to elucidate a "neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval" fails to discuss in any substantive way any of the main things that would need to be explained by an actual theory or understanding of how a brain could retrieve a memory: (1) how a brain could instantly find just the right tiny engram where a memory was stored in it; (2) how a brain could read information stored in it; (3) how a brain could perform the miracle of instantly decoding such learned information that had been encoded in neural states or synapse states, acting 1000 times faster than cells do when they decode DNA information; (4) what miracle of translation would have allowed information so diverse to ever have been encoded as neural states or synapse states in the first place. The paper is additional evidence that our scientists have no actual understanding of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory. There does not exist any such thing as a "neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval." Humans and animals remember things, but neither scanning their brains during memory activity nor rat experiments provide any insight as to how instantaneous recall of specific learned items (or any recall at all of such items) can occur. 

The lack of any real understanding on this matter is almost admitted by the paper in question, which states at its end, "Our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of retrieval remains rudimentary." That is not how it would be in the year 2020 (70 years after the discovery of DNA) if human brains actually performed memory retrieval.  In a brain that stored and retrieved memories, there would have been signs of its memory storage and retrieval mechanism discoverable around 1950; and around the same time we discovered the readable microscopic encoded information in DNA, around 1950, we would have discovered readable encoded memory information in brains (something which still has not been found).  Instead of finding any evidence for proteins dedicated to encoding memories,  which would have to exist in massive numbers if a brain stored memories, what was found was that the proteins in synapses (the alleged storage place of memories) have lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the maximum age of human memories. 

Recent Press Stories Distort Near-Death Experiences

A recent LiveScience article was entitled “Are 'Flatliners' Really Conscious After Death?” The story quoted Sam Parnia, a doctor who has researched near-death experiences, in which people give amazing accounts after having a close brush with death. Although it didn't give us the full story, and kind of filtered out some of the most important facts, the LiveScience story was mainly accurate. But there was a serious inaccuracy in the article's statement that “Recent studies have shown that animals experience a surge in brain activity in the minutes after death.” There was only one such study, and it showed a spike in a single type of brain wave at a moment 30 seconds after a rat's head had been severed, not “minutes after death.”

The LiveScience story made clear that we should absolutely not expect brain activity for more than a few seconds after someone's heart stopped. It states, “The brain's cerebral cortex — the so-called "thinking part" of the brain — also slows down instantly, and flatlines, meaning that no brainwaves are visible on an electric monitor, within 2 to 20 seconds.” This is brain wave activity. Unconsciousness occurs within 6 seconds after the heart stops. At this web site, a cardiology expert tells us, “The interval between last heart beat and passing out can vary from 3 seconds to about 6 seconds.”

The LiveScience article quotes Parnia discussing what are called veridical near-death experiences:

Substantial anecdotal evidence reveals that people whose hearts stopped and then restarted were able to describe accurate, verified accounts of what was going on around them, he added. “They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they'll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them," he explained. According to Parnia, these recollections were then verified by medical and nursing staff who were present at the time and were stunned to hear that their patients, who were technically dead, could remember all those details.

But the LiveScience story completely fails to tell us anything about the duration of these recollections. Were these merely patients remembering the first 10 seconds after heart failure, as their brain activity faded out? We can't tell from the LiveScience story. The answer is actually: no. People lose consciousness within six seconds after their heart stops, not long enough to report details of medical resuscitation efforts.

A patient giving an account of a veridical near-death experience will sometimes describe minutes of medical activity during the efforts of medical personnel to restart his heart. Such a thing was reported by Pam Reynolds and in a case reported by Sam Parnia in his Aware study. In both cases we had patients report lots of things that were going on when their hearts were stopped, a sequence of events lasting minutes. Quite a few other similar cases are discussed in this post. The Aware study is now hidden behind a paywall, making it hard for people to learn about its more startling paranormal details (which are barely hinted at in the study's abstract). See here for a discussion of these details.

What the LiveScience story also fails to mention is that when such veridical near-death experiences occur, a person will typically report floating out of his body, something that is completely at odds with current scientist dogmas claiming that consciousness is purely a product of the brain. The person reporting the experience will not report lying in his body while resuscitation efforts occurred. He will typically report being above his body, looking down on it. 

The LiveScience story spurred the appearance of similar stories in the press, some of which had headlines that were unfounded. Newsweek.com had a story entitled “What Happens After You Die? The Brain Keeps Working Long Enough for Thoughts to Form.” No, studies of near-death experiences (including Parnia's research) do not justify any such claim, and are consistent with the idea that your brain shuts down within a few seconds after the heart stops. Such research is not a story of “the brain continuing to work after the heart stops” but a story of “consciousness continuing after the brain has shut down.”

The worst mangling of the LiveScience story and the research it is based on was a story in the British tabloid The Sun, which had the headline, “After you die, your brain knows you're dead, terrifying study reveals.” Again, the research is not telling us anything about conscious brain activity continuing after the heart has stopped. And the research isn't terrifying. You should hardly be terrified by an account of someone whose heart stopped and who reported floating out of his body, and witnessing medical resuscitation efforts. Such stories suggest that the soul survives death.

We have in some of these stories a case of writers trying to hammer the round peg of near-death experiences into the square hole of neurological dogmas that consciousness is equivalent to brain activity. It's a mismatch that won't work, no matter how hard you hammer.

The idea of the mind continuing after the brain has shut down should not come as a big surprise to anyone who has noticed the great disarray of scientists in their efforts to explain how the most basic mind activities could be produced by brains. Neuroscientists have no plausible tale to tell of how brains could produce abstract thoughts, or how brains could instantly recall distant memories. If some small part of your brain stores an obscure memory, in some tiny neural location, how could your brain know where that exact storage spot was, in order to retrieve the information instantly? Our scientists cannot answer this most basic question, discussed here.

When it comes to how memories could be stored in the brain, our neuroscientists are flip-flopping all over the place. A recent MIT article tells us some researchers have offered a “new theory of memory formation” different from the “strengthening of synapses” theory that has been the standard story for decades. Their theory is that memories are stored in a “pattern of connections.” The “strengthening of synapses” theory is indeed untenable, mainly because the protein molecules involved in such strengthening are very short-lived, lasting only a few weeks. But a theory of a storage in the pattern itself is equally untenable. For such a theory to be true there would have to be some grand neuron coordinator precisely coordinating connections over many different neurons to make such a pattern correspond to a memory. Nothing like that is known to exist, and we cannot plausibly imagine it existing. A memory can be formed instantly, but neuron connections form slowly. We have some experience of information being stored in binary form and in DNA, but no one has any plausible model of how it could even be possible to store information in a “pattern of connections” between brain cells.

But despite such huge explanatory shortfalls, those who have been indoctrinated in the dogmas of modern academia will continue to speak as they have been conditioned, and will mostly speak like Twin 1 in the imaginary dialog below between two yet-to-be born twins in the womb.

Twin 1: It looks like our happy time here in the wet womb is almost over. It's almost time for that fatal event known as “birth.”

Twin 2: I don't believe that birth will be our end. I believe in what I call “life after birth.”

Twin 1: Life after birth? Preposterous! When birth occurs, we will be severed from the umbilical cord that is the sole source of our nourishment. Death must soon follow.

Twin 2: I'm not so sure. Maybe there's some way we can survive. Somehow I think there is some mysterious reality beyond this familiar womb we have known all our existence.

Twin 1: A reality beyond the womb? What could possibly make you think of such extravagant nonsense?

Twin 2: I sometimes seem to get faint, irregular signals. It's as if I could occasionally hear faint voices coming from beyond the womb we live in.

Twin 1: Oh, so you think you've picked up paranormal signals? It's all just in your mind.

The faint voices occasionally heard by Twin 2 (the voice of parents) may be analogous to the irregular indications humans seem to get of a reality beyond our physical reality, through things such as medium activity, apparition sightings, deathbed visions, near-death experiences and the appearance of mysterious orbs in photos. 

Postscript: In response to my point about memory recall, a person might argue that the brain doesn't need to know the exact location of some tiny spot where it recalls a memory; since all cells are connected, the brain can scan until it finds what it is looking for. But that is not how memory recall seems to work. If you say the name of a famous person such as John Kennedy, I do not have some mental experience of searching through memory like someone flipping the pages of an encyclopedia. I do not see in my mind's eye many images flashing until I finally reach the image of John Kennedy. Instead, you suddenly say "John Kennedy," and I instantly retrieve nothing at all except the image of John Kennedy.  How could that work so quickly, if the image is stored in, say, brain location #834,342,430, and I have no way of remembering that the image is stored in that location, in a brain that has no coordinate or addressing system allowing exact brain addresses? Nor will it work to claim that the image is stored everywhere in my brain, an idea that becomes rather ridiculous as it leads to thinking that there are billions of brain places I am storing the image of Spongebob Squarepants.  It seems that there is no plausible detailed theory of brain storage of memory compatible with our experience of instantaneous recall of obscure memories, little bits of information learned long ago and thought about never or almost never since that time.  Attempts at such theories never properly explain instantaneous recall or the wonder of hyperthymesia.  It seems that memory must involve something more than just the brain, an idea compatible with the phenomenon of near-death experiences, a phenomenon suggesting that something like a soul exists.

The Navigation Argument Against the Idea That Your Brain Stores All Your Memories

Neurologists like to assume that all your memories are stored in your brain. But there are actually quite a few reasons for doubting this unproven assumption, including the research of scientists such as Karl Lashley and John Lorber. Their research showed that minds can be astonishing functional even when large parts of the brain are destroyed, either through disease or deliberate surgical removal. Lorber documented a case of a person who was doing well in his college studies, even though the great majority of his brain had been destroyed by disease. Some children with brain problems sometimes undergo an operation called a hemispherectomy, in which half of their brain is removed. An article in Scientific American tells us, “Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.”

Given such anomalies, we should give serious consideration to all arguments against the claim that your brain is storing all your memories. In my previous post, I presented one such argument, based on the apparent impossibility of the brain ever naturally developing all of the many encoding protocols it would need to store the many types of things humans remember. In this post I will present another argument against the claim that your brain stores all your memories. This argument, which I call the navigation argument, is simpler than the argument in my previous post.

The navigation argument can be simply stated like this: a long-term memory cannot be stored in some particular part of the brain, because there could be no way in which your brain could ever instantly find the location where such a memory was stored.

Let's consider a simple case. You hear the name of a movie star. You then instantly recall what that person looks like, and see a faint image of that person in your “mind's eye.” But how could this ever happen, if the memory of that person is stored in some particular part of your brain? In such a case, you would need to know or find the exact place in the brain where that memory was stored. But there would be no way for your brain to do such a thing. It would be like trying to find one particular needle in a skyscraper-sized stack of needles.

Let's try to imagine some ways of getting around this difficulty, and consider whether they are viable. One possibility is that a memory hypothetically created in the brain might have some type of unique positional identifier, something rather than a GPS coordinate or a longitude/latitude coordinate (although it might be something like a 3D coordinate). When a visual memory was created, the brain might associate this coordinate with some memory cue (such as the person's name). So, for example, when you hear the phrase “White House” maybe your brain subconsciously retrieves some 3D coordinate allowing you to find where you have stored in your memory an image of the White House in Washington, D.C. The visual below illustrates the idea.

But there are three reasons why this doesn't work as an explanation. The first is that there is no way that the brain could ever know what the 3D coordinate was for some particular spot where a new memory was created. For example, if a brain is creating a new memory at a location with an X coordinate of 23.23342, a Y coordinate of 45.34245, and a Z coordinate of 33.3293, the brain would have no way of knowing that the memory was being created at that exact location. A second reason is that even if there was some brain storage area storing the location coordinates for particular memories, there would still be the question of: how could the brain instantly find the correct spot in such a cue storage area to find where these coordinates were? Since your brain can store millions of different memories, we must imagine that this cue storage area would also have millions of items. There is no reason we can think of why you would be instantly be able to find the exact part of this cue storage area that would have the coordinate needed to locate the appropriate memory. Third, there is the difficulty that even if the brain had the physical coordinates at which the memory stored, it would have no way of navigating to such a coordinate.

To try to make things a little better, let's get rid of this idea of a coordinate system. Let's imagine that there is some kind of cue memory area with direct neural connections leading to the spots where memories are formed. So then if you hear a particular name, your brain merely finds that name in the cue storage area, and then follows this little neural connection (rather like a wire or telephone line) to where the memory is stored. The visual below illustrates the idea. 

 

But this still does not give us a plausible answer as to how you could recall a memory stored in a particular spot in your brain. For one thing, there would be the difficulty of explaining how this wiring-up was occurring. It doesn't seem plausible to maintain that each time you memorize something, you are adding an entry in two different storage areas of your brain, and also instantly creating a neural wire or line connecting only these two. That seems like too much work and coordination to be occurring so quickly. We have no evidence that coordinated changes occur in two different areas of the brain when a memory is stored. While we know that connections can gradually form between neurons, this isn't something that can instantaneously occur to link separate areas of the brain when a memory is created.

You would also still have the previously mentioned problem of how your brain could instantly find the correct spot in this cue storage area where these cues are located. Since your brain can store millions of different memories, we must imagine that this cue storage area would also have millions of items. There is no reason we can think of why you would be instantly able to find the exact part of this cue storage area that would have the direct wire or neural connection needed to locate the appropriate memory in the visual storage area.

So we seem to be getting nowhere trying to imagine how the brain could allow you to instantly recall memories. Let's try looking at how computers are able to quickly retrieve data. Perhaps that might offer some clue.

One basic technique computers use to speed retrieval access is physical sorting. The same technique is used by a simple file cabinet in which the files are alphabetically sorted. But we cannot believe that the brain uses physical sorting. A mass of microscopic neurons (rather like a city-sized blob of tangled spaghetti that has been shrunk) is not something in which physical sorting is possible. All the different brain connections make physical sorting impossible, just like you can't sort a giant ball of tangled string into different parts (unless you disassemble and reassemble). A brain structured totally different from the human brain might be able to use physical sorting, but not the human brain. We have zero evidence that neurons are physically sorted. 

 Neurons cannot be physically sorted or physically grouped

Another basic technique computers use to speed retrieval access is physical grouping, such as when different types of information are placed in different computer files. The same technique is used by a simple file cabinet in which different types of information are put into different manila files. But we cannot believe that the brain uses physical grouping. A mass of neurons filled with connections between neurons is not something in which physical grouping is possible. A brain structured totally different from the human brain might be able to use physical grouping, but not the human brain. When we look at the brain, we see no evidence that a physical grouping of neurons is occurring. Neurons are not arranged into little clusters like stars are arranged into galaxies.

In short, it seems physically impossible that a brain structured such as ours could ever instantly retrieve memories, if such memories were stored in particular parts of the brain. There is no physical mechanism that can explain how this could occur in the human brain. 

One way to try to resist such an argument is to claim that a particular memory is not stored in a particular place in the brain, but throughout the brain. If that were true, there would be no problem of the brain trying to find just one particular spot where a memory is stored. But a human mind has many thousands or millions of memories. We can hardly believe that each of these is stored throughout the brain. If my memory of my first kiss was stored throughout my brain, that would leave no space for the thousands or millions of other memories I have. We may also note how absurd it is to imagine that, for example, I have stored throughout all the neurons of my brain some trivial image such as the image of SpongeBob Squarepants.

It is sometimes maintained that a specific memory is stored not in one little spot in the brain, or throughout the entire brain, but is scattered across several different places. This does nothing to make the retrieval of a memory from a brain more plausible. You do not lessen the difficulty of “how could the brain know where to find one specific spot where a particular memory is stored” if we assume that the memory is read from five or ten different specific places, because there is still the problem of how the brain could find those specific locations. Similarly, there would be no way for someone to find some information very quickly if it is in some book among many thousands of books in a library that all had no title on their cover; and it would be even harder to get such information quickly if the information was scattered across five or ten such books in such a library. Lacking any coordinate system or labeling system, a brain storing memories would be like such a library.

In a blog post, a neurologist has replied to the type of argument being made here (after it had been made by another writer). The neurologist writes: “You don’t have to know (nor does your brain) where in your physical brain a memory is located, because you can access that memory simply because it is integrated with so many other memories.”

This reasoning is fallacious. Using similar reasoning, I could argue that I don't have to know the phone number of someone in California to telephone that person, because all of the telephones are integrated with each other in a telephone network. But that's erroneous. You do have to know someone's phone number to instantly access that person's phone. To instantly access a memory such as occurs when you recall a face after seeing a name (or vice versa), the brain would absolutely need to know where that memory is stored (or have some mechanism for instantly locating that precise brain location), if the memory was stored in one particular location in the brain. But no one can give any explanation of how the brain could know such a thing, or how the brain could instantly find the correct memory. I may note that when you recall a face instantly after seeing it, it is not at all a case of one memory leading you to find another. We absolutely cannot use “integration of memories” to explain such a thing.

The complete lack of any workable theory for how memory recall can occur so quickly is admitted by neuroscientist David Eagleman, who states:

Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly.

The reasoning above suggests that our neurologists will never be able to solve the problem of how the mind is able to recall things so quickly. The human brain is simply not structured the way a physical system would need to be structured in order for an instantaneous recall of detailed complex memory information to occur from one particular storage location in the brain. The impossibility of explaining how instant memory recall occurs is a powerful reason for believing that long-term memories are not stored in your brain. We must postulate that the human mind is part of some reality that transcends the human nervous system. Call it a soul reality, or call it a spiritual reality – it is something that must go beyond the human brain.

As we will see in my next post, there is another reason for drawing the same conclusion: the fact that there is no viable mechanism that explains how the brain can be storing very long-term memories. In my next post, I will look at the most common mechanistic theory of how the brain stores long-term memories, and explain why it is untenable (citing neurologists themselves who have given powerful reasons why such a theory is untenable). The theory in question is untenable because it tries to explain long-term memories by appealing to a “shifting sands” type of mechanism that is so impermanent and fast-decaying that it is completely unsuitable for explaining human memories that can last for 50 years (and cannot even explain human memories that last for two years). 

Postscript: Given the complete lack of any coordinate system in the brain by which the exact locations of neurons can be specified, the brain can be compared to these things:
(1) the US phone system if no one's phone number had ever been published;
(2) a vast post office with countless post office boxes, none of them numbered;
(3) a city in which none of the streets were named, none of the buildings had an outside identifier, none of the apartments had apartment numbers, and none of the houses had street numbers;
(4) a vast library containing thousands of books, none of which have any title on their cover, chapter titles, or page numbers.
 
Imagine how hard it would be in any of such things to navigate to a precise location  -- a particular post office box, a particular phone,  a particular apartment in the city, or a particular book in the library.  That's the kind of situation that should exist in a brain storing abundant memories, because there is no coordinate system in a brain, and neurons don't have neuron numbers or something like a brain longitude and latitude.  Instantaneous recall of obscure memories should be impossible if our memories are stored in brains. The fact that we routinely perform such instantaneous recalls is strong evidence our memories are not mainly stored in brains.