He Could Not Speak Until They Took Out Half of His Brain

Our neuroscientists have the bad habit of frequently spouting dogmas that have not been established by observations. We have all heard these dogmas stated hundreds of times, such as when neuroscientists claim that memories are stored in brains, and that our minds are produced by our brains. There are actually many observations and facts that contradict such dogmas, such as the fact that many people report their minds and memories still working during a near death experience in which their brains shut down electrically (as the brain does soon after cardiac arrest).

One of the most dramatic type of observations conflicting with neuroscience dogmas is the fact that memory and intelligence is well-preserved after the operation called hemispherectomy. Hemispherectomy is the surgical removal of half of the brain. It is performed on children who suffer from severe and frequent epileptic seizures.

In a scientific paper “Discrepancy Between Cerebral Structure and Cognitive Functioning,” we are told that when half of their brains are removed in these operations, “most patients, even adults, do not seem to lose their long-term memory such as episodic (autobiographic) memories.” The paper tells us that Dandy, Bell and Karnosh “stated that their patient's memory seemed unimpaired after hemispherectomy,” the removal of half of their brains. We are also told that Vining and others “were surprised by the apparent retention of memory after the removal of the left or the right hemisphere of their patients.”

On page 59 of the book The Biological Mind, the author states the following:

A group of surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. "We were awed," they wrote later of their experiences, "by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child's personality and sense of humor." 

In the paper "Neurocognitive outcome after pediatric epilepsy surgery" by Elisabeth M. S. Sherman, we have some discussion of the effects on children of temporal lobectomy (removal of the temporal lobe of the brain) and hemispherectomy, surgically removing half of the brain to stop seizures. We are told this:

After temporal lobectomy, children show few changes in verbal or nonverbal intelligence....Cognitive levels in many children do not appear to be altered significantly by hemispherectomy. Several researchers have also noted increases in the intellectual functioning of some children following this procedure....Explanations for the lack of decline in intellectual function following hemispherectomy have not been well elucidated. 

Referring to a study by Gilliam, the paper states that of 21 children who had parts of their brains removed to treat epilepsy, including 10 who had surgery to remove part of the frontal lobe, "none of the patients with extra-temporal resections had reductions in IQ post-operatively," and that two of the children with frontal lobe resections had "an increase in IQ greater than 10 points following surgery." 

The paper here gives precise before and after IQ scores for more than 50 children who had half of their brains removed in a hemispherectomy operation in the United States.  For one set of 31 patients, the IQ went down by an average of only 5 points. For another set of 15 patients, the IQ went down less than 1 point. For another set of 7 patients the IQ went up by 6 points. 

The paper here (in Figure 4) describes IQ outcomes for 41 children who had half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations in Freiburg, Germany. For the vast majority of children, the IQ was about the same after the operation. The number of children who had increased IQs after the operation was greater than the number who had decreased IQs. 

Referring to these kind of surgeries to remove huge amounts of brain tissue, the paper “Verbal memory after epilepsy surgery in childhood” states, “Group-wise, average normed scores on verbal memory tests were higher after epilepsy surgery than before, corroborating earlier reports.” 

Some try to explain these results as some kind of special ability of the child brain to recover. But there are similar results even for adult patients. The page here mentions 41 adult patients who had a hemispherectomy. It says, “Forty-one patients underwent additional formal IQ testing postsurgery, and the investigators observed overall stability or improvement in these patients,” and notes that “significant functional impairment has been rare.”

Of these cases of successful hemispherectomy, perhaps none is more astonishing than a case of a boy named Alex who did not start speaking until the left half of his brain was removed. A scientific paper describing the case says that Alex “failed to develop speech throughout early boyhood.” He could apparently say only one word (“mumma”) before his operation to cure epilepsy seizures. But then following a hemispherectomy (also called a hemidecortication) in which half of his brain was removed at age 8.5, “and withdrawal of anticonvulsants when he was more than 9 years old, Alex suddenly began to acquire speech.” We are told, “His most recent scores on tests of receptive and expressive language place him at an age equivalent of 8–10 years,” and that by age 10 he could “converse with copious and appropriate speech, involving some fairly long words.” Astonishingly, the boy who could not speak with a full brain could speak well after half of his brain was removed. The half of the brain removed was the left half – the very half that scientists tell us is the half that has more to do with language than the right half. 

Cases like this make a mockery of scientist claims to understand the human brain. When scientists discuss scientific knowledge relating to memory, they almost never discuss the most relevant thing they could discuss, the cases of high brain function after hemispherectomy operations in which half of the brain is removed. Instead the scientists cherry-pick information, and describe a few experiments and facts carefully selected to support their dogmas, such as the dogma that brains store memories, and brains make minds. They also fail to discuss the extremely relevant research of John Lorber, who documented many cases of high-functioning humans who had lost almost all of their brain due to hydroencephaly. 

A scientist discussing memory will typically refer us to experiments involving rodents. Such experiments are almost always studies with low statistical power, because the experimenter failed to use at least 15 animals per study group, the minimum needed for a moderately reliable result with a low risk of a false alarm. There will be typically be some graph showing some measurement of what is called freezing behavior, when a rodent stops moving. The experimenter will claim that this shows something was going on in regard to memory, although it probably does not show such a thing, because all measurements of a rodent's degree of freezing are subjective judgments in which an experimenter's bias might have influenced things. There will often be claims that a fear memory was regenerated by electrically zapping some part of the brain where the experimenter thought the memory was stored. Such claims have little force because it is known that there are many parts of a rodent's brain that will cause a rodent to stop moving when such parts are electrically stimulated. And, of course, rodent experiments prove nothing about human memory, because humans are not rodents.

When a scientist discusses memory research, he will typically discuss the case of patient HM, a patient who was bad at forming new memories after damage to the tiny brain region called the hippocampus. Again and again, writers will speak as if this proves the hippocampus is crucial to memory. It certainly does not. The same very rare effect of having a problem in forming new memories cropped up (as reported here) in a man who underwent a dental operation (a root canal). The man had no brain damage, but after the root canal he was reportedly unable to form new memories. Such cases are baffling, and the fact that they can come up with or without brain damage tells us no clear tale about whether the hippocampus is crucial for memory. The hemispherectomy cases suggest that the hippocampus is not crucial for memory, for each patient who had a hemispherectomy lost one of their two hippocampuses, and overall there was little permanent effect on the ability to form new memories.

A scientific paper tells us that “lesions of the rodent hippocampus do not produce reliable anterograde amnesia for context fear,” meaning rodents with a damaged hippocampus can still produce new memories. The paper also tells us, “These data suggest that the hippocampus is normally involved in context conditioning but is not necessary for learning to occur.” So it seems that the main claim that neuroscientists cite to persuade us that they have some understanding of a neural basis for memory (the claim that the hippocampus is “crucial” for memory) is really a factoid that is not actually well established. 

Postscript: The case of patient HM has been cited innumerable times by those eager to suggest that memories are brain based. Such persons usually tell us that patient HM was someone unable to form any new memories.  But a 14-year follow-up study of patient HM (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that HM was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217:

In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable. 

The study also says that patient HM was able to learn a maze (although learning it only very slowly),  and was able eventually to walk the maze three times in a row without error. 

When the King of Science Soundbites Misses the Mark

Anyone who frequently watches science-related TV shows will instantly recognize the face of physicist Michio Kaku, who very frequently appears in such shows, giving slick little soundbites. Having a mellifluous speaking voice, Kaku must be rated A+ as a TV talking head. He's the king of the science soundbites. But are his science books as good as his TV soundbites?

Kaku's book The Future of the Mind is not one that I can rank highly, because I think it is built on a fallacious premise: the idea that the mind is merely the product of the brain. Kaku engages in a wide variety of speculations of how humans might be able to improve their minds by using things such as neural implants. In a similar vein, he speculates about uploading minds into computers or beaming minds into interstellar space. These speculations are fun to read, but very dubious because they are all based on the very dubious idea that the mind is purely a by-product of the brain.

Kaku makes no serious attempt to establish this idea; he just takes it as a given. A serious attempt to establish this idea would be a massive undertaking, as it would need to tell us things such as these:

• how immaterial consciousness could arise from material neurons;
• how a brain could possibly generate a thought or idea;
• how brains could store memories for 50 years despite the fact that proteins in synapses have lifetimes of only a few days or weeks;
• how complex memories and complex ideas could be stored in neurons, things which show  no physical sign of encoding stored symbolic information (other than genetic information in DNA);
• how miscellaneous neuron firings could possibly create such a thing as a unified self;
• how humans could instantly recall obscure items of information given a brain with no coordinate system and no position notation system (presumably needed to instantly find an exact location where some minor memory was stored).

Such an attempt would also need to explain away the very many lines of evidence for psychic phenomena suggesting the mind is more than a brain product. Kaku doesn't attempt to do any of this. What Kaku does repeatedly in this book is to make dubious citations of neuroscience research. I'll give some examples.

On page 14 to 15 Kaku tries with remarkable chutzpah to cite the case of Phineas Gage as something that caused a “paradigm shift in scientific thinking,” discrediting the idea of the soul. Gage's case certainly did no such thing, and citing it as evidence against such an idea makes no sense at all. What happened to Gage is that he accidentally got a thick railroad spike (1.25 inches in diameter) driven through the front of his brain. But a doctor examining him later declared that he was "quite recovered in his faculties of body and mind," and he went on to live a pretty normal life.  This case (along with countless other cases of high mental function despite huge brain damage discussed here and here) actually help to discredit the idea that minds are merely the product of brains, helping to shore up the likelihood of something like a soul. Some who knew Gage reported he underwent a personality change, but there are many reasons why personalities may change, and we don't know whether his personality change was related to his injury. An expert on Gage has stated that the personality change “did not last much longer than about two to three years,” but Gage lived for 12 years after the accident.

On page 16 Kaku claims this about the neuroscientist Penfield: “Penfield found that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe, his patients suddenly relived long-forgotten memories in a crystal clear fashion.” It's actually not known whether visual images arising from such stimulation are memories or hallucinations. A review of 80 years of experiments on electrical stimulation of the brain uses the word “reminiscences” for accounts that may or may not be memory retrievals. The review tells us, “This remains a rare phenomenon with from 0.3% to 0.59% EBS [electrical brain stimulation] inducing reminiscences.” The review states the following:

We observed a surprisingly large variety of reminiscences covering all aspects of declarative memory. However, most were poorly detailed and only a few were episodic. This result does not support theories of a highly stable and detailed memory, as initially postulated, and still widely believed as true by the general public....Overall, only one patient reported what appeared to be a clearly detailed episodic memory for which he spontaneously specified that he had never thought about it....Overall, these results do not support Penfield's idea of a highly stable memory that can be replayed randomly by EBS. Hence, results of EBS should not, at this stage, be taken as evidence for long-term episodic memories that can sometimes be retrieved.

This does not at all match what Kaku has suggested, there being only one example in 80 years of the type of thing he has suggested (recall of long-forgotten memory through electrical stimulation). I may note that no such cases prove that memories are stored in brains. If you rub an ice cube on my foot, I may remember some time in my youth when my feet once felt cold; but that doesn't mean memories are stored in my feet.

On page 34 Kaku tells us, “The concept of 'I' as a single unified whole making all decisions continuously, is an illusion created by our own subsconscious minds.” This very dubious claim is not empirically established,  and Kaku certainly does not validate it by citing a silly claim by Steven Pinker that consciousness is like a storm raging in the brain.

On page 37 to 39 Kaku attempts to cite split brain research to support his assumption of the mind being the product of the brain. As discussed here, the actual research (correctly interpreted) does not lend support to such a claim, but contradicts it. When the fibers connecting the hemispheres of the brain are severed, we are left with a single mind, not two (although such single minds have been inaccurately described as “two minds” by certain people eager to support the “minds come from brains” dogma).

On page 43 Kaku offers a strange definition of consciousness: “Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g. in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others) , in order to accomplish a goal (e.g. find mates, food, shelter).” That's way too complicated a definition. You don't need to be creating a model of the world or trying to accomplish a goal to be conscious. A better definition of consciousness would be this: "the mental facility needed for a mind to have a life experience consisting of things such as sensory perceptions, thoughts, or feelings.”

Scientists lack any coherent explanation for how a brain could generate thought or intellect. Scientists often fall back on localization claims to try to hide this shortfall. A scientist who cannot explain the how of a brain making an intellect will often try to use a where as a substitute, by suggesting that specific mental capabilities come from particular parts of the brain. So on page 56 Kaku tells us that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is “the CEO of the brain.” There is no good evidence for such an assumption. A scientific paper tested the IQ of six patients with lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and found that they had an average IQ of 104.8, above the average of 100, exactly the opposite of what we would expect if such a region was the “CEO of the brain.” See this post for a wide variety of neuroscience evidence conflicting with the claim that intelligence or decision making comes from the prefrontal cortex.

On page 64 Kaku makes an important misstatement about ESP. He states, “True telepathy, found in science fiction and fantasy novels, is not possible without outside assistance.” This is untrue. As reported here, decades of experimental research have found extremely dramatic evidence for extrasensory perception, without outside assistance. Such experimental evidence (replicated many times) is inconsistent with claims that minds are merely the products of brains. We would expect to have zero evidence for telepathy if such claims were correct. The mainstream peer-reviewed science journal American Psychologist just published a review of the evidence for psi (phenomena such as ESP), a review that stated this:

The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.

Scientists do not understand how a brain could store memories. But you would never know this from reading pages 106 to 107 of Kaku's book. He states as if it were fact a completely speculative and extraordinarily unbelievable theory about memory storage in brains: a kind of “splice and scatter” theory. His claim is that memories to be stored first go to the hippocampus, and then are spliced up and distributed in different parts of the brain – kind of like what would happen if you put a page through a shredder, and then scattered the paper strips in different parts of your house. Here is how Kaku states this very unbelievable idea:

To store these memories for a longer duration, the information must then run through the hippocampus, where memories are broken down into different categories. Rather than storing all memories in one area of the brain like a tape recorder or hard drive, the hippocampus redirects the fragments to various cortices....For instance, emotional memories are stored in the amygdala, but words are recorded in the temporal lobe. Meanwhile, colors and other visual information are collected in the occipital lobe, and the sense of touch and movement reside in the parietal lobe.

Such claims are not maintained by most neuroscientists, and there is no good evidence to support them. Tests have shown that patients with damage to the medial temporal lobe have “fully intact” remote autobiographic memories – not what we would see if words related to memories are stored in the temporal lobe. We still have no convincing evidence that any autobiographical or episodic memories are stored in the human brain. When we look at a recent review by neuroscientists of the current thinking about a brain storage of memories, we find near the end of the paper a very conspicuous uncertainty, with the scientists shooting out speculations in all different directions, as if they had nothing like firm ideas on how memory could be brain-stored – something quite contrary to the impression Kaku has given us that this matter has been figured out. Similarly, in this recent review of the current thinking about a brain storage of memories, we are told “our current knowledge of how such memories are stored in the brain and retrieved, as well as the dynamics of the circuits involved, remains scarce.” Using the term “engrams” to mean the hypothesis that there are cells in the brain that store memories, the authors state “what and where engrams are implicated in remote memory storage and how they change over time have received little experimental attention thus far.” The authors also frankly tell us that “ From engrams to spines surprisingly little evidence exists in the literature on the grounds of remote information processing, maintenance and storage to account for the lifelong and persistent nature of the mnemonic signal.”

Let me explain why the “splice and scatter” theory Kaku advanced is untenable. Let us first consider a simpler idea: that all the information needed to recall some particular memory is stored in one specific location of the brain – for example, your memory of your first kiss may be stored at neuron number 345,212,232. This then creates the extremely grave problem I call the navigation problem, the problem discussed here that there would seem to be no way for the brain to navigate instantly to that exact location – because the brain would not know where that location was. Finding that exact spot in a brain with no position notation system and no coordinate system would be like trying to find an exact page in a book in a library of a million volumes, none of which had titles on their covers. Or, to give another analogy, it would be like trying to find just the right post office box in a vast post office with millions of boxes, none of them numbered. But we are able to instantly recall obscure memories from decades ago. Someone may name some obscure figure you learned about many years ago, and you can instantly recall some facts about that person. No neuroscientist can explain how this could happen. The navigation problem is one of three main reasons for thinking that our episodic and conceptual memories are not actually stored in our brains, the other two being the permanence problem discussed here (that there is no viable theory of how memories could be stored for decades in a brain with such high protein turnover), and the encoding problem discussed here (which is that no one has a decent theory of how episodic or conceptual memories could ever be translated into neuron states).

But let us suppose, ala Kaku, that a single memory is not stored in only one spot, but is somehow spliced up and scattered among multiple spots. This does not make the navigation problem any less severe; instead, it makes it much worse. For now, rather than having to instantly find just one exact spot (one needle in the haystack), the brain would have to instantly find multiple needles in the mountain-sized haystack. This would be like instantly retrieving the information in seven books scattered around a million-volume library in which none of the shelves were marked and none of the books had titles on their covers.

In addition to such problems, Kaku's speculation creates the problem that we cannot conceive of any way in which a memory could be spliced up and its parts copied to different regions, nor can we conceive of any way in which scattered fragments could be reassembled into a memory that we can instantly recall as a unified whole. In a system in which tiny parts have location numbers, you can splice up information and scatter it. For example, I could scatter a 10-page note across ten post office boxes at a post office, by having a system whereby the first page in one post office box ended with a remark such as “continued in post office box 879,” and the second page in box 879 ended with a remark like “continued in post office box 1293.” But such a thing couldn't be going on in a brain, where none of the neurons have neuron numbers, each neuron is connected to about 10,000 other neurons, and there is no coordinate system, numbering system, or position notation system. Given limitations in the brain such as the lack of a unique pathway between one neuron and another neuron and the complete absence of any coordinate system, position notation system or numbering system, it is impossible to imagine any way that a brain could ever instantly recall a memory that was spliced up and stored in scattered regions of the brain.

Repeatedly in this book, Kaku proves to be an uncritical consumer of neuroscience hype. An example is on page 108, where he talks about an experiment with mice. He states the following:

Scientists at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California made history when they were able to record a memory made by mice and store it digitally in a computer. This was a proof-of-principle experiment, in which they showed that the dream of downloading memories into a brain might one day become reality.

The actual experiment was something very minor. The scientists recorded some brain signals that were being passed about in a mouse's head while it did a particular simple task (flipping a switch). When such signals were replayed to other mice, they were somewhat more likely to remember something. This is kind of perceptual playback, involves short-term memory only, and tells us nothing about whether long-term memory is stored in human brains. The experiment was not at all recording a memory in the sense of reading a memory permanently stored in the brain.

Kaku's most recent book is entitled “The Future of Humanity.” It's a pretty good book, and I only object to occasional passages in it. One such passage is on page 270, where Kaku says, “At present all known physical phenomenon, from the Big Bang to the motion of subatomic particles, can be explained by two theories: Einstein's general theory of relativity and the quantum theory.” This untrue statement is triumphalist nonsense. For one thing, it implies that Einstein's general theory of relativity explains the Big Bang, the universe's beginning; and that theory certainly does not at all explain why there was such an event. For another thing, there are countless physical phenomena that are not explained by either quantum theory or general relativity, including the origin of life, the origin of species, and earthquakes.

In fact, general relativity doesn't even well explain the speeds at which stars orbit the center of a galaxy, and scientists try to patch up this shortfall by bringing in a whole other theory, the theory of dark matter. As a news story states, “For decades, astronomers have noticed that the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters doesn’t seem to fit the predictions of general relativity.” The modern scientist needs at least ten theories to try to explain physical reality, and still he does not do a very good job of explaining such a reality.

Another misstatement occurs on page 279 where Kaku states, “Supersymmetry is the largest symmetry ever found in physics,” making it sound as if physicists have actually discovered supersymmetry in nature. They certainly have not. To the contrary, supersymmetry is a floundering theory that has done nothing but fail empirical tests.

In the book Kaku discusses string theory, his unproven physics specialty which thus far has not proven to be either useful or empirically successful. But don't worry, Kaku has an idea on how it may be a little bit useful. On page 287 he says, “The hope is that using string theory, we will be able to calculate the quantum corrections needed to analyze exotic phenomena such as time travel, interdimensional travel, wormholes, and what happened before the Big Bang.” This is kind of like claiming that your “white elephant” brain wave feedback gizmo will soon be able to cure depression, double your sexual pleasure, triple your intelligence and give you immortality.

Offering a completely groundless and gigantically extravagant speculation as if it were fact, Kaku also states on page 305, “The explanation for why the universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for life as we know it is because of luck, because there are billions of parallel universes that are not fine-tuned for life, that are completely lifeless.” But evoking such other universes (which is an act of pure fantasy) is pointless. If you want to believe that our universe is fantastically lucky, you can do so without assuming such other universes; so why bother to assume them? The multiverse is not an explanation. An explanation is something that makes a particular thing certain or likely. If we assume a trillion other universes, this does not increase the chance of our universe being life-compatible. And why is Kaku is telling us matter-of-factly that “there are billions of parallel universes” when there is no evidence at all for even one such universe other than our own?

It would seem that the “king of science soundbites” Kaku does not always get things right. And I doubt that opinion would change if I were to read Kaku's book “Parallel Worlds,” on the “fake science” topic of parallel universes. But on this page I can find some quotes from that book, one of which is the following:

At first, it seems as if the existence of complex life forms on Earth violates the second law. It seems remarkable that out of the chaos of the early Earth emerged an incredible diversity of intricate life forms, even harboring intelligence and consciousness, lowering the amount of entropy. Some have taken this miracle to imply the hand of a benevolent creator. But remember that life is driven by the natural laws of evolution, and that total entropy still increases, because additional energy fueling life is constantly being added by the Sun. If we include the Sun and Earth, then the total entropy still increases.

There are no "natural laws of evolution" in the sense of anything like the law of gravitation, and when scientists refer to natural selection they refer merely to a statistical effect, that fit organisms reproduce more often than unfit organisms. The origin of life was not at all driven by any law of evolution, since natural selection cannot occur until life originated. The argument about the sun by Kaku is what mathematician Granville Sewell calls the "compensation argument." It's the idea that you can have events seemingly defying the second law of thermodynamics in one place, as long as they are "compensated" by high-entropy events elsewhere. In this paper he forcefully argues that the argument is fallacious. He states the following:

Of course the whole idea of compensation, whether by distant or nearby events, makes no sense logically: an extremely improbable event is not rendered less improbable simply by the occurrence of ‘‘compensating’’ events elsewhere. According to this reasoning, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal — and the door is open.

"Consciousness Instinct" Tells No Coherent Tale As to How a Brain Could Make a Mind

In the recent book The Consciousness Instinct, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga writes about the brain and the mind. The subtitle of the book is Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. The book is obviously written with the assumption that brains do make minds, a very dubious proposition there are many reasons for doubting.  The book fails to make anything like a substantive defense of the claim that brains do make minds.  

One of the key issues in whether brains make minds is how a brain could possibly generate any such thing as an abstract idea. Brains and neurons are physical things, but ideas are mental things. We can understand how a physical thing can generate another physical thing, and we can understand how a mental thing (a mind) can generate another mental thing (an idea). But no one understands how a physical thing (a brain or some neurons) could generate a mental thing (an abstract idea).

Looking at the index of Gazzaniga's book I see it has no entry for “idea.” But I do see four pages that refer to “thoughts.” Searching those pages, I find on page 8 what seems to be Gazzaniga's only description of how thoughts or ideas are created:

It is as if our mind is a bubbling pot of water. Which bubble will make it up to the top is hard to predict. The top bubble ultimately bursts into an idea, only to be replaced by more bubbles. The surface is forever energized with activity, endless activity, until the bubbles go to sleep. 

As an attempt to explain the origin of ideas, this is a flop. A bubble is a physical thing, not a mental thing. When someone creates an abstract idea (such as the idea of a Trumper after viewing various zealous Trump supporters), such an abstraction (a mental act) bears no resemblance to a bubble floating up from hot water, a physical event which does not involve any observations. It may seem mysterious that bubbles pop up from water as it heats, but that's not an example of something appearing mysteriously. Water has some air trapped inside it, and the air just comes out as the water heats.

Water being heat up in a pot and producing bubbles is in several respects a very poor analogy for the creation of an idea. A human being will come up with a new idea only very slowly, and a human will only have one thought in his head at any single time. But in a heating pot of water, we see dozens of bubbles very quickly rising at the same time. When water starts to boil, it is a frothy chaos that bears no resemblance to the orderly thinking of a person trying to produce a new idea.

Not like a thinking mind

Again on page 206 and 207 Gazzaniga continues his bubble analogy, saying the following:

Thinking about this led me to use the metaphor of bubbling water as a way to conceptualize how our consciousness unfolds....The results bubble up from various modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water....Each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious....Our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion.

Consciousness is certainly not an illusion, and there are no neurological facts supporting any such metaphor, or the idea that our smooth flow of consciousness is anything like a stream of individual bubbles.

On page 214-215 Gazzaniga gives us more bubble babble, and says “we have memory bubbles and feeling bubbles.” We are told, “As one bubble quickly passes to the next, we have the illusion of feeling about the remembered event.” No, the feelings we have when remembering important events are not illusions. A woman remembering being raped is not having an illusory emotion.

Gazzaniga speaks very frequently about modules in the brain. The term module derives from computer programming. A module is a distinct unit of computer programming code that accomplishes some particular job. There is no meaningful insight involved in talking about mental function as a set of modules. The human mind is a seamless whole. We can speak of different aspects of the human mind, such as insight, imagination, memory, emotion, and so forth. But you're not doing anything to explain such things by fancy talking and calling such things “modules.” There is nothing like computer code producing the aspects of our mind. 

One of the biggest mysteries of the mind is memory. How is it that humans are able to remember things for 50 years or more, despite all the rapid molecular turnover in the brain? And how is it that a human is able to instantly retrieve an old memory, such as we see happening when someone mentions some obscure figure in history and you immediately recall some facts about that person? If the information is stored in some tiny spot of the brain, there should be no way in which the brain could find that exact spot so quickly in a brain that has no indexing, no coordinate system, and no position notation system. Doing such a thing would be like instantly finding just the right book in a vast library in which none of the books had titles on their covers, and none of the bookshelves or book aisles were marked.

Gazzaniga says nothing to explain such difficulties. He says on page 214 about a memory, “It is placed in memory in ways we still don't understand, but it is symbolic information, cold and formal, just as DNA is symbolic information – and just like DNA it has a physical structure.” This is another case of a scientist pretending to have some knowledge he does not have. We have no evidence that our memories are physically stored in our brains as symbolic information, and (as discussed here) no one has a credible theory of how episodic memories could be stored as neuron states, synapse states, or chemical or electricity states. There is no current theory of a structure or encoding scheme by which episodic memories and abstract learned concepts could be brain stored.

What about understanding, insight, and imagination? None of these things are mentioned in the index of Gazzaniga's book.

On page 79 Gazzaniga says, “I will argue that consciousness is not a thing.” He then claims that “consciousness” is just a word we use for “the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism.” This is not true. I can close my eyes and lie on my bed, thinking of nothing at all, and not remembering anything. That is consciousness that does not involve any instincts or memories.

The final chapter is entitled “Consciousness is an instinct,” which mirrors the title of the book. The claim that consciousness is an instinct is erroneous. The dictionary defines an instinct as “an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.” An example of an instinct is the instinct of a newborn baby to suck its mother's breast, or the instinct of a young man to get an erection when he sees a naked woman. Consciousness is not any such thing. It is not a particular reaction we have to a particular stimulus. We can have consciousness even when we are closing our eyes and receiving no stimulus at all.

One wonders: why on earth would Gazzaniga be claiming that consciousness is an instinct, a claim I can never recall any neuroscientist or philosopher of mind making? The only guess I can make is that maybe he was thinking that it would sound like an explanation for consciousness if we can explain consciousness as an example of something we understand: instincts. But we don't understand instincts at all. Instincts are one of the most mysterious aspects of biology. How is it, for example, that an average male would become sexually aroused by a female rather than some other stimulus? There's no neurological or genetic explanation that we can come up with for this. There's no little picture of a naked woman in the genes or the brain that a man reads to serve as a guide for what to become sexually stimulated by.

The lack of any neurological or genetic basis for such an instinct is shown by homosexuality, in which five percent of the male populace becomes sexually stimulated not by women but by members of their own sex. Many other animal instincts cannot be explained by genetics or neurology. Genes are just recipes for making proteins, and lack any power of expression to state behavior rules for organisms. So as we don't understand instincts, we would do nothing to explain consciousness by saying it is an example of an instinct; and consciousness is not an instinct.

What do you do when you're someone claiming that the brain makes the mind, but with no powerful ideas to offer as to how a brain could handle memory or generate ideas or generate consciousness or produce understanding? You fill up the book with digressions and detours, which is what this book does. We are treated, for example, to many pages talking about quantum mechanics.

It is rather like the way it was in high school when the teacher asked you to explain something you did not understand, and you tried to kind of fake your way through rather than saying, “I don't know.” For example, the teacher might ask you, “How did World War II begin in Europe?” and you might answer something like:

World War II was a very important conflict. There were big noisy battles, and American troops were landed in France, and there were lots of tanks shooting at each other. And they dropped lots of bombs. It all ended on a day called VJ Day.

Such is the approach of our neuroscientists, who give us endless assorted facts designed to impress us with their knowledge, but fail to give the answers they would give if they actually understood how a brain could make a mind.

Because of reasons discussed in great detail here, I assert that brains do not actually generate minds, and that no neuroscientist has either a credible theory of how a material brain could produce the memory skills that the human mind has (such as the instantaneous recall of very old memories), or a credible theory of how a brain could store memories for 50 years despite rapid molecular turnover in synapses, or a credible theory of how material brains could produce nonmaterial things such as consciousness, understanding, ideas, or thought.

Do Worm Experiments Add to the Case for a Human Soul?

Many think that the idea of a human soul is some old relic of an idea that has been made obsolete by modern neuroscience. But rather surprisingly the facts of neuroscience may provide a powerful rationale for believing in a human soul. The neurological case for a human soul may be concisely summarized as follows:

1. Human minds have astonishing capabilities that we cannot account for by postulating neural mechanisms, including self-awareness, abstract reasoning, the ability to remember 50-year old memories, the ability to recall very long linear sequences, and the ability to instantly recall obscure pieces of information.
2. Since we cannot explain such feats by neural mechanisms, we need to postulate some source of human mental functionality that goes beyond the brain, something along the lines of a soul.

The first premise above would be disputed by many a neuroscientist, but none of the things the premise mentions can actually be adequately accounted for by neuroscience. No neuroscientist can give any coherent explanation of how neurons are able to give a person self-awareness and the sense of self that humans have. When asked to explain very long-term memories such as memories that old people have of their childhood, a neuroscientist will typically mention the idea that memories are stored in synapses. But as discussed here, synapses are subject to very rapid molecular turnover and structural turnover which should make them incapable of storing memories for longer than a year. The molecular turnover in synapses is so rapid that they should be incapable of storing memories for longer than a few months. As discussed here, the architecture of brains seems to not be the type of architecture that might allow storing very long linear sequences such as humans can remember.

As for the instantaneous recall of distant memories, this is something that everyone takes for granted, but trying to explain it in detail neurologically is such a nightmare that neuroscientists rarely attempt such a thing. The main problem comes when we consider this issue: if memories are stored in the brain, how is it that someone could know exactly where in the brain a memory is stored? For example, if I say, “Tom Cruise,” your mind may recall various images of Tom Cruise. But if such images are stored in your brain, how could your brain know exactly where such images are stored? Brains are not structured in any way that allows for the location coordinates of anything to be recorded when a memory is stored. So it won't do for you to claim that you looked up storage spot number AZ4392 when you recalled what Tom Cruise's face look liked. Brains have no such coordinates. And how could you be using a coordinate, when you wouldn't know what the coordinate of a particular memory was? We never remember any brain location coordinates when we memorize things. It also will not do to claim that you scan through all your memories to get the answer, like someone leafing the pages of a book to find an answer. Such a thing would take hours, but you recall memories instantly. No neuroscientist has given a detailed plausible account of how humans could instantly recall distant memories stored in a brain. See here for more on the seeming impossibility of explaining instant memory recall through brains. 

An additional problem comes when we consider encoding and decoding. If your brain is storing memories, your brain would have to be using all kinds of super-complicated encoding and decoding schemes that would allow conceptual and visual information to be stored on a molecular level, and then translated back into concepts and images when you recall things. But it is hard to imagine how such encoding schemes could ever exist – for example, we can't imagine any encoding scheme by which you might translate the conceptually rich idea of America or the conceptually rich idea of your mother into a series of molecules. And if such super-complicated encoding schemes did exist, they would seem to be miracles of design 1000 times harder to explain than explaining the genetic code (already a nightmare for biologists to explain, even though it is pretty simple). See here for more about this difficulty.

All of these very great difficulties can be avoided through a radical idea: the idea that human mental capabilities are largely the product of a human soul rather than the brain. We can believe that our memories are mainly stored in something like a soul, rather than a brain. We can believe that our sense of self-identity and our ability for abstract reasoning (so hard to account for by the action of neurons) is also the product mainly of a human soul. There is a great deal of paranormal evidence supporting such an idea – things such as near-death experiences, suggesting human memories and consciousness can continue when the brain is totally shut down.

The main problem with such an idea is that it differs from what we have been told so often by neuroscientists. But such an idea is easier to accept if you simply remember: Nature never told us that our memories are stored in brains, and Nature never told us that our abstract concepts are generated by brains. It is merely our neuroscientists who have told us such things, and they have been jumping the gun before getting proof for such claims, being guilty of the overly presumptive dogmatism that is so common among modern scientists.

Scientists have long advanced the dogma that memories can only be stored in brains. But there is a line of experiments that challenge such a dogma. The experiments involve worms. The worms in question have an astonishing ability. You can cut off the head of one of these worms, and it will grow a new head.

In the 1950's the scientist James McConnell did astonishing experiments with flatworms. He trained flatworms (planaria) to respond to lighting cues. He then cut off the heads of the flatworms, leaving only half a worm. He was not surprised to see the tail of the worm regrow into a full worm that included a new brain. Such a thing had been observed long ago. But what was surprising was that the worms seemed to remember the learning that had previously been provided. Under the prevailing dogma of neuroscience – that all memories are stored in the brain – such a thing should have been impossible. The learning should have been lost when a worm's first brain was cut off. McConnell's research was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper stated, “ It was concluded that in planaria the rudimentary brain is necessary for learning to take place but not for retention of the learned response."

More recently, scientist Michael Levin of Tufts University has replicated McConnell's findings. Spending lots of money, Levin developed a fancy machine called the Automatic Training Apparatus, designed to test flatworms in a way that would be computer-assisted and involve less subjective interpretation by humans. 

 Levin's machine

Levin's results were similar to McConnell's. The sequence he documented over and over again was:

1. A worm was trained in some way.
2. The worm had its head severed.
3. The worm regrew its body, growing a new brain.
4. The worm was then retested to see whether it remembered its previous learning.
5. It was found repeatedly that the worm seemed to remember what it had previously learned before decapitation.

Levin published his research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper was entitled, “An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration.”

It is impossible to explain these results under prevailing dogmas that memories are stored in brains. An article on Levin's research includes some weird speculation involving RNA molecules going from the head of the flatworm into the tail, and then migrating back into the head after the head had regenerated after decapitation. But the article concedes that this scenario is “imaginary,” and scientists haven't even maintained that memories are stored in RNA molecules.

But there is a scenario that can explain experimental results such as McConnell's and Levin's. Consider the following hypothetical scenario.

1. All animals with brains (include flatworms and humans) have something like a soul. In the case of a flatworm, we might call this a mini-soul.
2. Such animals store memories not mainly in brains, but mainly in souls.
3. When a flatworm is decapitated, its brain is lost, but its soul or mini-soul is preserved, and still holds the animal's previous memories.
4. When the decapitated flatworm grows a new brain, it is able to remember its previous learning, because it is retrieving memories not from its newly regenerated brain but from its soul or mini-soul that was never damaged.

The experimental results of McConnell and Levin are inconsistent with the idea that memories are stored only in brains, but are quite consistent with the scenario above.

Are there any other experiments hinting at the existence of a soul? Yes, but they involve not animals but human beings. The experiments I refer to are experiments involving ESP and remote-viewing. Innumerable scientific papers have been published documenting positive results in such experiments. In the case of the Joseph Rhine experiments at Duke University, we have experiments showing spectacular results that we would not expect to see merely by chance even if everyone on the planet was tested for ESP.

What do such experiments have to do with the soul? Abilities such as ESP and remote viewing are utterly inexplicable under a neurological framework. Evidence for such abilities suggests very strongly that the human mind involves some paranormal or spiritual or transcendent component that goes beyond anything that can be explained by using the nervous system and the brain. The term “soul” can be used as a vague term for such a component.

Of course, you can deny all of this if you wish to cling to materialist dogmas about the brain, and maintain that the mind and memories are 100% brain effects. But life is going to be hard for you. You must explain away or deny the worm experiments done by multiple researchers. You must explain away or deny tons of experiments showing paranormal human abilities, experiments done for more than 100 years, including experiments done at leading universities and experiments long funded by the US government. You must deny all the evidence involving near-death experiences, suggesting that human consciousness can continue when the brain is inoperative, including many cases of people verifying details of their medical procedures when they should have been completely unconscious. You must claim that memories are all stored in brains, even though there is no plausible mechanism by which human brains could store memories for longer than a year or two, given all the structural and protein turnover occurring in synapses (discussed here). You must somehow claim that memory recall is purely neurological, even though no one has the slightest idea of how a brain or mind could ever know how to find the exact location in the brain where a memory was stored. You must also maintain that somehow all our abstract thoughts are made by neurons, although no one can explain how one neuron or a trillion neurons could combine to make an abstract concept such as “life,” “universe,” or “nation.” You must also maintain that somehow the brain is constantly using a vast wealth of encoding schemes and decoding schemes that allow it to translate concepts, episodic memories and visual memories into molecular storage, even though no one has ever found such an encoding scheme, no one has ever spelled out in detail how such encoding schemes could work, and if such encoding schemes existed they would require some insanely intricate design scheme almost infinitely more complicated than the design scheme behind DNA (creating a gigantic “intelligent design” issue materialists would prefer to avoid). You must also explain away cases such as John Lorber's and these cases, which suggest that minds can function very well even when a large fraction of the brain is damaged or a great majority of the brain is gone.

Good luck doing all that without tying your prose into knots.

Dennett's Book Dodges the Real Problems in Explaining Minds

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has long been regarded as one of the top apologists of materialism, so no doubt his fans must have had high hopes for his new tome, entitled From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. But the book fails to give us anything like a coherent plausible explanation for the origin of human mentality.

The first part of the book consists largely of Dennett pontificating about natural selection, which Dennett inaccurately portrays as some great creative force. What we have are the typical exaggerations and misstatements of Darwin fanboys on this topic, and they are delivered most dogmatically, with very little supporting evidence. Dennett provides no examples of innovative complex macroscopic features of organisms that have been proven to have originated by natural selection and random mutations –  because no such proof has been produced by scientists. Contrary to Dennett's assertions, natural selection is merely a kind of pruning effect or filter that gets rid of bad designs, not something that has any power to produce complex good designs. Natural selection may describe survival of the fittest, but does not explain the arrival of the fittest. 

 

The diagram above tells the true nature of natural selection. It is not something that explains the appearance of the yellow circles in the diagram, but merely explains how the red circles got filtered out.

On page 43, Dennett claims that natural selection is a collection of algorithms, and on page 384 he claims that “natural selection is a substrate-neutral family of algorithms.” These claims are false. An algorithm is a sequential set of steps to follow to achieve a particular result, being something that is processed by either a mind or a computer. Natural selection is simply the observational fact of survival of the fittest, the fact that fit things survive longer and reproduce more than unfit things. Natural selection is neither an algorithm nor a collection of algorithms.

The great question about natural selection is: how could this mere pruning effect (which is merely a filter) ever explain the astonishingly complex and coordinated biological complexity we see in the real world? Dennett doesn't explain this in any substantive way, although he very clumsily provides a visual to try to warm us up to the idea that something apparently designed can be produced naturally. He gives us a Science magazine photo showing some circles of stones, and discusses a geological theory that supposedly naturally explains these circles as natural geological effects. The problem with that, of course, is that the complexity we see in biological systems is trillions of times more complex (and gigantically more coordinated) than some little circles of stones.

Later on Dennett has a chapter with the rather silly title “Brains Made of Brains.” On page 155 he advances the frequently stated misconception that the brain is massively parallel. Getting things all mixed up, he states, “Brains are parallel (they execute many millions of 'computations' simultaneously, spread over the whole fabric of the brain); computers are serial (they execute one single simple command after another, a serial single-file stream of computations that makes up for its narrowness by its blinding speed).” To the contrary, human brains do not do many computations simultaneously, and humans can do only one math computation at a time; conversely you can buy desktop computers that actually do dual-processing which is parallel processing.

Sounding like a real Richard Dawkins fanboy, Dennett goes on to a long enthusiastic discussion of Dawkins' idea of memes. But such a discussion is not something that helps at the job of explaining the appearance of human minds. Memes are ideas, and do nothing to explain how we have a mind that produces ideas.

Dennett seems to dodge or largely ignore the main difficulties of explaining the origin of minds such as ours. One of the principal difficulties is the fact that according to the prevailing account, in a period of a few million years hominid ancestors evolved into large-brained humans; but the population of these hominids was supposedly very small when this happened, being no greater than 20,000 or so. The problem is that such a progression would have required many beneficial mutations, and the number of mutations in a population is proportional to the size of the population; so beneficial random mutations in a small population should be incredibly rare. As discussed in this scientific paper, calculations based on known mutation rates suggest that a few million years is way, way too small a time to allow for so many favorable mutations in such a small population, which we should not have expected to see in even 500 million years of time. This “waiting time” problem is one of the chief difficulties of explaining the origin of human minds. But Dennett simply ignores it.

Another set of difficulties lies in the fact that our minds have quite a few characteristics that we cannot plausibly explain by appealing to natural selection. As was pointed out at length in this essay by the co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace), the human mind has many capabilities and abilities that seem to be impossible to explain by means of natural selection, because they are things that do not improve an organism's chance of surviving in the wild. Among these things are aesthetic abilities, insight, curiosity, philosophical abilities, language abilities, mathematical abilities, spirituality, and altruism. As argued here, none of these things would make an organism significantly more likely to survive in the wild, so we cannot explain them by the idea of natural selection. So how did we get them? Dennett fails to provide an answer.

In my essay I referred to in the previous paragraph, I didn't even mention an additional problem: the difficulty of explaining man's very long-term memory. Humans have memories that can reliably recall things that happened 50 years ago, but this is very much a “luxury feature” exceeding by a factor of 25 what is necessary for survival. An organism would do just fine in the wild remembering things for only one or two years, by just remembering all of the skills and body/location memories it used in the last year or two. Besides being inexplicable from a Darwinian standpoint, our minds capable of storing memories for 50 years are inexplicable from a neurological standpoint. The leading theory of memory involves the idea that synapses store memories. But that doesn't work, because (as discussed here) synapses are subject to very rapid molecular turnover and structural turnover which should make them unsuitable for storing memories for longer than a year.

As far as I can see Dennett completely ignores the whole issue of explaining human memory, not even trying to explain it. He also seems to dodge or largely ignore the main philosophical issue involved in explaining human minds – the issue of how it could possibly be that a merely physical thing could produce the rich mental reality of our consciousness. Philosophers have long smelled an inherent implausibility that any merely physical thing (no matter how complicated its arrangement) could yield the very non-physical thing we call the human mind. For a physical brain to produce Mind seems rather like a stone pouring out blood when you squeeze it.

The only way Dennett seems to handle this issue is through a gigantic cop-out. His fourteenth chapter is entitled, “Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion.” I won't describe his nonsensical reasoning, but will merely note that the moment a thinker starts claiming that consciousness is an illusion, he has revealed the intellectual bankruptcy and unreasonableness of his assumptions.

In the last four pages of his book, Dennett provides a grand summary of his explanation of our minds. The summary is an incoherent mess. It starts with the last of his numerous appeals to the authority of Darwin, the type of Darwin showed nature is purposeless talk that thinkers like Dennett give like some Freudian reverently stating Freud showed our anxieties are caused by our childhood sex conflicts. Then Dennett goes on to mention Alan Turing (who helped get computers started) and Shannon (who made contributions to information theory). This seems more like name-dropping than something that helps in explaining our minds. Computers have nothing to do with explaining the origin of human minds. Giving a final salute to Dawkins, Dennett also mentions in italics “words striving to reproduce,” which is a strange personification that does nothing to clarify the origin of our minds. Then in the book's second-to-last paragraph he reiterates his cop-out claim that consciousness is a “user-illusion.”

Of course, by claiming that consciousness is just an illusion, a writer has a convenient excuse for failing to explain it, on kind of the grounds of “there's pretty much nothing there to explain.” It's convenient Dennett has such an excuse, as his book sheds little light upon the origin of our minds. 

Postscript: Today I am reading Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life by Cambridge University biology professor K. D. Bennett. Referring to speciation (the origin of species), this mainstream authority says on page 175, "Natural selection has been shown to have occurred (for example, among populations of Darwin's finches), but there is no evidence that it accumulates over longer periods of time to produce speciation in the Darwinian sense."  So why have we been so often told the opposite by Darwin enthusiasts?