“Nature's Deepest Secrets” or Just Mist-Castles in the Clouds?

A new book by Graham Farmelo has a title brimming with triumphalist hubris. The title is The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets. The book is a reverent treatment of speculative physics in which mathematicians and physicists create intricate realms of conjecture that have little contact with empirical reality: things like supersymmetry theory and string theory.

It is rather misleading to be using the term “modern math” to refer to things like string theory and supersymmetry. Speculative and unverified theories in physics should not be called math or mathematics, since those terms have such connotations of certainty. Such theories should be called physics theories that use mathematics. There is no basis for claiming that such theories have in any sense “revealed nature's deepest secrets.” “Reveal” is a word to be used when an observational discovery has been made. There have been no observational discoveries made to support theories such as supersymmetry and string theory.  The universe has not spoken in numbers to give us string theory or supersymmetry theory.  It is merely speculating physicists who have spoken in numbers to give us such things. 

On page 174 Farmelo quotes the eminent physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow as saying, “In Europe, supersymmetry seems to be a religion.” This is a very revealing quote that Farmelo should have carefully pondered, but it seems to have gone in one of Farmelo's ears and out the other. He has no insight into the sociological and groupthink factors involved in the cult-like cliques of modern theoretical physics.

Farmelo admits on page 249 that there is no evidence for string theory, saying that “it is disappointing that the framework has not yet made direct contact with experiments.” But Farmelo still supports it. He says on that page, “In my view, it is both wise and prudent to trust the judgment of the overwhelming majority of the world's leading theoretical physicists, who are confident that this theory is well worth pursuing.”

This is the kind of very dubious ad populum argument that people use to try to get you to believe in theories for which there is little or no evidence. Such an argument will typically make some dubious claim about the popularity of some theory among some group of scientists, without providing any actual hard polling data showing that the theory has the popularity that is being claimed. Are there actually any polls of “the world's leading theoretical physicists” in which they assert that string theory is true or “well worth pursuing”? I doubt it. And since Farmelo has told us that a leading physicist said that supersymmetry (a leading physics theory) “seems to be a religion” in Europe, why should we not believe that the popularity of string theory is like the popularity of some religion, something based in sociology and groupthink rather than sound judgment?

On page 251 Farmelo says, “Some undeniably first-rate thinkers – including Gerard 't Hooft, Sheldon Glashow and Roger Penrose – worry from their different perspectives that theoretical physics has taken a wrong turn towards sterile, ultra-mathematical approaches, many of which have become divorced from reality.” But Farmelo ignores such criticism. On page 250 he predicts that supersymmetry will “sooner or later, be demonstrated experimentally to be a fundamental feature of the laws of nature.” He gives no reason at all for predicting this other than saying “such a discovery would help to justify the faith of many theoreticians that beautiful mathematics serves as a useful lodestar,” referring to a star that guides a ship on which direction to move. So we should believe in theories simply because they seem to have beautiful mathematics? That doesn't make sense.

We get a contrary view from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

"And not only is there no historical evidence that beauty and elegance are good guides to find correct theories, there isn’t even a theory for why that should be so. There’s no reason to think that our sense of beauty has any relevance for discovering new fundamental laws of nature."

This year cosmologist Ethan Siegel had a post entitled “Why Supersymmetry May Be the Greatest Failed Prediction in Particle Physics History.” Referrring to supersymmetry theory under its acronym of SUSY, Siegel states, “No reasonable person can justifiably conclude that SUSY is supported by the evidence.” He also states the following:

"There's a large and powerful group of (mostly) theorists who will go to their graves as true believers in not only SUSY, but electroweak-scale SUSY, regardless of what the evidence says. Yet with every new proton the LHC collides, we see the same answer again and again: no SUSY. No matter how often we fool ourselves, nor how many scientists get fooled, nature is the ultimate arbiter of reality. The experiments do not lie. As of today, there is no experimental evidence in favor of SUSY."

I guess we can put down Farmelo as one of the true believers who will go to their graves believing that the supersymmetry theory is true. We should note the tendency of certain people in the world of physics to develop life-long attachments to dubious unproven theories, a tendency that also exists very abundantly in the world of biology.

There are several reasons why the “beauty” argument for supersymmetry is not convincing. One reason is that there are always millions of possible ways in which the physics of nature could be configured in a beautiful manner. So if you imagine some hypothetical configuration of particle physics that seems beautiful to you, you have no basis for saying, “This must be how nature really is, because it's so beautiful.” There will be always be a million other possible ways that nature could be configured on a fundamental level, that would be just as beautiful as what you imagined.

Similarly, I may imagine some very beautiful design that Heaven might have, but it would be foolish for me to say, “This is so beautiful, it must be how Heaven looks.” For even if we assume that there must be a beautiful Heaven, there would always be a million other beautiful designs that such a Heaven might have.

The other reason why the “beauty” argument for supersymmetry is not convincing is that supersymmetry isn't really very beautiful at all. The theory has a little symmetry, but it's not very beautiful because it isn't a functional symmetry. The hypothetical “superparticles” imagined by supersymmetry theory are not necessary for our existence. So while supersymmetry imagines a symmetry situation, the situation is not a functional symmetry, so it isn't particularly beautiful.

There actually exists a functional symmetry in the fundamental layout of nature, a beautiful exact symmetry that is very necessary for our existence. This symmetry is the fact that the electric charge on each electron in the universe is the very exact opposite of the electric charge on each proton in the universe. This is both a symmetry and a functional symmetry. If such an exact symmetry did not exist, the laws of chemistry would not work, our bodies would not hold together, and planets and stars would not be able to hold together (as the electromagnetic repulsion of particles in them would overwhelm the gravitational attraction that holds them together).

Our theoretical physicists virtually never talk about this very exact and functional symmetry that we know exists in nature. Instead, they spend a thousand times more time talking about imaginary, non-functional symmetries for which there is no evidence. Go figure.

Not really beautiful, because it's not a functional symmetry

One Day's Dubious Stories at a Science News Web Site

Major websites make money from online ads. So the more people click on a link to some science story, the more money the website makes. Nowadays science news sites have a tremendous financial incentive to hype and exaggerate science stories. If they have a link saying, “Borderline results from new neuron study,” they may make only five dollars from that story. But if they have a story saying, “Astonishing breakthrough unveils the brain secret of memory,” they may make five hundred dollars from that story. With such a situation, it is no wonder that the hyping and exaggeration of scientific research is at epidemic levels.

Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. They know the more some scientific research is hyped, the more glory and attendees will flow to their university.

A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:

Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study.

We can get a good idea of how bad the science hype problem has become by looking at misleading or dubious news articles available on a single day at a major science news site, www.sciencedaily.com. The day I found these articles was June 22, 2019. ScienceDaily.com is a site that gets revenue from ads. On this day I found three ads on the front page of the site, two peddling a car lease, and the other peddling a Samsung smartphone. The more sensational and enticing the claims made on ScienceDaily.com, the more money the site will make from people clicking on its ads. 

One of the misleading ScienceDaily.com stories on June 22 had this headline: “Two new Earth-like planets discovered near Teegarden's Star.” Until life is discovered on another planet, it will always be misleading to describe another planet as “Earth-like.” A planet is only like the Earth if life has been discovered on the planet. But no one has discovered life on these two planets near Teegarden's Star, nor anywhere else in space. They haven't even discovered water on either of these planets. The correct way to describe planets such as the two planets near Teegarden's Star is to call them “Earth-sized planets,” not Earth-like planets.

Another of the doubtful stories on ScienceDaily.com on June 22 had this headline: “Origin of life: A prebiotic route to DNA.” Prebiotic means “before life existed.” The concept of DNA existing before life existed is nonsensical, and the news story does nothing to substantiate such an idea. The story merely talks about a hypothetical pathway by which some of the chemical sub-units of DNA may have arisen, some chemical sub-units called nucleosides. Nucleosides are to DNA like individual characters (A, B, and so forth) are to a book. So the Science News article should have been entitled “A prebiotic route to DNA building blocks,” not “A prebiotic route to DNA.”

Another of the dubious stories on ScienceDaily.com on June 22 had this headline: “Your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept.” The article discusses a scientific paper that presents no robust evidence showing that your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept. As Figure 3 of the paper makes clear, “Neither the RSA neural score a–b nor the univariate neural score c–d from the first fMRI run significantly differentiated the participants by group, and neither was significantly predictive of concept knowledge.” 

The study authors played around with three different arbitrarily contrived "neural score" calculation algorithms. The first two algorithms (consisting of 4 or 5 steps) failed to show any evidence that brains reflect a subject's knowledge, as we see from the line I just quoted.  The third algorithm was an extremely complicated and arbitrary 7-step algorithm, including various selections  and assignments in which scientists were free to choose whatever they wanted, and quite a lot of complex statistical manipulation and transformation.  This extremely convoluted algorithm produced a "statistically significant" difference between two study groups with different knowledge levels -- something that could easily have occurred purely because of chance data variations.  This smells like a case of "keep torturing the data until it confesses."  The authors give no justification for why we should accept this convoluted algorithm as a valid way of computing a "neural score" related to knowledge, rather than a million other possible ways someone could compute such a score. 

Here is how such a study should have been done. First, the study should have been a preregistered study that stated and justified a single simple straightforward method for computing the "neural score,"  decided on before any data was gathered.  Such a method should not have allowed any possibility for arbitrary selection. Then the study should have used a blinding protocol, in which analysts did not know whether the fMRI brain scans they were looking at were from a group of people with the relevant concept knowledge, or a group of people without such knowledge.  Then the study should have  reported the results only using the single pre-determined method for computing the "neural score,"  rather than giving the analysts freedom to play around with neural score calculation methods until the desired result was achieved. Also, the study should have used a minimum of 15 subjects per study group. Apparently none of these things was done.  

Another of the very dubious stories on June 22 had a headline of “Plate tectonics may have driven 'Cambrian Explosion.'"   When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see very little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 540 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is an enormous surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian Explosion.

The major groupings of life are called phyla. There are about 35 animal phyla, and almost all of these phyla appeared during the Cambrian era. There is not a single animal phylum that has arisen since about the time of the Cambrian era, which lasted from about 540 million years ago to 485 million years ago. As one research paper states, “The youngest animal phylum is about 500 million-year-old.”

This creates quite a problem for Darwinian theory, as it is not what such a theory predicts. According to Darwinian ideas, what we should have seen is more and more phyla appearing as time progressed, as more and more branches appeared in a tree of life, like the tree of life that appeared as an illustration in The Origin of Species. In fact, Darwin said in The Origin of Species that the Cambrian Explosion “may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

The June 22nd science news story about plate tectonics and the Cambrian Explosion suggests a laughable idea: that geological activity produced lots of oxygen, and that this oxygen caused the enormous burst of biological origins that was the Cambrian Explosion.  We should chuckle at this puerile idea, and ask those who propose it: is that all you got? 

You don't explain something by merely mentioning a necessary condition for it. For example, if you were puzzled by  extraterrestrial monsters suddenly appearing in the international space station, you wouldn't explain their appearance by saying that the oxygen in the space station was necessary for their existence.  So it is nonsensical to have a headline suggesting that some oxygen-producing geological event was the cause of a huge information explosion involving a vast burst of biological innovation that produced almost all animal phyla. 

The news story in question also made a claim about oxygen very inconsistent with a science news story earlier this year in which we read the following:

A study by University of California, Berkeley geochemists presents new evidence that high levels of oxygen were not critical to the origin of animals. The researchers found that the transition to a world with an oxygenated deep ocean occurred between 540 and 420 million years ago.

The Cambrian Explosion is dated at about 540 million years ago. 

Another of the very dubious stories on the June 22 “Science Daily” site had the title “Ultimate destiny: How undifferentiated cells commit to their biological fate.” The news article repeatedly tried to persuade us that cells make decisions. Here are some excerpts:

The human body is made up of hundreds of cell types exquisitely specialized to perform their jobs with great precision. This complexity, however, belies the fact that each of the trillions of highly specialized cells start out as a single primordial cell. How do these primitive, undifferentiated cells choose their ultimate destiny?...The findings....show that cells face multiple competing choices on their journey to adulthood and perform a series of binary decisions until they reach a final destination....The research reveals that neural crest cells' decisions occur in three phases: activation of competing genetic programs vying for the cell's attention, gradual biasing toward one of these programs and the cell's ultimate commitment...To retrace the decision making of these primitive cells as they diverge into different areas of specialization, the investigators used single-cell sequencing...As cells decide on a path, one genetic program becomes stronger, while the competing one gets weaker, allowing the cell to move toward its chosen path. The analysis shows that cells face a series of binary choices, with each subsequent decision further narrowing the choice of specialization.

Of course, this is mostly bunk and baloney. A cell never makes a decision, contrary to the frequent assertions of this news story. Only conscious agents make decisions. Also, there are no genetic programs offering different specialization paths for cells. Neither genes nor DNA specifies the structure of any cell. DNA does not even fully specify any of the proteins that are the building blocks of cells. DNA merely specifies the low-level polypeptide sequence (amino acid sequence) that is the starting point of a protein molecule, before protein folding occurs for unknown reasons.

So how is it that generic cells become different types of specialized cells? That's a great mystery that we don't understand. We don't even understand what causes cells to divide. We should not pretend that we know something we do not, by inventing mythological narratives about cells engaging in decision making and deliberation.  It is reasonable to suspect that the mysterious workings of cells (so inexplicable from a bottom-up perspective) are the result of some unfathomable top-down influence, but we have no understanding of how such an influence could work.  

Cell differentiation by Halleyfournier for Wikipedia Commons

Cell differentiation is simply one of a host of mysteries scientists do not understand. See here for 50 other such mysteries. 

There was so much error and doubtful hype on the Science Daily web site on June 22, 2019, with five dubious or misleading headlines or stories. This type of thing is partially the blame of university press offices, and partially the blame of headline writers who sometimes "sex up" science news stories that may have already been "sexed up" by a university press office. 

Similar problems occur at the Daily Galaxy site (www.dailygalaxy.com), which sometimes has misleading headlines with made-up quotes not matching the words of any person in the article under the headline. An example on June 26 was their story, "Non-Biological Origin of Life –'Ancient Proteins Embedded in Meteorites.' ” The story presented no evidence whatsoever that proteins have been discovered in meteorites, nor did it quote anyone who thinks that any meteorite ever had a protein. The story merely discussed chemical fragments a thousand times simpler than a protein.  

At least on www.sciencedaily.com the ads are clearly marked as ads (although in a grayish-white "Advertisement" announcement that is just barely visible). But on the very widely read www.reddit.com "subreddits" such as www.reddit.com/r/science,  we have ads that are blended in with the science news headlines.  Unless you are aware that the word "promoted" refers to an ad,  you are likely to be completely confused about which headlines are news stories and which headlines are ads. How can we regard any site following such a presentation policy as a trustworthy source of information? 

Postscript: The sciencedaily.com story here is an example of an extremely misleading story on that site.  The story had the title "Sound waves boost older adults' memory, deep sleep" and the subtitle "Pink noise synced to brain waves deepens sleep and triples memory scores in older adults." Such a thing would be a huge breakthrough if it were, but it isn't true at all.  The actual results are shown in Table 2 of the study.  The 13 subjects given the sound waves and the "pink noise synced to brain waves" recalled 52.1 percent of the words, and the subjects given a "sham" treatment without such waves recalled 47.8 percent of the words. Instead of doing 300% better with the sound waves, the subjects did only 8% better, a result that could easily have been due to pure chance with so few subjects tested. 

So Many Better Arguments Against Materialism Than the One He Uses

At the Aeon web site, we recently had an essay entitled “Minding Matter.” Under that title we read a subtitle or “teaser text” that reads, “The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics seems to rest on shaky metaphysical ground.” Materialism is actually a position in philosophy rather than physics. Materialism is the claim that matter or mass-energy is all that exists, and according to such a position your mind is purely a product of your brain (or perhaps just an aspect of your brain).

I was interested in what argument or arguments the author (the astrophysicist Adam Frank) would present against materialism. But the only argument Frank gave was one of the weakest arguments anyone could use against materialist claims about the mind. It was an argument that can be summarized like this: “We can't be sure that minds are produced by matter (or that minds are just some aspect of matter), because we're not really sure what matter is.”

Frank discusses at some length the fact that while nineteenth century scientists regarded atoms as being solid little balls of matter, we now know that atoms are made of smaller particles such as electrons, protons and neutrons; and a particle such as an electron has a kind of “fuzzy” nature , so we can't be sure exactly what it is. This is partially because of quantum mechanics, the modern theory of subatomic reality. There are different interpretations of quantum mechanics that disagree with each other, so we cannot be sure of the exact nature of matter on the lowest level. Frank states this: “We know that matter remains mysterious just as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those mysteries should be."

This is one of the weakest arguments I can imagine against the materialist claim that brains make minds or that minds are just an aspect of brains. The argument does nothing to provide evidence against such a claim, but merely raises a kind of weak question mark suggesting that maybe such a claim isn't certain.

The weakness of Frank's argument can be shown by the fact that what he mentions can be used (with equally weak force) in a way exactly opposite to the way he has used it. For example, a materialist could argue like this:

“Now, it may seem impossible to believe that matter could produce minds if matter consists of hard solid atoms that are like little billiard balls. But quantum mechanics clouds the waters. For example, we don't really know what an electron is. Since we don't really have understanding at the lowest level of what matter is, who is to say that it could not be producing mind?”

If Frank had actually wanted to argue against the claim that minds are merely the product of brains, or an aspect of brains, there are many arguments that he could have used far stronger than the “weak tea” argument he has used. Such arguments are presented in my blog site www.headtruth.blogspot.com. Below are some of these arguments, but not all of them:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.
2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.
3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.
4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.
5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.
6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.
7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.
8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 
9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.
10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.
11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.
12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia who can recall every day of their adulthood) or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.
13. The very strong laboratory evidence for psi (most notably extrasensory perception) shows that humans have abilities that cannot be explained by neural activity, and that must involve some higher consciousness reality beyond the brain.
14. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head.
15. Well-documented evidence for apparitions provides evidence that the human mind is not merely the result of brain activity. Such evidence includes (1) more than 100 cases of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know had died, only to very soon learn that the corresponding person had died (as discussed here, here, here and here); (2) many additional cases of apparitions seen by multiple observers, contrary to the explanation of hallucination (discussed here and here); (3) many other cases of death-bed apparitions as discussed here and documented by researchers such as Haraldsson and Osis. 
16. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.
17.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

These things all indicate that our minds and memory (or paranormal phenomena) must be the result of some spiritual or immaterial aspect of man or some soul aspect of man, in direct contradiction to the position of materialism that such a thing does not exist. 

Postscript: Discussing hemispherectomy operations in which half of a brain is removed to stop seizures, the paper here states,  "Others, (Ogden, 1988; Riva & Gazzaniga, 1986; Vargha-Khadem et al., 1997a; Verity, 1982) have reported excellent, even normal linguistic abilities after hemispherectomy of either side" of the brain. An interesting scientific paper is entitled, "When only the right hemisphere is left: Studies in language and communication." The study gives us an in-depth analysis of a subject named BL who as a child had half of his brain removed (the left half) in a hemispherectomy operation to reduce seizures.  The paper tells us that BL has "above normal intelligence" and that he graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in business and sociology.  In a battery of tests of memory and language, the subject showed normal results, with only slight, subtle defecits. He scored above-average on a few memory-related tests, such as the Boston Naming Test and the Famous Names and Faces test.  We are told, "Regarding speech, language, and communicative function, BL's performance appears grossly normal in pronunciation, grammar, semantics, and usage." 

A study such as this helps to debunk dogmas such as the dogma that the brain is the source of our minds.  You can read about many similar cases by following the links above.  Referring to patients who had half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations, the paper states, "The numerous observations on cognitively intact persons hemispherectomized in childhood bring to mind the report of Lorber (1983) on hydrocephalic adults, whose brains are constituted of only a thin layer of cerebral tissue, and yet who enjoy normal or superior motor and cognitive abilities." Talking about the small effect of hemispherectomy operations in which half of a brain is removed, a doctor states, "When you take out half of their brain in one sitting it’s as if they weren’t touched." When will our neuroscientists start putting two and two together to reach the conclusion that is taught by such observational facts? 

New Study Indicates Why DMT Can't Explain Near-Death Experiences

Ever since Raymond Moody's best-selling 1975 book Life after Life, the common characteristics of a near-death experience have been well-known. A particular near-death experience may have between one or more of these characteristics. The characteristics include:

• a sensation of floating out of the body, which may include seeming to view the body from above;
• feelings of peace, joy or tranquility;
• a life-review in which previous life events are reviewed or relived in some sped-up manner;
• a passage through a tunnel;
• an encounter with a very bright light or a “being of light” or a light that is somehow sensed to be numinous or a source of thought or feeling;
• an experience of seeing some heavenly or supernatural realm;
• an experience of seeming to see one or more deceased relatives;
• an experience of being told that you must “go back” and continue to live your regular life;
• an experience of having heightened consciousness, mentality or perception.

Since near-death experiences were first reported, those who do not believe in a soul or life after death have been trying to suggest a natural explanation for the phenomenon.  One attempt at an explanation is what we may call the "stash release" theory. This is the idea that when someone is at the verge of death or undergoing a cardiac arrest, there can be a release of hallucinogenic chemicals stored in the brain.  A person may try to back up this claim by saying something like "DMT has been detected in the brain of mammals." However, there has never existed any evidence that any hallucinogenic chemicals exist in the brain of mammals other than in micro-traces a thousand times too small to produce a hallucination.  

There's a new study on the topic published in a scientific journal. It is remarkable how the press release on this topic (and the NeuroscienceNews.com story based on the press release) misleadingly describe the study as if it were something supporting the "stash release" theory. The headline on NeuroscienceNews.com is " ‘Mystical’ psychedelic compound found in normal brains."  The story tells us that DMT has been discovered in mammalian brains. It also says, "Her team’s work has also revealed that the levels of DMT increase in some rats experiencing cardiac arrest." But no mention is made in the story of what level of DMT was found in a mammalian brain, and no mention is made by how much the DMT level increased during cardiac arrest. You should tend to be suspicious of scientific news stories that fail to provide the relevant numbers. 

Luckily the story is based on a study in a scientific journal, and the whole study can be read online here.  Deplorably, the study does not reveal in its abstract what level of DMT was measured.  But if you dive into the study we can get that information. The level of DMT detected was about 1 nanomole, a billionth of a mole. The paper states, "the normal rat brain contained detectable levels of DMT..ranging 0.05–1.8 nM with an average of 0.56 nM." The abbreviation nM stands for nanomole. So the study tells us that a rat brain has only about 1 nanomole of DMT.

How much is a nanomole?  It's about 300,000 times smaller than the amount needed to produce a hallucinogenic result. The dose typically used to produce DMT hallucinations or a DMT "trip" is about 30 milligrams.  That's a dose about 300,000 times stronger than a nanomole.  

According to the site here, which can be used as a rough guide, 5750 milligrams of a particular substance is equivalent to .05 moles. So an amount 100 times smaller (about 57 milligrams) would be equal to about .0005 moles. We multiply that .0005 by a billion to get the equivalent number of nanomoles, leaving us with 500,000.  So a dose of 57 milligrams is about 500,000 nanomoles, a dose of 30 milligrams is about 300,000 nanomoles, and a single nanomole is only about 1/300,000 of the minimum 30 milligrams to produce a hallucinogenic result. 

As for the claimed cardiac arrest increase in DMT, the paper shows that it is only an increase from 1 nanomole to 2 nanomoles. That means that even during cardiac arrest, the DMT would still be 150,000 times too small to produce a hallucinogenic result. 

The news article written about the study failed to make any mention of the fact that mere nano-traces of DMT had been measured.  This is not quite chicanery and deceit. It is also not quite chicanery and deceit for a man to vaguely tell his girlfriend, "I have accumulated some savings," when these savings consist merely of one penny deposited each month into a piggy bank. 

See the post here for why there is a huge difference between DMT experiences and near-death experiences, and why DMT could not actually explain near-death experiences, even if it existed in the brain a million times greater than the nano-traces that have been detected. 

A DMT trip is a little like this

Postscript: There's a new study indicating that near-death experiences are astonishingly common. The study is entitled “Prevalence of near-death experiences and REM sleep intrusion in 1034 adults from 35 countries.” Using a “crowdsourcing” platform to get a random sample of 1034 adults from many different countries, the study authors found that 28% of the respondents answered “Yes” when asked whether they had ever had a near-death experience.

This 28% was then asked to answer “Yes” or “No” to the following questions (called “Greyson scale questions”):

• Did time seem to speed up or slow down?

• Were your thoughts speeded up?

• Did scenes from your past come back to you?

• Did you suddenly seem to understand everything?

• Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness? *

• Did you have a feeling of joy?

• Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe?

• Did you see, or feel surrounded by, a brilliant light?

• Were your senses more vivid than usual?

• Did you seem to be aware of things going on elsewhere, as if by extrasensory perception or telepathy?

• Did scenes from the future come to you?

• Did you feel separated from your body?

• Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?

• Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence or hear an unidentifiable voice?

• Did you see deceased or religious spirits?

• Did you come to a border or point of no return?

Only those who answered “Yes” to 7 or more of these questions were judged to have had a “full-scale” near-death experience. Ten percent of the respondents answered “Yes” to 7 or more of these questions.

You may realize how remarkable such a result is when you consider that only a small fraction of the population have ever come close to death. There are no exact figures on what percentage of the population has come close to death, but a reasonable ballpark estimate might be between 10% and 20%. So it seems like a very high fraction of those who come to death experience near-death experiences.

The scientific paper tries to suggest some causal relation between what is called “REM sleep intrusion” and near-death experiences. REM sleep intrusion is supposedly some state in which someone can briefly dream while he is awake. To try to determine the level of “REM sleep intrusion” in respondents, the scientific survey asked these questions:

• Just before falling asleep or just after awakening, have you ever seen objects, things or people that others can’t see?
• Just before falling asleep or just after awakening, have you ever heard voices, music or sounds that other people can’t hear?
• Have you ever awakened and felt paralyzed or found that you were unable to move?
• Have you ever had abrupt muscle weakness in your legs or knee buckling, or felt sudden muscle weakness in your face or head drop?

Twenty percent of the overall respondents answered “Yes” to three or more of these four questions, but 34% of those who claimed to have a near-death experience answered “Yes” to three or more of these questions. 47% of those who were judged to have had “full-scale” near-death experiences answered “Yes” to three or more of these “REM sleep intrusion” questions.

The authors have tried to play this up as something significant, but it may have no causal significance at all. We can easily explain the difference without imagining any causal relation between “REM sleep intrusion” and near-death experiences.

The “REM sleep intrusion” questions are questions about abnormal experiences. Anyone answering the survey and reporting a near-death experience might simply be someone more prone to candidly admit to an abnormal experience.

In many ways we are socially conditioned not to report abnormal experiences, for fear of being ridiculed as an oddball. But if a person has already admitted in a survey that he has had one type of abnormal experience (a near-death experience), he may then be much more likely to admit another type of abnormal experience involving sleeping. This greater tendency to confess to a second abnormal experience (after confessing to a first abnormal experience) can easily explain the somewhat greater “REM sleep intrusion” scores of people who experienced near-death experiences.

The page here briefly explains why “REM sleep intrusion” is not a credible explanation for near-death experiences, and the paper here explains such a thing in much greater length.