"DNA as Recipe" Is as False as "DNA as Blueprint"

In 1943 physicist Erwin Schrodinger speculated that the chromosomes of a cell “contain, in some kind of code-script, the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.” Within a decade, DNA was discovered. But DNA never was found to be anything like some blueprint or recipe or code-script for making a human being. 

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a blueprint as "a complete plan that explains how to do or develop something." DNA merely contains very low-level chemical information such as lists of the amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies. Nowhere in DNA is there any of the following:

1. a specification of the large-scale structure of the human body;
2. a specification of the structure of any of the appendages of the human body such as legs or arms or heads;
3. a specification of any organ system of the human body;
4. a specification of any individual organ of the human body;
5. a specification of any of the 200 types of cells in the human body;
6. a specification of any of the organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

There are several different reasons why we know that DNA has no such things. The first reason is that human DNA has been very thoroughly analyzed through multi-year scientific projects involving very large teams of scientists, such as the Human Genome Project and the ENCODE project, and no such specifications have been found in DNA. For example, no one has found any place in DNA where it specifies that humans have two legs or two arms or one neck or two eyes or two ears or ten fingers. The second reason is that only one type of “language” has ever been found used by DNA, the very low-level “poor-man's language” of the genetic code, allowing nothing to be stated other than low-level chemical information such as the amino acids in proteins. Using this “poor-man's language” capable of only stating amino acids or other equally low-level chemical information, it is absolutely impossible to state things such as a complex three-dimensional structure or the anatomy of the eye or the anatomy of the human reproductive system.

DNA only specifies low-level chemical information

The third reason is that if a human DNA molecule were to contain a specification of a human, should a thing would be a fantastically complex instruction that could only be read and interpreted by something in the human womb capable of reading fantastically complex instructions. But nothing like that exists in the human womb. Blueprints are only useful because they are read by human agents smart enough to execute the complex instructions of the blueprints. If a blueprint existed in DNA, it would be something far more complicated than a blueprint for making a home. Such a thing would require some gigantically sophisticated “DNA blueprint reader” capable of reading and executing enormously complicated instructions. But no such thing exists in the human womb. We therefore absolutely cannot explain how a human progresses from a fertilized ovum to a newly delivered baby by imagining that a DNA blueprint or recipe has been read and followed.

Such facts prove in multiple ways that DNA cannot possibly be a blueprint or a program or a recipe for making a human. DNA actually contains less than 10 percent of what is needed to specify a human. A molecule containing all of the information needed to specify a human being would be more than 10 times larger than a human DNA molecule. What we know about the size of the genomes of different organisms is entirely inconsistent with claims that DNA is some kind of blueprint or recipe for making a human. In terms of total number of base pairs, the DNA of humans is more than ten times smaller than the DNA of many amphibians and flowering plants, as you can see in the visual here. We would expect the opposite to be true if DNA contained a blueprint for making a human.

But for decades, mainstream academia has deceived us about DNA, pushing the phony-baloney idea that DNA is some kind of blueprint or recipe or algorithm or program for making a human. I call this falsehood the Great DNA Myth. 

An example of a Darwinist biologist shamelessly telling this gigantic lie is the utterly deceptive statement made below by French biologist Francois Jacob on page 313 in his 1970 book "The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity":

"The formation of a man from an egg is a marvel of exactitude and precision. How can millions of cells emerge, in specialized lineages, in perfect order in time and space, from a single cell? This baffles the imagination. During embryonic development, the instructions contained in the chromosomes of the egg are gradually translated and executed, determining when and where the thousands of molecular species that constitute the body of an adult are to be formed. The whole plan of growth, the whole series of operations to be carried out, the order and the site of syntheses and their coordination are all written down in the nucleic-acid message." 

This was all a huge fiction, written decades before the Human Genome Project had even started to analyze the contents of DNA. Jacob's ideological motivation in telling this lie is made rather clear by the quotation he gives at the very beginning of this book, where he quotes Diderot as saying this:

"Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth." 

The false claim that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for making a human was denounced by Ken Richardson, formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University. In an article in the mainstream Nautilus science site, Richardson stated the following:

"Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story."

But the Great DNA Myth (that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for making a human) continues to be pushed by many, including the journal Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In September, 2019 the publication had a “special issue” entitled “Genotype to Phentotype.” The issue was designed to give us the idea that genotypes specify phenotypes, an idea that is dead wrong. The phenotype (or visually observable characteristics of an organism) is not specified by an organism's genotype (its DNA). DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level structural information.

On page 1395 we are told a huge untruth by Zahn, Purnell and Ash, who stated, “The DNA within a human cell, known as the genotype, provides a blueprint to direct a host of processes for building an embodied organism.” Here we have the two biggest fables about DNA, the myth that it is a blueprint, and the myth that the passive chemical information repository that is DNA “directs” things, as if it were almost some intelligent agent. The fallacy of using words such as “directs” about DNA is debunked by biologist Richardson in his Nautilus article, and he also debunks the “DNA as blueprint” myth by stating, “there is no prior plan or blueprint for development.” 

Introducing some of the papers in the “special issue,” Zahn, Purnell and Ash state, “We examine cases in which various cells and traits are specified by DNA mutations or epigenetic changes.” But humans have 200 different types of cells, and DNA does not contain a specification of any one of them. The “special issue” has a paper with the misleading title, “Mapping human-cell phenotypes to genotypes with single-cell genomics.” But the paper does not at all describe how any cell phenotypes or structures are specified in DNA genotypes. It merely mentions some cases in which rare DNA mutations can affect a cell to produce a disease.  The paper has a visual which attempts to illustrate the idea of some mapping between genes and cell types, but it's just a speculative "something like this could exist" type of thing; and instead of listing specific genes, the genes listed in the mapping are listed as "Gene 1", "Gene 2", "Gene 3," "Gene 4," and "Gene 5." Such speculative illustrations do not constitute any case of showing that a cell type is specified by DNA or genes. 

At a biology "expert answers" site, we read an expert answer telling us that "DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell," and also that DNA does not even specify how to make the mere membrane of a cell. DNA does not specify any type of cell, and does not even fully specify the things that are smaller than cells. Cells are built from smaller units called organelles, and even their structures are not specified by DNA. When we look at the lowest level of chemical structure, and look at proteins, we find that even those are not fully specified by DNA. DNA specifies the amino acid sequence of proteins, but not their three dimensional shapes.  The mystery of how proteins acquire such three-dimensional shapes is the unsolved problem of protein folding, which scientists have not solved despite decades of laborious efforts. Claims that the three-dimensional shapes of proteins are simply consequences of their amino acids sequences (listed in DNA) are disproved by the failure of ab initio methods to reliably predict the shapes of proteins from their amino acid sequences, and also by the dependency of a large fraction of protein molecules on other molecules (so-called chaperone molecules) in order to achieve their three-dimensional shapes.  A scientific paper about such ab initio protein structure prediction (which uses only the amino acid sequence) tells us, "Currently, the accuracy of ab initio modeling is low and the success is generally limited to small proteins." 

The Genotype to Phenotype “special issue” also very strangely includes a paper entitled “Microbiomes as source of emergent host phenotypes.” Talk about grasping at straws. Your microbiome is the set of all microbes living inside you, or the total DNA of all the microbes living inside you. You will not solve the problem that DNA does not contain a blueprint or recipe for making a human by trying to look for instructions for making a human inside the DNA of microbes living inside a human. The DNA of such microbes suffers from exactly the same limitations of human DNA, limitations which prevent it from being anything like a blueprint or a recipe for building large three-dimensional structures.

None of the papers in the Genotype to Phenotype “special issue” provide anything that should prevent us from thinking that Zahn, Purnell and Ash were feeding us baloney when they stated, “The DNA within a human cell, known as the genotype, provides a blueprint to direct a host of processes for building an embodied organism.” There is zero evidence that DNA is a blueprint for making a human, and we know of several reasons why it cannot be any such thing.  Given its physical limitations limiting it to listing low-level chemical ingredients, it is utterly impossible that DNA could do any such thing as directing or specifying even a single process, let alone "a host of processes."  The biochemical processes inside organisms are gigantically complex, far too complex to be specified or directed by the kind of minimalist "bare bones" poor-man's language that is the genetic code used by DNA,  capable of listing only sequences of low-level chemicals.  Below we see a description of one of these gigantically complex processes, from a biochemistry textbook. 

Immensely complicated biochemistry of vision

On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false." The same expert (in a paper claiming massive misuse by others of the term "heritability") states, "Our DNA, we now know, does not contain specific blueprint-like instructions about traits." Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading." Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."

In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following:

"It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master."

Debunking the idea of DNA as a program consisting of algorithms, biologist Denis Noble states the following:

"No complete algorithms can be found in the DNA sequences. What we find is better characterised as a mixture of templates and switches. The ‘templates’ are the triplet sequences that specify the amino acid sequences or the RNA sequences."

In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."  Scientist Jean Krivine presents here a very elaborate visual presentation with the title, "Epigenetics, Aging and Symmetry or why DNA is not a program." Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper:

"DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone. Rather, DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."

Rejecting the "DNA as blueprint" and "DNA as human specification" ideas, biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written the following:

"DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth. There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."

Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.  A press account of the thought of geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys states, "DNA is not a blueprint, he says."  B.N. Queenan (the Executive Director of Research at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University) tells us this:

"DNA is not a blueprint. A blueprint faithfully maps out each part of an envisioned structure. Unlike a battleship or a building, our bodies and minds are not static structures constructed to specification."

"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, who adds, "It doesn't encode some specific outcome." "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says. "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times." Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."

Ian Stevenson M.D. cited quite a few biologists pointing out the genes and DNA cannot determine the form of an organism:

"Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are. Biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."

Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism." A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."

Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 

In their book "The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma" (page 148)  biologists  Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart state, "DNA provides no instruction on where to place the proteins in the cell. There is no genetic information for large-scale cellular organization."

Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

"The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full sequence of genes would reveal the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of life. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover that precisely the reverse is the case. Contrary to all expectations, there is a near equivalence of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was no less disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of both the mouse and our primate cousins...There is in short nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly has six legs, a pair of wings and a dot-sized brain and that we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of comprehending the history of our universe."

The false claim that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for making a human was denounced by Ken Richardson, formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University. In an article in the mainstream Nautilus science site, Richardson stated the following:

"Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story."

Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structure an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewontin (1982) and Oyama (1985)." 

As biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."At the Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this expert's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism," states Templeton Prize-winning physicist and astrobiologist P. C. W. Davies. A 2024 article says, "Martínez Arias, 68, argues that the DNA sequence of an individual is not an instruction manual or a construction plan for their body...The Madrid-born biologist argues that there is nothing in the DNA molecule that explains why the heart is located on the left, why there are five fingers on the hand or why twin brothers have different fingerprints."

Two scientists said this:

"We see no valid use for definitions of the genotype and phenotype in terms of blueprints, programs, or

sets of instructions, and their realizations or

manifestation....The program/manifestation metaphor is factually misleading, because it suggests that the genotype uniquely determines an organism’s phenotype. However, as is well known, all

it does is specify an organism’s norm of reaction to environmental conditions (Rieger et al., 1991, Lewontin, 1992)."

A Duke University biologist and a Cornell University biologist have confessed this: " No information about the overall architecture of these body parts is present in the cells and tissues of the parts themselves, or in each organism’s genes."  

When we ponder the vastly dynamic nature of the human organism, we may more fully understand the absurdity of trying to explain human morphogenesis by pushing a myth of "the DNA blueprint is read." Blueprints are used to create static things such as buildings.  But a human organism is gigantically dynamic, with a vast horde of diverse cellular activities occuring in most of our flesh.  Each cell is as complex as a factory, and to specify a human (with 200 cell types) you would need (among other things) not merely to specify the structure of each of those 200 cell types, but an intricate description of the activity and processes within those cells.  Such a specification would be as complex as one that not only specified the physical layout of 200 factories, but also one that specified the dynamics of the manufacturing processes and material movements inside such 200 factories. We can think of all too many reasons why such vast complexities could never be specified by a molecule merely listing low-level chemical ingredients.  

Some concede that DNA is not a blueprint, but then say that DNA is a recipe. It is just as false and misleading to claim that DNA is a recipe as it is to say that DNA is a blueprint.  Let's start with the definition of "recipe." The Cambridge English Dictionary defines "recipe"  as "a set of instructions telling you how to prepare and cook a particular food, including a list of what foods are needed for this," giving no other definition. DNA does not tell us how to prepare and cook a food, so it is absurd to be calling DNA a recipe. 

A recipe is not a mere list of ingredients, but a set of assembly instructions on how to make some edible food using those ingredients -- instructions such as "mix for 2 minutes on medium speed of mixer," "chop up almonds and pour them into mixing bowl," "pour mixture into a cake cooking pan," and "bake for 35 minutes at 375 degrees." DNA specifies chemical ingredients, but does not specify any steps or algorithm for using such ingredients to assemble complex things such as cells or organs or reproductive systems or organisms. So it is false to say that DNA is a recipe, unless you merely say that DNA is a recipe for making the low-level chemical units called polypeptide chains.  Because it contains no high-level assembly instructions, DNA is neither a recipe nor a program for making a human, any organ system of a human, any organ of a human, any appendage of a human, or any cell type of a human. 

The Great DNA Myth that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for building organisms is not some careless error comparable to someone clumsily saying that there are only 7 planets in the solar system. The claim that DNA is a blueprint or recipe for building organisms is a falsehood typically told by certain people who need to tell this particular falsehood to defend unbelievable claims they wish to defend.   I will leave for another post a discussion of the ideological motivations for this misinformation that has been peddled for decades by esteemed authorities in academia.  

Postscript: The term "body plan" is a profoundly misleading term that biologists love to use, a term that opens the door to deceptions about DNA. In biology literature the term "body plan" has a very limited meaning, something vastly different from a complete plan for constructing an organism. According to a scientific paper "a body plan is a suite of characters shared by a group of phylogenetically related animals at some point during their development." The wikipedia.org article on "body plan" tells us this: "A body plan, Bauplan (German plural Baupläne), or ground plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of animals." 

According to this definition, all chordates (including men, bears, dogs and fish) have the same body plan. So when biologists talk about "the human body plan" they

are merely referring to the common characteristics of all chordates, including men, bears, dogs and fish:  basically just the existence of a backbone and bilateral symmetry (having the same things on both sides of the body).  They are not referring to the structure of the 200 types of cells in the human body, or the structure of internal organs, and are not referring to the dynamic intricacies of human physiology. But anyone hearing the term "body plan" will think the term referred to a complete specification of a human body.  So, most misleadingly, biologists may say that this or that "determines the body plan," when all they mean is the beginning of a bilateral organism with a backbone, something a thousand times simpler than the final product of the internally dynamic and enormously organized human body.  This is as misleading as someone saying that he has built a starship, when he has merely built a boat in the shape of a star. 

Near-Death Experiences Suggest the “Brain as Mainly a Valve” Idea

A near-death experience is when someone reports astonishing and mysterious hard-to-explain events occurring at a moment of physical danger, typically one in which he or she came close to death. A recent study on near-death experiences indicates that such experiences occur to a significant fraction of the population. The study by Kondziella, Dreier and Olsen used an online “crowdsourcing” platform called Prolific Academy. People from all over the world register with this online site, and are paid small sums to participate in research studies. Using the platform, Kondziella, Dreier and Olsen were able to question 1034 random subjects from 35 countries.

Previous studies had indicated that between 4% to 8% of the population have had near-death experiences. But the Kondziella, Dreier and Olsen study found that 289 out of 1034 subjects claimed to have had something like a near-death experience. The scientists applied something called the Greyson scale to quantify the strength of the reported experiences. 106 of the participants reported experiences that were scored 7 or higher on the Greyson scale, which is generally regarded as the cutoff level for a “full-blown” or “classic” near-death experience. So about 10% of the subjects reported a “full-blown” or “classic” near-death experience, and some 28% reported some type of near-death experience.

This is an astonishingly high number when we consider that the great majority of people never have any close brushes with death. A reasonable guess about what percentage of people have had a close brush with death would be something like 10% or 15%. So if you get 10% of about 1000 subjects reporting a full-blown near-death experience, that may suggest that most people who have close brushes with death have a full-blown near-death experience.

Making a questionable use of the word “symptoms,” the authors report the following: “The most often reported symptoms were abnormal time perception (faster or slower than normal; reported by 252 participants; 87%); exceptional speed of thoughts (n=189; 65%); exceptional vivid senses (n=182; 63%); and feeling separated from one’s body, including out-of-body experiences (n =152; 53%).” These are extraordinarily high numbers, involving about 20% of the random sample of 1034 subjects. These numbers suggest that the actual level of near-death experiences may be as high as about 20% of the population. There seems to be no obvious reason why we should not say that anyone who reports either “exceptional speed of thoughts” or “exceptional vivid senses” or “feeling separated from one's body” (during a health emergency or close brush with death) as a person who has had a near-death experience.

We should ponder the extraordinary significance of such numbers. Our neuroscientists dogmatically maintain that the brain is the sole source of our thoughts and mind. Yet judging from the numbers above, a full 15% of the population have had experiences in which their mind was separated from their body. Such a result is entirely incompatible with the “brain makes your mind” dogma, and strongly suggest that your mind and consciousness do not at all come from your brain, and can exist apart from your brain. When we get into the specific accounts given by near-death experiences, we often find those who have such experiences claim to have observed their bodies from above their bodies, just as if their soul was floating above their bodies. Why do our neuroscientists ignore such massively occurring observational reports, which argue so strongly that the dogmas neuroscientists are teaching are dead wrong?

An interesting idea is that your mind is something that comes from some external metaphysical reality beyond the human body, and that far from being the source of your mind, the brain is mainly a kind of valve that restricts your mind. It may be that each of us has a mind that is something far beyond what we experience in day-to-day living, and that the only reason we seem to have minds so limited is that our brains limit our minds. We can imagine a reason why there might need to be such a valve effect or limiting effect. So we can concentrate on all the measly little challenges of day-to-living (such as staying warm, getting enough food, and avoiding various types of physical harm), it might be necessary for consciousness to be reduced and restricted, so that we can focus our thoughts on the crummy little details of the here and now, rather than being absorbed in the grand thoughts of a philosopher.

A possible relation of the brain and mind

Under such a theory, what would we expect if a mind or soul somehow moves temporarily beyond the body, such as in the out-of-body experiences often reported during near-death experiences? We might expect that the mind or thinking might be enhanced, for in such a case the “valve” effect of the brain might no longer be limiting our minds. It is just such a thing that is often reported during near-death experiences. The study by Kondziella, Dreier and Olsen found that 65% of 252 people reporting near-death experiences reported “exceptional speed of thoughts.” There is no way to account for such a thing under a “brain makes the mind” theory. But if the brain is like a valve that restricts and limits the human mind, we might expect that people might report much faster thinking when their brains shut down because of a close brush with death.

What we know about the brain is consistent with the idea of a brain mainly being a kind of valve. No one has ever discovered any effect by which neurons can produce a thought or an idea or an understanding of something, and no one has any coherent explanation of how such things can be produced by neurons. But we do know of a variety of signal-slowing factors in the brain (things such as synaptic delay, neural noise, synaptic fatigue and what is called tortuosity) which should have a very strong cumulative signal slowing effect. 

The study by Kondziella, Dreier and Olsen was trying to establish some kind of association between near-death experiences and  something called “REM intrusion,” but it failed to convincingly find any causal link between the two. “REM intrusion” is a kind of “dream a bit while you're awake” effect that people can experience either when they're on the verge of falling asleep, or have just woken up but are sleepy. The study asked five questions designed to search for signs of “REM intrusion” in people. The questions were worded in such as to get the maximum number of people who could be claimed as people who experienced “REM intrusion.” People were asked “have you ever” questions such as “Just before falling asleep or just after awakening, have you ever seen things, objects or people that others cannot see?” or “Just before falling asleep or just after awakening, have you ever heard sounds, music or voices that other people cannot hear?” Asking such “have you ever” questions is not a reliable way to judge whether people experience “REM intrusion” to a significant degree, just as asking, “Have you ever felt an unexplained pain in your stomach?” is not a reliable to test for whether people have a stomach disease. A sound way to judge the degree of “REM intrusion” experienced by people would be to have a question like the following:

Just before falling asleep or just after awakening, how often have you seen things, objects or people that others cannot see?

Choice 1: Never.

Choice 2: Once or twice in my life

Choice 3: Three to ten times in my life

Choice 4: Between ten and twenty times in my life

Choice 5: More than twenty times in my life

Of the people who claimed to have a near-death experience, 34% answered “yes” to three of more of the five questions related to “REM intrusion.” Of the people who did not claim to have had a near-death experience, 14% answered “yes” to three of more of the five questions related to “REM intrusion.” There's a reason why such a difference does not actually establish that those reporting near-death experiences more often experience such “REM intrusion.” The reason is that those who reported a near-death experience may simply have a higher degree of candor and openness about reporting out-of-the-ordinary experiences. Once someone has reported one type of out-of-the-ordinary experience, there may be a kind of “breaking the ice” effect that may make him 20% or 30% or 40% more likely to report a second out-of-the-ordinary experience that he might have otherwise never discussed. Such a thing can easily account for the difference in the percentage of people who answered “yes” to three or more of the questions about “REM intrusion.” Since people don't report things like near-death experiences when they are on the boundary of normal sleep, "REM intrusion" makes no sense as an explanation for near-death experiences. 

A second crowdsourced study was done by Kondziella, Dreier, Lemale and Olsen, using the same online survey platform of Prolific Academy, but using a different group of subjects. The results were almost the same as in the first survey. The differences are shown below:

	Survey 1	Survey 2
Number of subjects	1034	1037
Number claiming a near-death experience	289	286
Number with a “full-blown” near-death experience (Greyson score >= 7)	106	81
Number reporting time moving slower or faster than normal	252	257
Number reporting extraordinary speed of thought	189	169
Number reporting exceptional vivid senses	182	165
Number reporting feeling separated from one's body, including out-of-body experiences	152	113

The second of these studies tries to draw a link between near-death experiences and “migraine aura” headaches, based on the claim that “Forty-eight (6.1%) of 783 subjects without migraine aura and 33 (13.0%) of 254 subjects with migraine aura had experienced” a near-death experience. Here the attempt at an explanation is even less convincing than in the previous survey, for we have a mere 13% of those reporting these “migraine aura” headaches reporting near-death experiences. X is not likely to be the cause of Y if only 13% of the people reporting Y also report X. Moreover, there has never been a tendency for people to report head pain during near-death experiences, making migraine headaches a particularly unlikely explanation. And people don't report they have near-death experiences after they merely had a bad headache.

The important takeaways from these two studies are:

1. A significant fraction of people report near-death experiences, with about 25% of people reporting such experiences, and about 8% or 10% of people reporting “full blown” near-death experiences with 7 or more of the classic characteristics of near-death experiences.
2. Most of those reporting near-death experiences report their mind operated exceptionally fast, with some 16% to 18% of the total population reporting such an effect. 
3. Most of those reporting near-death experiences report having had extraordinary experiences in which they were separated from their body, with some 10% to 15% of the total population reporting such an effect. 

So what we have is a massive empirical reality that is very much inconsistent with prevailing dogmas about the brain and mind, that the brain is the source of the mind. But such an empirical reality is consistent with the idea that your mind is not the product of your brain or body, and that your brain is like a valve that serves mainly to limit your mind, rather than something that gives rise to your mind.

Postscript:  At the link here we have a survey of survivors of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake which killed some 240,000 people.  81 survivors were interviewed, by talking to patients at a convalescent hospital, patients who had been admitted because of injuries suffered in the earthquake. 40 out of 81 reported "full blown" near-death experiences (7 or greater on the Greyson scale).  51% (41 out of 81) reported "thinking unusually fast," 28% (23 out of 81) reported "sudden understanding," 43% (35 out of 81) reported "an out-of-body experience," and 65% (53 out of 81) reported "unusually vivid thoughts." 

He Gets "Victorians and the Paranormal" All Wrong

The Victorian Era was the era when Queen Victoria was queen of the British, between 1837 and 1901. The second half of the nineteenth century was an astonishing period in which inexplicable events repeatedly occurred before a host of witnesses, which included ordinary people and countless distinguished experts. When those skeptical of the paranormal write about such events, they sometimes produce travesties of history that are full of gigantic omissions and glaring distortions. An example is an article by Karl Bell that appeared online on October 31. The article was entitled “Victorian scientists thought they’d found an explanation for ghosts – but the public didn’t want to hear it.”

Distorting the historical reality, Bell tries to create in the reader's mind two ideas:

1. That the Spiritualism movement (beginning in 1848) and the seances of the following decades were merely caused by people misidentifying furniture movements that occurred because of muscular movements when people put their hands on furniture such as tables.
2. That the scientist Michael Faraday debunked such things by showing an “ideomotor effect” by which people can unconsciously move furniture that they are touching.

The Spiritualist movement that began in 1848 did not originate in any accounts of furniture moving when people touched furniture. The movement began with reports in Hydesville, New York of an abundance of mysterious unexplained noises, including mysterious rappings, and many other loud unexplained noises. Many witnesses claimed that the noises responded in a seemingly intelligent manner to human speech, as if they were caused by some invisible power. A very full account can be found on pages 284 to 299 of Robert Dale Owen's fascinating 1860 book Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. You can read such an account here. Interestingly, on page 272 to page 283 of the same book we read about a similar case that occurred in 1850 in France, a case in which there were two solid months of inexplicable noises and inexplicable physical disturbances resembling poltergeist activity and an intelligent invisible force. Many witnesses attested to the phenomenon at a place that had not yet heard of the Hydesville incidents. Referring to this French phenomenon, Owen states on page 283, “It would be difficult to find a case more explicit or better authenticated than the foregoing.”

In the early 1850's many people engaged in what was called table turning. This involved a group of people placing their hands on a table. Very often the table would seem to make mysterious movements. The reported effects included the following:

1. a simple tilting or turning of the table when people put their fingers on top of it;
2. cases of a table rising up into the air when people put their fingers on top of it;
3. cases in which a table would rise up into the air or move when no one touched the table.

Because items (2) and (3) were widely reported, it is clear that Faraday did not at all explain the better cases of the reported phenomena. There is no amount of manual force with the fingers that can cause a table to rise up into the air when people place their fingers on top of it, even if they are intentionally trying to do such a thing. Nor can any theory of unconscious force explain cases of tables moving or rising when no one touched them.

The rituals called seances might involve table turning, but often involved many other types of seemingly paranormal activity. Reported events at seances included the mysterious levitation of furniture or chairs (sometimes when no one was touching them), the levitation of a human being, the arising of mysterious inexplicable noises, voices appearing from out of nowhere, musical instruments playing when no one touched them, the appearance of mysterious lights, curtains or other objects shaking or fluttering when no one was touching them, or objects seeming to appear from out of nowhere (what are called apports).

It is therefore a misleading distortion to suggest that the activity at seances was merely table turning. Clearly table turning was only a small fraction of the reported paranormal activity at seances.

This phenomenon of table turning (and related anomalous phenomena) were scientifically investigated by a distinguished scientist, Harvard chemistry professor emeritus Robert Hare. Hare started out completely believing in Faraday's idea that table turning was caused purely by muscular force. But his investigations led him to reject such an idea. In 1855 he published a long book reaching the conclusion that the phenomenon involved an inexplicable paranormal reality. For example, on page 46 he states, “I first saw a table continue in motion when every person had withdrawn to about the distance of a foot; so that no one touched it; and while thus agitated on our host saying, 'Move the table toward Dr. Hare,' it moved toward me and back again.” This is only one of countless paranormal incidents described in the book, which Hare mainly regarded as proof of some mysterious paranormal reality. He devised numerous scientific instruments to test paranormal effects, and frequently found them to give dramatic inexplicable results. 

This phenomenon of table turning was also scientifically investigated at length by Count Agenor de Gasparin, who published in 1857 a two-volume scientific book describing countless paranormal effects (such as table levitation and mysterious rappings) observed under controlled conditions. Gasparin's research is well-summarized in Chapter VI of the book Mysterious Psychic Forces by the astronomer Camille Flammarion.  For example, Gasparin described this happening on September 3, 1853:

“Some one proposed the experiment which consists in causing a table to rotate and give raps while it has on it a man weighing say a hundred and ninety pounds. We accordingly placed such a man on the table, and the twelve experimenters, in chain, applied their fingers to it. The success was complete: the table turned, and rapped several strokes. Then it rose up entirely off the floor in such a way as to upset the person who was upon it.”

Such a result is inexplicable through any result of subconscious muscle movement. Gasparin reported the following occuring on October 7, 1853:

“Let us turn again to the finest of all demonstrations, that of levitation without contact. We began by performing it three times. Then, since it was thought by some that the inspection of the witnesses could be carried on in a surer way in the case of a small table than in that of a large one, and with five operators more certainly than with ten, we had a plain deal centre-table brought which the chain, reduced by half, sufficed to put in rotation. Then the hands were lifted, and, contact with the table being entirely broken, it rose seven times into the air at our command.”

Since this was a report of levitation of a table without contact, it obviously cannot be explained through Faraday's “ideomotor effect” of subconscious muscle movement. Shockingly, the phenomenon of table turning had stood up well to rigorous scientific experiments, with the investigators finding it to be a mysterious paranormal reality rather than something they could debunk.

Something similar was reported in 1855 by Eliab Wilkinson Capron, who reported that a “table moved on the floor with nobody touching it – moved to the distance of a foot or more and back, in various directions.” In 1869 the London Dialectical Society (a rationalist organization) launched a major scientific investigation of phenomena such as table turning. It concluded that “movements of heavy bodies take place without mechanical contrivance of any kind or adequate exertion of muscular force by the persons present, and frequently without contact or connection with any person.” 

Excerpts of the report of the committee can be read here, and the entire report can be read here. Below are some quotes from the report (go to this link to see the place in the report from which I quote).

1. "Thirteen witnesses state that they have seen heavy bodies-in some instances men—rise slowly in the air and remain there for some time without visible or tangible support.
2. Fourteen witnesses testify to having seen hands or figures, not appertaining to any human being, but life-like in appearance and mobility, which they have sometimes touched or even grasped, and which they are therefore convinced were not the result of imposture or illusion.
3. Five witnesses state that they have been touched, by some invisible agency, on various parts of the body, and often where requested, when the hands of all present were visible.
4. Thirteen witnesses declare that they have heard musical pieces well played upon instruments not manipulated by an ascertainable agency.
5. Five witnesses state that they have seen red-hot coals applied to the hands or heads of several persons without producing pain or scorching; and three witnesses state that they have had the same experiment made upon themselves with the like immunity.
6. Eight witnesses state that they have received precise information through rappings, writings, and in other ways, the accuracy of which was unknown at the time to themselves or to any persons present, and which, on subsequent inquiry was found to be correct.
7. One witness declares that he has received a precise and detailed statement which, nevertheless, proved to be entirely erroneous.
8. Three witnesses state that they have been present when drawings, both in pencil and colours, were produced in so short a time, and under such conditions as to render human agency impossible.
9. Six witnesses declare that they have received information of future events and that in some cases the hour and minute of their occurrence have been accurately foretold, days and even weeks before."

Flammarion states that the committee included "physicists, chemists, astronomers and naturalists, several of them members of the London Royal Society."  At this place in the report, the committee made the following general conclusions:

"These reports, hereto subjoined, substantially corroborate each other, and would appear to establish the following propositions:—

1. That sounds of a varied character, apparently proceeding from articles of furniture, the floor and walls of the room (the vibrations accompanying which sounds are often distinctly perceptible to the touch) occur, without [Pg 292]being produced by muscular action or mechanical contrivance.

2. That movements of heavy bodies take place without mechanical contrivance of any kind or adequate exertion of muscular force by the persons present, and frequently without contact or connection with any person.

3. That these sounds and movements often occur at the times and in the manner asked for by persons present, and, by means of a simple code of signals, answer questions and spell out coherent communications.

4. That the answers and communications thus obtained are, for the most part, of a commonplace character; but facts are sometimes correctly given which are only known to one of the persons present."

Perhaps the most famous scientific investigations into the paranormal in the Victorian Era were the investigations of the eminent scientist William Crookes. Bell conveniently ignores making any mention of Crookes, and it is easy to figure out why. The case is one that is entirely inconsistent with what Bell tries to insinuate.

Crookes was the co-discover of the element thallium, and the inventor of the Crookes tube, a kind of vacuum tube that was the earliest ancestor of all television sets and computer monitors. Crookes made two important investigations into the paranormal. The first was to investigate the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Many distinguished observers had reported the most astonishing paranormal phenomena in the presence of Home, such as levitations of furniture and levitations of Home himself. Home passed Crookes' scientific tests with flying colors. Crookes reported that when Home merely touched the top of an accordion that Crookes had recently bought, while the accordion was inside a cage, the musical instrument played by itself; and that when Home removed his hand entirely, so no one was touching the instrument, it also played by itself. "The instrument then continued to play, no person touching it, and no hand being near it," Crookes reported (Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, page 13). 

 On page 10 Crookes writes the following:

"Among the remarkable phenomena which occur under Mr. Home's influence, the most striking, as well as the most easily tested with scientific accuracy, are –(1) the alteration in the weight of bodies, and (2) the playing of tunes upon musical instruments (generally an accordion, for purposes of portability) without direct human intervention, under conditions rendering contact or connection with the keys impossible. Not until I had witnessed these facts some half-dozen times, and scrutinised them with all the critical acumen that I possess, did I become convinced of their objective reality."

Crookes also investigated the medium Florence Cook. He reported the most astonishing phenomenon: that a ghostly “full form materialization” would repeatedly appear next to the body of Florence Cook. This could not have been Florence in disguise, for Crookes reported seeing both at the same time. A fuller discussion of Crookes'  account of these investigations (with quotations of his exact statements) can be found here.

Besides not saying a word about Crookes, and not saying a word about the investigation of the London Dialectical Society, Bell fails to say a word about perhaps the other most famous case of the Victorian era, the case of Leonora Piper. Unlike mediums such as Home and Cook, Piper was what is called a mental medium. Except for one time, she produced no anomalous physical phenomena. But upon going into a trance, Piper seemed to speak under the control of some external spirit. Very many times, in such trances Piper would seem to know things that were impossible for her to know, such as intimate details of the lives of the people in the same room.

For eighteen months, Piper was investigated by William James, a psychologist so eminent that he is sometimes called “the father of American psychology.” On page 268 of this link, in the article on Piper, we read that in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, James concluded the following: “And I repeat again what I said before, that, taking everything that I know of Mrs. Piper into account, the result is to make me feel as absolutely certain as I am of any personal fact in the world that she knows things in her trances which she cannot possibly have heard in her waking state, and that the definite philosophy of her trances is yet to be found.’’ An arch-skeptic (Richard Hodgson) was brought in to investigate, and even resorted to hiring private investigators to search for evidence of fraud. None was found, and Hodgson ended up avowing to the authenticity of Piper.

Bell also completely fails to mention the Society's work documenting reports of apparitions seen by credible witnesses. The culmination of that work was a 1000-page two-volume work by three members of the Society (psychologist Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore), entitled Phantasms of the Living, which can be read online here and here. 

The very careful scholarly work Phantasms of the Living provided many hundreds of well-documented cases of people seeing apparitions or ghosts. You can read summaries of many of the accounts here and here and here and here  and here and here. A type of case very commonly reported was when someone would unexpectedly see an apparition of someone he did not know was dead, only to find out later that such a person had recently died. Very many such accounts can be read using the links I just gave.

Far from providing some natural explanation for ghosts, the massive scholarly work Phantasms of the Living failed to do any such thing, and made it look more likely than ever that there is no natural explanation for ghosts and apparitions. Again and again, the accounts in the book were just the type of thing we would expect if a human soul survives death and leaves the body after death.

What do we hear about Leonora Piper in Bell's account? Not a word, nor does he mention the equally dramatic Victorian case of Eusapia Palladino. What do we hear about Phantasms of the Living in Bell's account? Not a word. He mentions the physicist William Barrett, failing to tell us that Barrett authored the book Deathbed Visions giving many accounts of people seeing apparitions, without  offering any natural explanation for such sightings. Under a misleading heading “Debunking the bump in the night,” Bell merely says the following, trying to make it sound as if the Society for Psychical Research had somehow debunked the paranormal:

“Various subcommittees investigated hypnotism, telepathy, seances and hauntings). Their work helped expose frauds and they were careful to apply scientific controls to their investigations.”

Not one word is mentioned by Bell about all the evidence for the paranormal gathered by the Society for Psychical Research. Bell ends by approvingly quoting some person in 1882 who made the stupid statement that scientists must engage in “careful abstention from dangerous trains of thought,” which sounds like something we would hear not from a scientist but from a dogmatic religionist. 

The title of Bell's article is very misleading. His title claims “Victorian scientists thought they'd found an explanation for ghosts,” but he mentions only one such scientist (who did not actually claim to have an explanation for ghosts, but only for turning tables). A more accurate title to describe a full discussion of Victorian scientists and the paranormal would be “Victorian scientists found good evidence for the paranormal all over the place.”

The Seven Sins of “Memory Engram” Experiments

There are some very good reasons for thinking that long-term memories cannot be stored in brains, which include:

• the impossibility of credibly explaining how the instantaneous recall of some obscure and rarely accessed piece of information could occur as a neural effect, in a brain that is without any indexing system and subject to a variety of severe signal slowing effects;
  
• the impossibility of explaining how reliable accurate recall could occur in a brain subject to many types of severe noise effects;
• the short lifetimes of proteins in synapses, the place where scientists most often claim our memories are stored;
• the lack of any credible theory explaining how memories could be translated into neural states;
• the complete failure to ever find any brain cells containing any encoded information in neurons or synapses other than the genetic information in DNA;
• the lack of any known read or write mechanism in a brain.

But scientists occasionally produce research papers trying to persuade us that memories are stored in a brain, in cells that are called "engram cells." In this post, I will discuss why such papers are not good examples of experimental science, and do not provide any real evidence that a memory was stored in a brain. I will discuss seven problems that we often see in such science papers. The "sins" I refer to are merely methodological sins rather than moral sins. 

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

Scientists never have a good basis for believing that a particular memory is stored in some exact tiny spot of the brain. But a memory experiment will often involve some assumption that a memory is stored in one exact spot of the brain (such as some exact spot of a cubic millimeter in width). For example, an experimental study may reach some conclusion (based on inadequate evidence) about a memory being stored in some exact tiny spot of the brain, and then attempt to reactivate that memory by electrically or optogenetically stimulating that exact tiny spot.

The type of reasoning that is used to justify such a “shot in the dark” assumption is invariably dubious. For example, an experiment may observe parts of a brain of an animal that is acquiring some memory, and look for some area that is “preferentially activated.” But such a technique is as unreliable as reading tea leaves. When brains are examined during learning activities, brain regions (outside of the visual cortex) do not actually show more than a half of 1% signal variation. There is never any strong signal allowing anyone to be able to say with even a 25% likelihood that some exact tiny part of the brain is where a memory is stored. If a scientist picks some tiny spot of the brain based on “preferential activation” criteria, it is very likely that he has not picked the correct location of a memory, even under the assumption that memories are stored in brains. Series of brains scans do not show that some particular tiny spot of the brain tends to repeatedly activate to a greater degree when some particular memory is recalled. 

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

Randomization and blinding techniques are a very important scientific technique for avoiding experimenter bias. For example, what is called the “gold standard” in experimental drug studies is a type of study called a double-blind, randomized experiment. In such a study, both the doctors or scientific staff handing out pills and the subjects taking the pills do not know whether the pills are the medicine being tested or a placebo with no effect.

If similar randomization and blinding techniques are not used in a memory experiment, there will be a high chance of experimenter bias. For example, let's suppose a scientist looks for memory behavior effects in two groups of animals, the first being a control group having no stimulus designed to affect memory, and the second group having a stimulus designed to affect memory. If the scientist knows which group is which when analyzing the behavior of the animals, he will be more likely to judge the animal's behavior in a biased way, so that the desired result is recorded.

A memory experiment can be very carefully designed to achieve this blind randomization ideal that minimizes the chance of experimenter bias. But such a thing is usually not done in memory experiments purporting to show evidence of a brain storage of memories. Scientists working for drug trials are very good about carefully designing experiments to meet the ideal of blind randomization, because they know the FDA will review their work very carefully, rejecting the drug for approval if the best experimental techniques were not used. But neuroscientists have no such incentive for experimental rigor.

Even in studies where some mention is made of a blinding protocol, there is very rarely any discussion of how an effective protocol was achieved. When dealing with small groups of animals, it is all too easy for a blinding protocol to be ineffective and worthless. For example, let us suppose there is one group of 10 mice that have something done to their brains, and some other control group that has no such done thing. Both may be subjected to a stimulus, and their “freezing behavior” may be judged. The scientists judging such a thing may be supposedly “blind” to which experimental group is being tested. But if a scientist is able to recognize any physical characteristic of one of the mice, he may actually know which group the mouse belongs to. So it is very easy for a supposed blinding protocol to be ineffective and worthless. What is needed to have confidence in such studies is not a mere mention of a blinding protocol, but a detailed discussion of exactly how an effective blinding protocol was achieved. We almost never get such a thing in memory experiments. The minority of them that refer to a blinding protocol almost never discuss in detail how an effective blinding protocol was achieved, one that really prevented scientists from knowing something that might have biased their judgments. 

For an experiment that judges "freezing behavior" in rodents, an effective blinding protocol would be one in which such freezing was judged by a person who never previously saw the rodents being tested. Such a protocol would guarantee that there would be no recognition of whether the animals were in an experimental group or a control group. But in "memory engram" papers we never read that such a thing was done.  To achieve an effective blinding protocol, it is not enough to use automated software for judging freezing, for such software can achieve biased results if it is run by an experimenter who knows whether or not an animal was in a control group. 

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

Under ideal practice, as part of designing an experiment a scientist is supposed to perform what is called a sample size calculation. This is a calculation that is supposed to show how many subjects to use per study group to provide adequate evidence for the hypothesis being tested. Sample size calculations are included in rigorous experiments such as experimental drug trials.

The PLOS paper here reported that only one of the 410 memory-related neuroscience papers it studied had such a calculation. The PLOS paper reported that in order to achieve a moderately convincing statistical power of .80, an experiment typically needs to have 15 animals per group; but only 12% of the experiments had that many animals per group. Referring to statistical power (a measure of how likely a result is to be real and not a false alarm), the PLOS paper states, “no correlation was observed between textual descriptions of results and power.” In plain English, that means that there's a whole lot of BS flying around when scientists describe their memory experiments, and that countless cases of very weak evidence have been described by scientists as if they were strong evidence.

The paper above seems to suggest that 15 animals per study group is needed.  But In her post “Why Most Published Neuroscience Findings Are False,” Kelly Zalocusky PhD calculates (using Ioannidis’s data) that the median effect size of neuroscience studies is about .51. She then states the following, talking about statistical power:

"To get a power of 0.2, with an effect size of 0.51, the sample size needs to be 12 per group. This fits well with my intuition of sample sizes in (behavioral) neuroscience, and might actually be a little generous. To bump our power up to 0.5, we would need an n of 31 per group. A power of 0.8 would require 60 per group."

So the number of animals per study group for a moderately convincing result (one with a statistical power of .80) is more than 15 (according to one source), and something like 60, according to another source.  But the vast majority of "memory engram" papers do not even use 15 animals per study group.

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

Another measure of how robust a research finding is the statistical significance reported in the paper. Memory research papers often have marginal statistical significance close to .05.

Nowadays you can publish a science paper claiming a discovery if you are able to report a statistical significance of only .05. But it has been argued by 72 experts that such a standard is way too loose, and that things should be changed so that a discovery can only be claimed if a statistical significance of .005 is reached, which is a level ten times harder to achieve.

It should be noted that it is a big misconception that when you have a result with a statistical significance (or P-value) of .05, this means there is a probability of only .05 that the result was a false alarm and that the null hypothesis is true. This paper calls such an idea “the most pervasive and pernicious of the many misconceptions about the P value.” 

When memory-related scientific papers report unimpressive results having a statistical significance such as only .03, they often make it hard for people to see this unimpressive number. An example is the recent paper “Artificially Enhancing and Suppressing Hippocampus-Mediated Memories.”  Three of the four statistical significance levels reported were only .03, but this was not reported in the summary of the paper, and was buried in hard-to-find places in the text.

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

Papers claiming to find evidence of memory engrams are often guilty of using presumptuous language that presupposes what they are attempting to prove. For example,  the non-movement of a rodent in an experiment is referred to by the loaded term "freezing," which suggests an animal freezing in fear, even though we have no idea whether the non-movement actually corresponds to fear.  Also, some cell that is guessed to be a site of memory storage (because of some alleged "preferential activation" that is typically no more than a fraction of 1 percent) is referred to repeatedly in the papers as an "engram cell,"  which means a memory-storage cell, even though nothing has been done to establish that the cell actually stores a memory. 

We can imagine a psychology study using similar loaded language.  The study might make hidden camera observations of people waiting at a bus stop.  Whenever the people made unpleasant expressions, such expressions would be labeled in the study as "homicidal thoughts."  The people who had slightly more of these unpleasant expressions would be categorized as "murderers."   The study might say, "We identified two murderers at the bus stop from their increased display of homicidal expressions." Of course, such ridiculously loaded, presumptuous language has no place in a scientific paper.  It is almost as bad for "memory engram" papers to be referring so casually to "engram cells" and "freezing" when neither fear nor memory storage at a specific cell has been demonstrated.  We can only wonder whether the authors of such papers were thinking something like, "If we use the phrase engram cells as much as we can, maybe people will believe we found some evidence for engram cells." 

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

A large fraction of all "memory engram" papers hinge on judgments that some rodent engaged in increased "freezing behavior,"  perhaps while some imagined "engram cells" were electrically or optogenetically stimulated. A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing in rodents by stimulating a wide variety of regions. It says, "It is possible to induce freezing by activating a variety of brain areas and projections, including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012), lateral, basal and central amygdala (Ciocchi et al., 2010); Johansen et al., 2010; Gore et al., 2015a), periaqueductal gray (Tovote et al., 2016), motor and primary sensory cortices (Kass et al., 2013), prefrontal projections (Rajasethupathy et al., 2015) and retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014).” 

But we are not informed of such a reality in quite a few papers claiming to supply evidence for an engram. In such studies typically a rodent will be trained to fear some stimulus. Then some part of the rodent's brain will be stimulated when the stimulus is not present. If the rodent is nonmoving (described as "freezing") more often than a rodent whose brain is not being stimulated, this is hailed as evidence that the fearful memory is being recalled by stimulating some part of the brain.  But it is no such thing. For we have no idea whether the increased freezing or non-movement is being produced merely by the brain stimulation, without any fear memory, as so often occurs when different parts of the brain are stimulated.

If a scientist thinks that some tiny part of a brain stores a memory, there is an easy way to test whether there is something special about that part of the brain. The scientists could do the "stimulate cells and test fear" kind of test on multiple parts of the brain, only one of which was the area where the scientist thought the memory was stored. The results could then be compared, to see whether stimulating the imagined "engram cells" produced a higher level of freezing than stimulating other random cells in the brain. Such a test is rarely done. 

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

A crucial element of a typical "memory engram" science paper is a judgment of what degree of "freezing behavior" a rodent displayed.  The papers typically equate non-movement with fear coming from recall of a painful stimulus. This doesn't make much sense. Many times in my life I saw a house mouse that caused me or someone else to shreik, and I never once saw a mouse freeze. Instead, they seem invariably to flee rather than to freeze. So what sense does it make to assume that the degree of non-movement ("freezing") of a rodent should be interpreted as a measurement of fear?  Moreover, judgments of the degree of "freezing behavior" in mice are too subjective and unreliable. 

Fear causes a sudden increase in heart rate in rodents, so measuring a rodent's heart rate is a simple and reliable way of corroborating a manual judgment that a rodent has engaged in increased "freezing behavior." A scientific study showed that heart rates of rodents dramatically shoot up instantly from 500 beats per minute to 700 beats per minute when the rodent is subjected to the fear-inducing stimuli of an air puff or a platform shaking. But rodent heart rate measurements seem to be never used in "memory engram" experiments. Why are the researchers relying on unreliable judgments of "freezing behavior" rather than a far-more-reliable measurement of heart rate, when determining whether fear is produced by recall? In this sense, it's as if the researchers wanted to follow a technique that would give them the highest chance of getting their papers published, rather than using a technique that would give them the most reliable answer as to whether a mouse is feeling fear. 

Another crucial element of many "memory engram" science papers is analysis of brain scans.  But there are 1001 ways to analyze the data from a particular brain scan.  Such flexibility almost allows a researcher to find whatever "preferential activation" result he is hoping to find.  

Page 68 of this paper discusses how brain scan analysis involves all kinds of arbitrary steps:

"The time series of voxel changes may be motion-corrected, coregistered, transformed to match a prototypical brain, resampled, detrended, normalized, smoothed, trimmed (temporally or spatially)...Furthermore, each of these steps can be done in a number of ways, each with many free parameters that experimenters set, often arbitrarily....The wholebrain analysis is often the first step in defining a region of interest in which the analyses may include exploration of time courses, voxelwise correlations, classification using support vector machines or other machine learning methods, across-subject correlations, and so on. Any one of these analyses requires making crucial decisions that determine the soundness of the conclusions."

The problem is that there is no standard way of doing such things. Each study arbitrarily uses some particular technique, and it is usually true that the results would have been much different if some other brain scan analysis technique had been used. 

Examples of Such Shortcomings

Let us look at a recent paper that claimed evidence for memory engrams. The paper stated, “Several studies have identified engram cells for different memories in many brain regions including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012; Ohkawa et al., 2015; Roy et al., 2016), amygdala (Han et al., 2009; Redondo et al., 2014), retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014), and prefrontal cortex (Kitamura et al., 2017).” But the close examination below will show that none of these studies are robust evidence for memory engrams in the brain. 

Let's take a look at some of these studies. The Kitamura study claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the prefrontal cortex is the study “Engrams and circuits crucial for systems consolidation of a memory.”  In Figure 1 (containing multiple graphs), we learn that the number of animals used in different study groups or experimental activities were 10, 10, 8, 10, 10, 12, 8, and 8, for an average of 9.5. In Figure 3 (also containing multiple subgraphs), we have even smaller numbers. The numbers of animals mentioned in that figure are 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 10, 8, 5, 6, 5 and 5. None of these numbers are anything like what would be needed for a moderately convincing result, which would be a minimum of 15 animals per study group. So the study is very guilty of Sin #3. The study is also guilty of Sin #2, because no detailed description is given of an effective blinding protocol. The study is also guilty of Sin #4, because Figure 3 lists two statistical significance values of “< 0.05” which is the least impressive result you can get published nowadays. Studies reaching a statistical significance of less than 0.01 will always report such a result as “< 0.01” rather than “<0.05.”  The study is also guilty of Sin #7, because it relies on judgments of freezing behavior of rodents, which were not corroborated by something such as heart rate measurements. 

The Liu study claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the hippocampus of the brain is the study “Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall.” We see in Figure 3 that inadequate sample sizes were used. The number of animals listed in that figure (during different parts of the experiments) are 12, 12, 12, 5, and 6, for an average of 9.4. That is not anything like what would be needed for a moderately convincing result, which would be a minimum of 15 animals per study group. So the study is  guilty of Sin #3. The study is also guilty of Sin #7. The experiment relied crucially on judgments of fear produced by manual assessments of freezing behavior, which were not corroborated by any other technique such as heart-rate measurement. The study does not describe in detail any effective blinding protocol, so it is also guilty of Sin #2. The study is also guilty of Sin #6. The study involved stimulating certain cells in the brains of mice, with something called optogenetic stimulation. The authors have assumed that when mice freeze after stimulation, that this is a sign that they are recalling some fear memory stored in the part of the brain being stimulated. What the authors neglect to tell us is that stimulation of quite a few regions of a rodent brain will produce freezing behavior. So there is actually no reason for assuming that a fear memory is being recalled when the stimulation occurs. 

The Ohkawa study claimed to have “ identified engram cells” in the hippocampus of the brain is the study “Artificial Association of Pre-stored Information to Generate a Qualitatively New Memory.” In Figure 3 we learn that the animal study groups had a size of about 10 or 12, and in Figure 4 we learn that the animal study groups used were as small as 6 or 8 animals. So the study is guilty of Sin #3. Because the paper used a “zap their brains and look for freezing” approach, without discussing or testing alternate explanations for freezing behavior having nothing to do with memory, the Ohkawa study is also guilty of Sin #6. Judgment of fear is crucial to the experimental results, and it was done purely by judging "freezing behavior," without measurement of heart rate.  So the study is also guilty of Sin #7. This particular study has a few skimpy phrases which claims to have used a blinding protocol: “Freezing counting experiments were conducted double blind to experimental group.” But no detailed discussion is made of how an effective blinding protocol was achieved, so the study is also guilty of Sin #2.

The Roy study claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the hippocampus of the brain is the study "Memory retrieval by activating engram cells in mouse models of early Alzheimer’s disease."  Looking at Figure 1, we see that the study groups used sometimes consisted of only 3 or 4 animals, which is a joke from any kind of statistical power standpoint. Looking at Figure 3, we see the same type of problem. The text mentions study groups of only "3 mice per group," "4 mice per group," and "9 mice per group,"  and "10 mice per group."   So the study is guilty of Sin #3. Although a blinding protocol is mentioned in the skimpiest language,  no detailed discussion is made of how an effective blinding protocol was achieved, so the study is also guilty of Sin #2.  Some of the results reported have a statistical significance of only "<.05," so the study is guilty of Sin #4. 

The Han study (also available here) claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the amygdala is the study "Selective Erasure of a Fear Memory." In Figure 1 we see a larger-than average sample size was used for two groups (17 and 24), but that a way-too-small sample size of only 4 was used for the corresponding control group. You need a sufficiently high number of animals in all study groups, including the control group, for a reliable result.  The same figure tells us that in another experiment the number of animals in the study group were only 5 or 6, which is way too small. Figure 3 tells us that in other experiments only 8 or 9 mice were used, and Figure 4 tells us that in other experiments only 5 or 6 mice were used. So this paper is guilty of Sin #3. No mention is made in the paper of any blinding protocol, so this paper is guilty of Sin #2. Figure 4 refers to two results with a borderline statistical significance of only "< 0.05," so this paper is also guilty of Sin #4.  The paper relies heavily on judgments of fear in rodents, but these were uncorroborated judgments based on "freezing behavior," without any measure of heart rate to corroborate such judgments. So the paper is also guilty of Sin #7. 

The Redondo study claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the amygdala is the study "Bidirectional switch of the valence associated with a hippocampal contextual memory engram."  We see 5 or 6 results reported with a borderline statistical significance of only "< 0.05," so this paper is  guilty of Sin #4. No detailed description is given of how an effective blinding protocol was achieved, and only the skimpiest mention is made of blinding, so this paper is guilty of Sin #2.  The study used only "freezing behavior" to try to measure fear, without corroborating such a thing by measuring heart rates.  So the paper was guilty of Sin #7.  The study involved stimulating certain cells in the brains of mice, with something called optogenetic stimulation. The authors have assumed that when mice freeze after stimulation, that this is a sign that they are recalling some fear memory stored in the part the brain being stimulated. What the authors neglect to tell us is that stimulation of quite a few regions of a rodent brain will produce freezing behavior. So there is actually no reason for assuming that a fear memory is being recalled when the stimulation occurs.  So the study is also guilty of Sin #6. 

The Cowansage study claimed to have “identified engram cells” in the retrosplinial cortex of the brain is the study "Direct Reactivation of a Coherent Neocortical Memory of Context." Figure 2 tells us that only 12 mice were used for one experiment. Figure 4 tells us that only 3 and 5 animals were used for other experiments. So this paper is guilty of Sin #3. No detailed description is given of how an effective blinding protocol was achieved, and only the skimpiest mention is made of blinding, so this paper is guilty of Sin #2.    It's a paper using the same old "zap rodent brains and look for some freezing behavior" methodology, without explaining why such results can occur for reasons having nothing to do with memory recall. So the study is guilty of Sin #6. Some of the results reported have a statistical significance of only "<.05," so the study is guilty of Sin #4. 

So I have examined each of the papers that were claimed as evidence for memory traces or engrams in the brain. Serious problems have been found in every one of them.  Not a single one of the studies made a detailed description of how an effective blinding protocol was executed. All of the studies were guilty of Sin #7.  Not a single one of the studies makes a claim to have followed some standardized method of brain scan analysis. Whenever there are brain scans we can say that the experiments merely chose one of 101 possible ways to analyze brain scan data. Not a single one of the studies has corroborated "freezing behavior" judgments by measuring heart rates of rodents to determine whether the animals suddenly became afraid. But all of the studies had a depenency on either brain scanning, uncorroborated freezing behavior judgments, or both. The studies all used sample sizes far too low to get a reliable result (although one of them used a decent sample size to get part of its results). 

The papers I have discussed are full of problems, and do not provide robust evidence for any storage of memories in animal brains. There is no robust evidence that memories are stored in the brains of any animal, and no robust evidence that any such thing as an "engram cell" exists. 

The latest press report of a "memory wonder" produced by scientists is a claim that scientists implanted memories in the brains of songbirds. For example, The Scientist magazine has an article entitled, "Researchers Implant Memories in Zebra Finch Brains."  If you read the scientific paper in the journal Science, you will find that one of the crucial study groups used consisted of only seven birds, which is less that half of the fifteen animals per study group that is recommended for a moderately convincing result. The relevant scientific study is hidden behind a paywall of the journal Science.  But by reading the article in The Scientist, we can get enough information to have the strongest suspicion that the headline is an unjustified brag. 

Of course, the scientists didn't actually implant musical notes into the brains of birds.  Nothing of the sort could ever occur, because no one has the slightest idea of how learned or episodic information could ever be represented as neural states. The scientists merely gave little bursts of energy into the brains of some birds. The scientists claimed that the birds who got shorter bursts of energy tended to sing shorter songs. "When these finches grew up, they sang adult courtship songs that corresponded to the duration of light they’d received," the story tells us.  Of course, it would be not very improbable that such a mere "duration similarity" would occur by chance.  

It is very absurd to be describing such a mere "duration similarity" as a memory implant.  It was not at all true that the birds sung some melody that had been artifically implanted in their heads.  The scientists in question have produced zero evidence that memories can be artificially implanted in animals.  From an example like this, we get the impression that our science journalists will uncritically parrot any claim of success in brain experiments with memory, no matter how glaring are the shortcomings of the relevant study.