Straw-man seeks Brain, and vice versa: A new model of memory in spherical cows falling in vacuum

In the arena of Brain Learning (as opposed to kidney memories), the Paradigms are Shifting again! Fortunately we have fitted them with a tracker beacon so it is easy to find their new location.

"Dendritic Learning as a Paradigm Shift in Brain Learning"

It is immediately clear that Sardi et al.'s new Dendritic, non-synaptic paradigm of memory acquisition was inspired by the Codex Seraphinianus:



The paper is written in first person despite having six authors. The first-person "I" appears to be Prof. Ido Kanter, a reincarnation of Copernicus, who even remembers Copernicus' unrecorded thoughts.

It does not present any data, or any novel hypothesis... the paper is best understood as a paid advertisement for an earlier publication by the same group which did have a hypothesis and a lot of hand-wavy computer simulations, also some results from new types of experiment on vat-grown brains neuron-like cells onna plate, as the old-fashioned methods of neuroscience were not fit for the authors' purpose.

All becomes clear when we examine a press release for that earlier publication and discover that Prof. Kanter is a physicist. Stand back, neuroscientists! Here is a physicist, to explain how you have been neurosciencing wrong all these past seven decades!

"Physicists negate century-old assumption regarding neurons and brain activity"

The press release is a small masterpiece of dumbing-down, combined with imprecision, hubris, profound ignorance of the "century-old assumption" that the author intends to topple, and a grim determination to be not even wrong. By the second sentence, it has managed to overestimate the number of neurons by more than a factor of 10, which by the standards of physics is just experimental error:

Their number is approximately one Tera (trillion), similar to Tera-bits in midsize hard discs.

Towards the end it climbs to new heights of bafflegab:

The new results call for a re-examination of neuronal functionalities beyond the traditional framework and, in particular, for an examination into the origin of degenerative diseases. Neurons which are incapable of differentiating between "left" and "right"—similar to distortions in the entire human body—might be a starting point for discovering the origin of these diseases.

Neuroskeptic noted "the problem with dendritic learning as an exclusive mechanism of learning" (compared to the old pre-shift paradigm of post-synaptic modification learning)

...is that it leaves each neuron with only two or three ‘degrees’ of information capacity.
A neuron can have thousands of synapses and if they are all independent, that’s a lot of potential information storage. Whereas if plasticity is confined to the primary dendrites, this massively reduces the information capacity of each neuron.

[See also S. Clyde, two months ago]

From the Physicist perspective, this stark simplicity is Feature not Bug... an index of how Nature should work, if only a physicist had been in charge of the design. If Kanter were right, Evolution would have been negligent by missing the opportunity to store information ('memories") in the medium of synaptic changes...
Clear out your desk, Evolution, you are fired.

[H/t Leonid Schneider]

The bald spot is Nature's way of allowing more near-IR photons to penetrate my scalp and enhance mitochondrial function in neurons in my parietal lobes

Combine-Harvester Racing

Remember Michael Carroll? Of course you do. Here at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Combine-Harvester Racing Club, we are forever grateful for his many contributions to medical knowledge hilarity... the many mock-medical cargo-cult potions and tchotchkes he sold through five separate websites* (because just one scam is never enough)... so many contributions that it would be invidious to single out just one. Fortunately "Invidious" is my hiphop-DJ name and I have no qualms about singling out the Vielight 'Neuro' Cognition-Enhancing, Neuron-Regenerating Photonic Diadem:

The Neuro is the worlds first transcranial-intranasal combination light therapy helmet system. It is based on the science of photobiomodulation, the utilization of photonic energy to stimulate cellular function in neurons. It directs pulsed near infrared light (NIR) to the hubs of the default mode network [ video ] (DMN) of the brain using optimally engineered light emitting diodes (LED).

The Neuro Alpha and Neuro Gamma incorporate newer and improved transcranial LED diodes. The only difference between the two models is the pulse rate – The Neuro Alpha pulses at 10 Hz but the Neuro Gamma pulses at 40 Hz. The Gammas pulse rate is utilized for our Alzheimers Disease clinical trials and the Neuro Alphas pulse rate is ideal for general brain health, based on brainwave oscillations

Nostril Torch available separately:

Looks like I picked the wrong week to
quit illuminating my brain with a
fibre-optic torch up one nostril!

Throw in a pair of Valkee "Torch-in-the-Ear" earplug spotlights for temporal-lobe illumination, shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

Given the scale and range of Michael Carroll's commercial activities, it was inevitable that his various pairings of 'worthless snake-oil' and 'panaceal curative promises' would attract the attention of the FDA, whose lawyers have no problem with the phrases "Fraudulent Cancer Products" and "Illegally Sold Cancer Treatments". They reviewed three of his websites and found much to complain about... notably, the Reinwald / Ruggiero product Rerum (regularly featured at Riddled). They may or may not have been subsequently reminded of the two further websites comprising Carroll's operations.

We can only hope that the FDA are not limited to an annual quota of Cease-&-Desist orders to spread around the target-rich environment of the American Scammosphere.

In other news, we learn via Neuroskeptic that there is a whole literature on improving cerebral function by way of TILS (trans-cranial infrared laser stimulation), which is to say, LASER BEAMS TO THE FREAKIN' FOREHEAD; we squee with delight, and hasten to inform the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League!

[Explaining Voice] The rationale is that the cytochrome-C oxidase molecules within mitochrondrial membranes are the central engines of cellular respiration, juggling electrons for protons across the membrane, creating a proton gradient (this is the gradient, that drives the mills, that coin the standard currency of the cellular energy economy, in the form of ATP molecules). And they contain a couple of heme groups, so they absorb red / infrared photons. Therefore they pump protons more efficiently after light absorption. [/Explaining Voice]

So Evolution had the opportunity to use this photopigment property of cC-OX to evolve eyes that see in infrared. Where is my Infrared Vision?! We strapped Swearing Bob in the Riddled Evolvamat with a laser-beam irradiating his forehead, in the hope of opening a Third IR Eye by stimulating the full cC-OX potential, but the results were not optimal.

Also disappointing and sub-optimal: Failure of Evolution, after 3 billion years of multicellular evolution, to re-jig a form of cytochrome-C oxidase that works equally well within our less-illuminated interiors. Evolution, we are very disappointed in you. This is why we had to invent the transparent skull.


See those monkeys' increased cognitive performance!

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* Carroll now has a sixth scamshop, "The Real Truth Behind Cancer". The resemblance of its title to Ty Bollinger's longer-established "The Truth About Cancer" scammocopoeia is no doubt accidental, as is the implication that Bollinger is engaged in some kind of unreal, fake grift.

** There is (or was) a theory that cytochrome-C -- a smaller molecule, upstream from cC-OX in the Redox cascade, highly-conserved, also built around a couple of heme groups*** so also red-light-absorbing -- originally had an role in bacterial photosynthesis, before Evolution coopted it for respiration. Just offering this as a better rationale for TILS.

I know this stuff because of 1970s pop-science magazines, because OLD.

***A heme group is a transition-element ion, coordinated within a plate of biological graphene porphyrin ring, which is a good way of stashing away a spare electron until you need it, but it has other nice molecular properties besides. Which is probably why there are so many cytochrome heme-proteins involved in cell biochem. Also, Evolution is lazy and has a bad work ethic. Go home, Evolution, come back when you've sorted out your attitude problem.

Heme groups: Not just for making black pudding taste good.

The Battle of SPION Kop

Smut burying a lede

István Bókkon is a colleague of Dr Michael Persinger (whom FSM preserve) of Ontario, friend of Riddled, so it was inevitable that he would provide some partly-baked ideas to contribute to the gaiety of nations. We have already encountered his unique and challenging views on "bio-photons" as a channel of intra-cranial neural communication. We allowed these to overshadow his equally non-doctrinaire theory that nanoparticles of magnetite are the recording medium of memories. Some would say that we buried the lede in that particular episode of the Riddled Encyclopedia of All World Gnowledge, but don't worry, we always cut the lede's head off first, and drive a stake through its heart.


The theory pursues a loose metaphor with magnetic tape, with the magnetic nanoparticles of Fe₃O₄ precisely aligned in the brain within cortical minicolumns, like the woven chain-link meshes of ferrite rings that formed computer-core memory in days of yore, recording engrams by way of physical displacement. Figure 1 (below) should make it clear how this works.

Fig. 1. Long-term memory based on the magnetite nanoparticles distributed in neuronal and astroglial membranes (see text): (a) cylinders represent neuronal minicolumns in the neocortex; (b) network that represent 3-D magnetic structures generated by self-organization of multiple astroglial magnetic fields; (c) biomagnetite distribution on neuronal and astroglial cells; (d) long-term memory based on single-domain magnetite distribution in the astroglial network.

If still confused, consult Fig ii instead.

There is an entire warren of rabbit-holes here, waiting to be explored, if we rely on the innate compass of our cerebral magnetite deposits to help us find our way out. For inevitably -- given the ineluctable workings of synchronicity, Narrativium and the Morphogenetic Field -- the idea has been repeatedly re-discovered, and published in Medical Hypotheses, titled with blithe disregard for Betteridge's Law of Headlines:

There is some non-convergence of opinion between this belief system (with the precise alignment and self-organisation of the mnemonic magnetite), and another school of thought in which cortical nanoparticles are wont to wobble around in such unconstrained, uncoordinated freedom that exposure to the strong changing fields of a MRI scanner will send them all catty-wampus and higgledy-piggledy, to the detriment of the integrity of nearby neurons.*

This possibility is of more than academic importance if you are of similar mind to the Riddled Bioethics Division and Tullymonstrum Affiliations Working Group (every Thursday night at the Old Entomologist). Because if so, by now you will have wondered "Given a multi-Tesla MRI scanner and two ice-block sticks, how can I use them to access the magnetic memories of unwitting passers-by?" Magnetite particles are the smallest, quantised units of clandestine information theft, that is why they are also called SPIONs.

Some would worry that this entire scholium of thought depends on the assumption that our brains do contain magnetite particles, and all this rests upon a single quarter-century-old claim from electrosmog cranks that no-one seems to have replicated except other electrosmog cranks. Even Dottori Gatti & Montanari, Italian impresaria of nanopollutants and nanocontamination, have nothing to say about cerebral magnetite infiltration. The omission is suspicious and invites accusations that their frequent publications and general wolf-crying alarmism is just part of their cover and they are really in cahoots with the conspiracy to conceal the truth. Whereever Cahoots may be. Some say that it is a small village in South-West Ireland.

But fret no more, for we fired up the Riddled Scanning Electron Macroscope and focused it on a bit of Open Mike's brain that he wasn't using at the time, and there were nanoparticles aplenty.


In fact there were magnetic nanoparticles everywhere else we looked too:


The whole tradition can be traced back to 1984 when Lucius Shepard came up with the clever notion of training bacteria to deposit internal crystals of magnetite so as to be magnetotactic, and then acclimatising them to swarm and thrive in the usual bacterial manner but in a specialised environmental niche, i.e. recently-devitalised brains. It turns out that the side-effects of a nervous-system infestation of these bacterial symbionts include sensitivity to magnetic fields, experiencing a Magic Realism sensibility, access to alternative realities, being a reanimated corpse, and eyes that glow green inna dark. Italian translations of Green Eyes get the best cover art, no-one knows why.



But Shepard knew nothing of Class-4 Fictive Confinement Facilities to prevent fictional inventions from escaping into reality... which is how magnetotactic bacteria became a thing.

One of the many inadequate features of consensus reality is its absence of a cinematographic adaptation of Green Eyes. Over in the counterfactual timeline where the movie version does exist, let's just say that Nick Cage and Werner Herzog thoroughly deserved their Oscars.

* Thx Neuroskeptic

And the Quicklime girl still plies her trade Reduction of the many from the one

It has not gone unnoticed how war-crime forensic archaeologists show little enthusiasm for the rest of the human remains but focus their attention on the state of preservation of the victims' brains: *

• Almost 50% of individuals from a Spanish 1936 mass grave had their brains preserved.
• Chemical analysis confirms that these brains were preserved by saponification.
• Three factors influenced brain preservation: microbiological, chemical and physical.
• A forensic and holistic approach is emphasized for the recovery and analysis of human remains in forensic context.

[Thx Neuroskeptic]

It is a vision of a parallel world in which Guillermo del Toro directed the Indiana Jones movies.

We note, regretfully, that the process of saponificaton may preserve the structure of the cranial contents, perhaps even at the microscopic level, but the chemicals have been sea-changed into something strange and new. Analeptic Alzabo is the tomb-robbing historian's best friend, but it would be of little use here, and the prospect of the 3^rd season of "iZombie" shifting the action to Spain is just not gonna happen.

In other news, not entirely coincidental, Professor Michael Persinger is still at the top of his game. Building on earlier brain-related reports, he provides another installment of his unconventional and stimulating perspectives on embodiment, and further demonstrations that structure -- not metabolic activity -- is what counts. It may be that his team at Laurentian University could provide the Spanish team with first-hand clues for identifying the culprits of the Civil War atrocity.

Much as a printed circuit diagram of a Symbolic Hieronymus Machine fulfills its function every bit as well as an actual circuit of wire and capacitors and battery, so a 20-year-pickled slice of cortical tissue retains its neural wiring diagram (although the proteins are denatured and cross-linked and the lipid membranes are vulcanised rubber), allowing it to show detectable gamma- and theta-wave activity when steeped in neurotransmitters. Not to mention the emissions of bio- necrophotons, and the responses to auditory frequencies in the primary auditory cortex. All implying that it also retains a dim flickering level of consciousness, memory and awareness of its status as a slice of brain in a jar of formalin.

Mind you, Nicolas Rouleau and Persinger have previously found EEG activity in blue PlayDo, so the bar is not high.

Right: Nicholas Rouleau: Another
victim of Nominal Determinism?

I for one am withholding judgement on Persinger's necroneurology until he manages to access the memories locked within a 130-million-year-old dinosaur brain.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Therein lies the script for a mash-up of 'Jurassic Park' and 'Total Recall', with an contraband trade in first-person dinosaur experiences that goes horribly wrong. I would watch the hell out of that.

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* During the excavation of the Spanish Civil War grave at La Pedraja (Burgos, Spain), 104 individuals were found interred within it, 45 of which displayed brains that were preserved but dehydrated and reduced in size.[...] The results of the analyses on these morphologically identifiable human brains confirmed the presence of nerve structures, fatty acids, and in one case ante-mortem evidence for an intracranial haemorrhage. The fatty acid profile corresponds to the process of saponification. Therefore, the interpretation is that the preservation of these brains at the mass grave of La Pedraja was due to the saponification process, which was influenced by the manner and cause of death, the chemical composition of the brain, the physicochemical properties of the soil and the meteorological conditions at the time.

Skull-blogging: The Torch in my Ear

Imagine our disappointment here at Riddled Research Laboratory, to discover that someone else has already thought of selling a small torch that plugs in one's ear, with the idea that light will pass through the bony bunker encasing the middle ear and illuminate one's brain. In fact they claim to have patented the notion, although I am not convinced that the patent would stand up to a challenge in court, given the existence of prior art from Elias Canetti.

Earlier invention

Also the Valkee company departs from Riddled in the goal of this cerebral illumination. They do not hope that shedding light on the brain will interfere with the transmission of neural biophotons and bring swift easeful oblivion. Rather, they argue that it will ameliorate the ravages of Seasonal Affective Disorder during the long arctic nights lit only by the Aurora Borealis... ease jetlag... improve cognitive functioning and athletic performance... because brain photoreceptors blah blah melatonin blah blah.

Alternative title: Don't skate on polar ice
It's too thick to be sliced by the light
Of long and white polar nights

Valkee pursued this argument with a series of clinical trials: in World Journal of Neuroscience (a jizzmop of a journal from SCIRP where 'peer review' consists of waiting for the cheque to clear), then in Medical Hypotheses (a gift to lazy bloggers, noted for its contributions to the gaiety of nations). More recently a study was commissioned for ‎€10,000 and published in Frontiers of Physiology (a Med. Hyp. wannabee), where the peer reviewer was a Korean dance instructor in the editor's employ.

Be that as it may, we were not downcast for long. As we consoled ourselves at the Old Entomologist with a round of Glander's Vegemite Gose, it occurred to us that if the goal is to bring light to the brain without drilling holes in the customer's head, then the thinnest, most light-permeable part of the skull is not the temporal bone, but the ethmoid bone. In other words (and fewer of them), what we need is a miniaturised torch that fits up the nostril.

Any light that does not filter up through the cribiform plate into the brain will be scattered back down and out the other nostril, providing useful illumination if one happens to be reading an atlas during the long polar night, while illustrating the concept of sinus-oidal projection.

Red Shift is taking away my sanity Red Shift, all moving away from we

Hurrah, a new shipment of Fail has arrived!

Just in time, for stockpiles of Stupid were running perilously low!

They say that a man's gotta know his limitations. Down at the Old Entomologist we are fortunate to have head barmaid Evangeline van Holsterin, who lets us know with no room for uncertainty when we reach those limits, and a request for a fifth pint of Old Sheepshagger Beyond-the Pale Ale goes unrequited. Not everyone is so lucky. Thus we commend the editors of a scientific journal when they call in a more suitably-qualified Guest Editor to weigh the merits of a manuscript on the table, recognising that it lies far beyond their own areas of expertise, if not violating the borders of rational thought.

Editorial Board
(artist's impression)

In this case the Guest Editor was Dr Michael Persinger, whose name is familiar to the Riddled readership for his extensive and far-ranging oeuvre of quantum neurology and electro-atmospheric consciousness studies. Who better to edit a cross-species study of biophotons and steer it in the direction of publication?

Alejandro Jodorowsky
invents words LIKE A BOSS

"Biophotons?" you wonder skeptically. "Is that a neologism from a Jodorowsky graphic-novel script?" But you are only fooling, for you know perfectly well that biophotons are a channel of neural communication within the brain. Or else an epiphenomenal side-effect of consciousness, detectable outside the brain in a light-proof laboratory with a sufficiently sensitive image intensifier. Or both [because quantum uncertainty]. If the former is true, it is not clear how each intra-neural biophoton signal is detected when it reaches its destination at the end of a nerve axon; nor how the myelinated axons work as waveguides to discourage the photons from heading off along straight lines as is the custom of light; nor how the brain copes with non-signal background photons (in the form of sunlight scattered through the skull); nor why nerves still bother with electrochemical signal transmission in parallel with this faster and more efficient optical channel of communication. The answer is probably "quantum coherence and non-classical, non-deterministic uncollapsed wave-functions within the neural microtubules". It usually is.

Quantum enmanglement

So it turns out that if you slice up the brains of dead animals and perfuse them with glutamate to trigger some sort of residual chemical activity, there is ultraweak postmortem phosphorescence, with photons in the red-to-near-infrared range. The task of running a control test with slices of different organ meats (to check whether this emission is specific to brain tissue, and to neural rather than glial cells) is left as an exercise for the reader, for true Mad Scientists have no time for your cautious "control" fiddle-faddle. Wang et al. were too busy measuring the wavelengths of these necrophotons with a BSAD (Biophoton Spectral Analysis Device) -- which stripped of its impressive acronym turns out to be a diffraction grating -- and found that the wavelength is species-specific.

Editorial Board (still baffled)

We learn that the photons are red-shifted, the extent of the redshift increasing with the intelligence of the animal, greatest for human brains. It is not clear whether this is a Doppler shift with the slices receding from the experimenters at different velocities; or a gravitational effect, the photons losing energy as they climbed out of a kind of intellectual gravity well before reaching the BSAD; or perhaps a cosmological expansion. And sadly, the authors neglect to tell us what wavelength the photons started with before they were red-shifted, which might allow us to identify the oxidative-stress reactions from which they arose. But never mind, for hey, Peter Hammill!

The overall rigour of the study does not benefit from Wang et al.'s conviction that by measuring the width of the first-order diffracted strip, they are thereby measuring the maximum and minimum wavelengths λ_max and λ_min of a whole spectral band of photon emissions. No, dudes, that's not how it works... the first-order strip is a simple copy of the central zeroth-order strip, and its width depends on how wide you make the collimator slot.

Coherent biophotons = Brain-lasers

Then to add insult to derpery, Salari et al. come along with a critique of the paper in which they accept these (artefactual) λ_max and λ_min as genuine, and use them to calculate the coherence length of the quantum entanglement for each animal species. I was left in despair at this point and went outside to sit in the sun for half an hour in the hope that the extra photons, filtering through my skull, would disrupt my brain's intra-neural biophoton signalling and bring swift oblivion.

However, I will forgive everyone involved in this debacle -- Persinger, Wang's group, and the Salari-Bókkon group -- if they get together and perfect their necrophoton technology to the point that they can extract the visual cortex of a recently-deceased individual, and scan the ultraweak emissions from the dying neurons so as to reconstruct the last image that the dead person saw.

Thx Leonid Schneider