30 Reasons We Know the Mind Is Not in the Brain

Reason 1: Synapses (the reputed storage place of memories) and dendritic spines are made up of proteins that are very short-lived, having average lifetimes only about a thousandth of the maximum length of time humans can retain memories.

Reason 2: Synapses and dendritic spines do not have anything like the lifetimes they would need to have to account for 50-year-old memories.

Reason 3: Although claimed to be caused by “synapse strengthening,” humans can form new memories instantly, far faster than the much longer time needed for synapses to strengthen.

Reason 4: People who have hemispherectomy operations (in which half of the brain is surgically removed) seem to have relatively small loss of memories.

Reason 5: Humans such as Wagnerian tenors and Hamlet actors are able to perfectly recall very large bodies of memorized information, but this should not be possible if recall occurs using synapses that transmit signals with a low reliability of only 10% to 50%.

Reason 6: A brain storage of memories would require massive amounts of information encoding, but no one has ever found any sign of encoded information in the brain other than the genetic information in DNA.

Reason 7: No one has ever been able to read memory information from any type of brain outside of his own body.

Reason 8: In the case of Lorber’s patients and the case of the French civil servant, we have cases of people with fairly normal memory function but only very small amounts of functional brain tissue.

Reason 9: There is little evidence that strokes and traumatic brain injury (which occur more than a million times in the US every year) cause retrograde amnesia, and no clear evidence that memory loss in Alzheimer’s or dementia correlates with neuron loss. 

Reason 10: In cases of retrograde amnesia (a problem in recall of past memories), episodic memories older than some particular date are preserved, which is the opposite of what we would expect if memories are stored in our brains.

Reason 11: People can recall things instantly, but there is no way to explain how a brain could instantly navigate to just the right tiny spot where some memory was stored, which would be like instantly finding a needle in a haystack.

Reason 12: The cumulative effect of synaptic delays (a delay caused by the time needed for a signal to travel across a synaptic gap) means that brains should be far too slow to account for instantaneous memory recall.

Reason 13: Synaptic fatigue (a delay caused after a synapse has fired) should make brains far too slow to account for instantaneous memory recall.

Reason 14: No one has ever advanced a credible detailed theory of how human learned knowledge and episodic memories could be translated into neural states or synapse states.

Reason 15: The brain does not seem to have any mechanism for writing a memory.

Reason 16: The brain does not seem to have any mechanism for reading a memory.

Reason 17: There is so much noise in the brain (with each neuron bombarded by signals from thousands of other neurons) that if a brain were to somehow read a stored memory, it would quickly be drowned out by all of the neural noise.

Reason 18: The brain shows no sign of looking different or acting different or working harder when a memory is recalled.

Reason 19: Humans are able to recall extremely long sequences such as all of the lines of Hamlet, but the brain does not have any architecture that would seem to support sequential memorization.

Reason 20: There is no good evidence of any physical change in brains corresponding to an acquisition of a conceptual or episodic memory.

Reason 21: Outside of synapses and dendritic spines there is no place in the brain that could be a suitable storage place for memories lasting 50 years.

Reason 22: People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.

Reason 23: People with damaged brains sometimes show types of memory recall superior to that of people with ordinary brains. 

Reason 24: Humans can acquire detailed memories even when the brain has effectively shut down because the heart has stopped.  

Reason 25: If memories were stored in brains, there would need to be many hundreds of genes with the job of handling the gigantic chore of encoding memories into neural states; but no one has found even one such gene. 

Reason 26: There are no drugs that can produce retrograde amnesia. 

Reason 27: There is substantial evidence that memories can long survive the decay and destruction of the brain. 

Reason 28: The time delay caused by a need to encode memories in a brain would prevent the instantaneous formation of memories that we often see in humans. 

Reason 29: The time delay caused by a need to decode memories stored in a brain would prevent the instantaneous recall that humans routinely display.

Reason 30: Human memory information can exhibit high degrees of hierarchical organization, but the brain has no structure that could support such organization.