{"id":15229,"date":"2026-04-02T08:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/?p=15229"},"modified":"2026-04-02T08:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:48:14","slug":"brain-as-receiver-is-still-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/brain-as-receiver-is-still-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain As Receiver Is Still Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I have a love-hate relationship with TikTok, as I do social media in general. It is a great communication tool and allows scientists and science communicators to get their content out to a larger audience cheaply and easily. If you know how to use the internet and social media as a resource, you can find a video about almost any topic. I particularly love the “how to” videos. And yet these applications are also used (mostly used<\/a>) to spread nonsense and misinformation, or at least inaccurate, misleading, or overly generalized information. The low bar of entry cuts both ways.<\/p>\n

As a result I spend part of my time as a communicator with my finger in the dike of social media pseudoscience and science denial. For example, this individual feels<\/a> his insights into the workings of the human brain need to be shared with the world. His musings are based entirely on a false premise, his apparent misunderstanding of what neuroscientists understand about brain function. He begins with the nicely vague statement, “scientists have discovered”, followed by a completely incorrect statement – that thoughts come to our brain from outside the brain.<\/p>\n

Before I get into this old “brain as receiver” claim, I want to point out that this format is extremely common on TikTok in particular and social media in general. This is more worrying than any individual claim – the culture is to present some random nonsense in the format of “isn’t this crazy”, or with with a cynical tone implying something nefarious is going on. Such authors may or may not believe what they say, they may just be trying to amplify their engagement with a total disregard toward whether what they are saying is true or not. They may even be a full Poe – knowing that what they say is nonsense. Either way, they feel it is appropriate to spend the time to record and upload a video without spending the few minutes that would be needed to check to see if what they are saying is even true. The very platform they are using to spread their nonsense often has all the information they need to answer their alleged questions. The culture is profoundly incurious, intellectually vacuous, lacking all scholarship or quality control, and seems to value only engagement. Thrown into the mix are true believers, grifters, and those who display classic symptoms of some form of thought disorder. This is “infotainment” taken to its ultimate expression.<\/p>\n

Back to the video at hand – the author begins with an unsourced vague claim, but one that is not uncommon in the “new age” subculture, that our brains are mostly just receivers for a vast intelligence that comes from somewhere outside the brain. He states this as if it is a scientific fact. He then goes on to muse about some new age nonsense regarding being on a higher or lower “frequency” and therefore attracting good thoughts or bad thoughts. Is there any plausibility or evidence for the notion that some of the information that comes to our brain originates somewhere outside the brain? By this I do not mean through the known senses, but that part or all of the “mind” is a non-physical phenomenon, and the brain is a conduit for the mind, interfacing it with the physical body.<\/p>\n

This is one formulation of what is known as dualism, which I have written about here many times – that mind and brain are not entirely one phenomenon, but two. My position, which tracks with the consensus opinion of neuroscientists, is that the mind is what the brain does. There is only the brain. The mind is not software running on the brain – it is the brain, simply describing our perception of what the brain is doing. That sci-fi trope of a “consciousness” being transferred from one body to another, or into an object, is simply impossible. Just as you cannot “upload” yourself into a computer. At best you can make a copy that replicates some of your mental functions, but it is in no meaningful way you. You are your brain.<\/p>\n

How do we know this is true? This is, far and away, the best inference from all available data. While the brain is incredibly complex and we are still learning lots of the details, it is now entirely clear that the brain is a living information processing machine. Neurons connect to each other forming circuits and networks the can store and process information. These networks correspond to specific functions, and those functions can be altered or destroyed by changes to the corresponding physical circuits in the brain. We have known this for over a century – if you have a stroke that damages part of the brain, you lose that part of your functionality. And this does not only relate to physical things like movement, but also to thought, such as the ability to understand language, to reason spatially or mathematically, to process visual information, etc. This can even have bizarre manifestations, like your ability to feel as if you own or control parts of your body. As our technology has improved we have been able to map the circuits in the brain to finer and finer detail – and throughout the entire process nothing has emerged to challenge this core understanding of neuroscience. The mind is the brain.<\/p>\n

There are also many ways in which there is a lack of findings to support any alternative interpretation. For example – no part of the brain is an actual receiver for any kind of external signals, of any frequency. We perceive the world through our sensory organs, and there is no “extrasensory” perception. There is no functionality without a corresponding neurological cause. There does not appear to be any limit to our ability to alter mental function by altering brain function. There is no evidence for mental function outside of brain function. In short, when we look at the brain we find wetware, a living computer, not a receiver of any sort.<\/p>\n

All of this information, often patiently explained by experts, is freely available on the internet. All someone has to do is, before they post a video of their incredible opinions, ask a very simple question – is what I am about to say actually true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a love-hate relationship with TikTok, as I do social media in general. It is a great communication tool and allows scientists and science communicators to get their content out to a larger audience cheaply and easily. If you know how to use the internet and social media as a resource, you can find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":15230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-15229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-neuroscience","tag-dualism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15231,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15229\/revisions\/15231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}