I hate to pick on poor confused Robert Epstein again, but after thinking about it some more, I’d like to explain why an example in his foolish article doesn’t justify his claims.

Here I quote his example without the accompanying illustrations:

In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences.

Because you might never have seen a demonstration like this, or because you might have trouble imagining the outcome, I have asked Jinny Hyun, one of the student interns at the institute where I conduct my research, to make the two drawings. Here is her drawing ‘from memory’ (notice the metaphor):

And here is the drawing she subsequently made with a dollar bill present:

Jinny was as surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar bill thousands of times.

What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.

Now let me explain why Epstein’s example doesn’t even come close to proving what he thinks it does.

First, the average person is not very good at drawing. I am probably much, much worse than the average person in this respect. When I play “pictionary”, for example, people always laugh at my stick figures. Yet, given something to look at and copy, I can do a reasonable job of copying what I see. I, like many people, have trouble converting what I see “in my mind’s eye” to a piece of paper. So it is not at all surprising to me that the students Epstein asks to draw a dollar bill produce the results he displays. His silly experiment says nothing about the brain and what it “stores” at all!

Second, Epstein claims that the brain stores no representation of a dollar bill whatsoever. He is pretty unequivocal about this. So let me suggest another experiment that decisively refutes Epstein’s claim: instead of asking students to draw a dollar bill (an exercise which evidently is mostly about the artistic ability of students), instead give them five different “dollar bills”, four of which have been altered in some fairly obvious respect. For example, one might have a portrait of Jefferson instead of Washington, another might have the “1” in only two corners instead of all four corners, another might have the treasury seal in red instead of the typical green for a federal reserve note, etc. And one of the five is an ordinary bill. Now ask them to pick out which bills are real and which are not. To make it really precise, each student should get just one bill and not be able to see the bills of others.

Here’s what I will bet: students will, with very high probability, be able to distinguish the real dollar bill from the altered ones. I know with certainty that I can do this.

Now, how could one possibly distinguish the real dollar bills from the fake ones if one has no representation of the real one stored in the brain?

And this is not pure speculation: thousands of cashiers every day are tasked with distinguishing real bills from fake ones. Somehow, even though they have no representation of the dollar bill stored in their brain, they manage to do this. Why, it’s magic!