Abstract
In 1948, Claude Shannon introduced his version of a concept that was core to Norbert Wiener's
cybernetics, namely, information theory. Shannon's formalisms include a physical framework,
namely a general communication system having six unique elements. Under this framework,
Shannon information theory offers two particularly useful statistics, channel capacity and
information transmitted. Remarkably, hundreds of neuroscience laboratories subsequently reported
such numbers. But how (and why) did neuroscientists adapt a communications-engineering
framework? Surprisingly, the literature offers no clear answers. To therefore first answer "how", 115
authoritative peer-reviewed papers, proceedings, books and book chapters were scrutinized for
neuroscientists' characterizations of the elements of Shannon's general communication system.
Evidently, many neuroscientists attempted no identification of the system's elements. Others
identified only a few of Shannon's system's elements. Indeed, the available neuroscience
interpretations show a stunning incoherence, both within and across studies. The interpretational
gamut implies hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different possible neuronal versions of Shannon's
general communication system. The obvious lack of a definitive, credible interpretation makes
neuroscience calculations of channel capacity and information transmitted meaningless. To now
answer why Shannon's system was ever adapted for neuroscience, three common features of the
neuroscience literature were examined: ignorance of the role of the observer, the presumption of
"decoding" of neuronal voltage-spike trains, and the pursuit of ingrained analogies such as
information, computation, and machine. Each of these factors facilitated a plethora of interpretations
of Shannon's system elements. Finally, let us not ignore the impact of these "informational
misadventures" on society at large. It is the same impact as scientific fraud.