“Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias”
“Here we will argue, however, that detailed examination of brain parts or their selective perturbation is not sufficient to understand how the brain generates behavior (Figure 1). One reason is that we have no prior knowledge of what the relevant level of brain organization is for any given behavior (Figure 1A)…
Neuroscience is replete with cases that illustrate the fundamental epistemological difficulty of deriving processes from processors. For example, in the case of the roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans), we know the genome, the cell types, and the connectome — every cell and its connections (Bargmann, 1998, White et al., 1986). Despite this wealth of knowledge, our understanding of how all this structure maps onto the worm’s behavior remains frustratingly incomplete…
Deep and thorny questions like “what would even count as an explanation in this context,” “what is a mechanism for the behavior we are trying to understand,” and “what does it mean to understand the brain” get sidelined. The emphasis in neuroscience has transitioned from these larger scope questions to the development of technologies, model systems, and the approaches needed to analyze the deluge of data they produce…
Accomplishing this task requires hypotheses and theories based on careful dissection of behavior into its component parts or subroutines (Cooper and Peebles, 2015). The behavioral work needs to be as fine-grained as work at the neural level. Otherwise one is imperiled by a granularity mismatch between levels that prevents substantive alignment between different levels of description…
This tendency to ascribe psychological properties to single neuron activity that can only be sensibly ascribed to a whole behaving organism is known as the mereological fallacy”
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(16)31040-6
I want to print out figure 1 here and post it on my wall so I can look at it whenever I am reading a study or thinking up experiments. So many assumptions baked into our experimental protocols!
Related: “The brain: a radical rethink is needed to understand it”; “Mind and Cosmos: Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Brave Critique of Scientific Reductionism”; “We have vastly underestimated apes’ intelligence because of our own sense of superiority”; “What Emotions Are (and Aren’t)”
