“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). When this concern is coupled with the brain’s deep degeneracy, it becomes apparent that the causal manipulation approach is not sufficient for gaining a full understanding of the brain’s role in behavior (Marom et al., 2009). The same behavior may result from alternative circuit configurations (Marder and Goaillard, 2006), from different circuits altogether or the same circuit may generate different behaviors...
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. Thus, it is readily apparent that it is very hard to infer the mapping between the behavior of a system and its lower-level properties by only looking at the lower-level properties...
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
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!
FB: “we caution similarly against the idea that what is true for the circuit is true for the behavior. Monod’s line has echoed through to the present day with the argument that molecular biology and its techniques should serve as the model for understanding in neuroscience (Bickle, 2016). We disagree with this totalizing reductionist view but take it as evidence that excessive faith in molecular and cellular biology may be partially to blame for the current dominance of interventionist explanations in neuroscience”
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