As a comparative biologist, I appreciated Nanthia Suthana’s new opinion piece about how neuroscience research is relatively divided by what model species researchers are working on.
I am interested in an assumption underlying Suthana’s thesis:
As a result, neuroscience’s primary limitation today is not a lack of data or tools, but persistent fragmentation across model systems, recording modalities and analytic traditions.
This made me wonder how fields assess their progress. Judging from conference attendance and journals, neuroscience is a phenomenally healthy field of research. Yet it is a field that somehow seems to think that, darn it, we should be further along.
How do research disciplines measure their own progress? To put it another way, if we were able to successfully remove a suggested limitation, what would we know?
If we got the “cross species dialogue” that Suthana thinks neuroscience needs, what would be the thing we would learn? All I can gather from the article is that we could better “refine or revise” our theories. But I’m not sure which theories those are, or what discoveries we might expect.
I realize that it might seem a big ask to get a preview of what discoveries we might make if we did more comparative biology in neuroscience. Unexpected lucky findings are the norm in every field of science. But in some fields, it is very clear about what certain limitations are, and what could be learned if those obstacles were removed.
Astronomers knew for decades that they would be able to see deeper into space if they have a space-based telescope.
Particle physicists knew for decades that they could test for the presence of the Higgs boson if they had particle accelerators that operated at higher energy levels.
Paleontologists knew for decades that major evolutionary events, like vertebrates living on land full time, should be in rocks of a particular age.
But there are a lot of fields that are just not like that. Neuroscience might be one of them. Or maybe it isn’t like that yet.
Related posts
Nominees for the Newton of neuroscience
External links
Neuroscience has a species problem
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