How does cognitive neuroscience make progress?

I’ve been involved in discussions lately (more than usual anyway) about how we make progress in neuroscience and cognitive science, and how the synergy is supposed to work. These issues have always been on my mind but it was just recently that we were encouraged to put our thoughts in writing. David Poeppel and I just published a paper in the journal eNeuro, which you can find open acccess here. The title is Against the Epistemological Primacy of the Hardware (ÆPH) and that’s the end of the title–absolutely not a title with a colon in it, nope.

The discussion so far hasn’t been a straight path to clean conclusions. ÆPH makes some points we think apply broadly, although it’s largely in response to Gyuri Buszaki’s recent opinion paper, which itself was a response to *waves at all of psychology and cognitive neuroscience* whole swaths of research over the years. But ours is also a reaction to some of the ‘collateral’ in Gyuri’s books. And on top of that there’s an editorial by Christoph Bernard, and a discussion on Paul Middlebrooks’s Brain Inspired podcast.

So it’s an ongoing back-and-forth thing that may be hard to keep track of if you are busy with, well, *gestures at our apocalypsed world* all of this.

I thought I would help you there and provide some guidance to navigate these arguments. Without elaborating too much I will also mention some takeaways and outstanding questions, in case you would like to think along. I’ll try to keep this updated as it develops.

Links:

• Calling names – Christoph Bernard
  • The editorial presenting the following 2 papers and reflecting on the issue of naming.
• The Brain–Cognitive Behavior Problem: A Retrospective – György Buzsáki
  • Gyuri’s piece from 20 years ago, where he lays down a very critical view of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The arguments there are unpacked in more subtle and interesting ways in Gyuri’s later books.
• Against the Epistemological Primacy of the Hardware – David Poeppel & Federico Adolfi
  • Our piece, reacting to Gyuri’s article but also considering the latest developments of his ideas.
• Podcast discussion – Brain Inspired
  • Here David and Gyuri join Paul Middlebrooks to discuss in real time the substance of the disagreements (with surprise questions by John Krakauer and Paul Cisek). I’ve clarified my understanding of Gyuri’s position and polished my own views from listening to this. I think you are going to find it a productive discussion.

• The Brain from Inside Out – György Buszáki
  • If you only read Gyuri’s article above, it’s likely you’re not gonna get the full subtelties in his argument, and perhaps form an uncharitable opinion. I recommend that you also read at least the parts of his book that are relevant to this discussion. He provides very nice summaries throughout, so you can quickly get a sense of what to pay attention to.

Once you’ve read all of the above, you may find some of the following useful to narrow down the scope of the disagreements.

Clarifications

• I’ve seen some confusion about the level our critique operates on. There’s what we know and how we come to know it. Ours is not a criticism of a particular view of how the brain works, or about specific ‘inside-out’ work in neuroscience–it is a critique of conclusions such as Gyuri’s about how such work comes about and how contributes to progress. We question the prescriptive discourse that has emerged as collateral from the inside-out view.

• I sense that some of the disagreements stem from possibly profound differences in how non-human vs human neurosciences procede (cf. discussions where one scientist is thinking of the capactity for language while the other is thinking of rats running in a maze). We need to bridge this gap from both sides.

Still contentious

• A point that Gyuri keeps making in different forms is that brain ‘stuff’ should be the arbiter in how the mind works. This harks back to a point we make in our article: there appears to be a hierarchy of evidence in how Gyuri sees progress, where brain data is better at arbitrating between candidate explanations of cognitive processes.

• There’s been a lot of criticism about the terms in psychology and cognitive science. But does neuroscience have its ‘parts list’ correctly identified? We believe alignment is important, and it can only come if neither cognitive science nor neuroscience have their parts lists entrenched, but take them to be hypotheses that can be ruled out using evidence from multiple qualitatively distinct sources.

• Can cognitive science decompose its subject matter in a meaningful way without grounding to the brain? Gyuri seems to think not.

• Although Gyuri readily admits there’s no observation that happens in a vaccum, I think the illusion of an independent, unbiased brain observation (where the “grounding” comes from) is still implicit in the structure of the arguments we’ve heard so far. You can hear a historical example in the podcast where an electrode in the rat hippocampus helps rule out an explanation of behavior.