Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias

February 18, 2021 Jeremiah Hendren

Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias

Krakauer, John W., Asif A. Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm A. MacIver, and David Poeppel
Neuron 93, no. 3 (2017): 480-490
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.12.041

An analogy from computer science that has both historical and conceptual appeal is the distinction between software and hardware; whereby the software represents ‘‘what’’ the brain (or one of its modules) is doing, and the hardware represents ‘‘how’’ it is doing it. Sternberg has stated it as the ‘‘distinction between processors and the processes that they implement’’ (Sternberg, 2011, p. 158). The core question we address here is whether the processes governing behavior are best inferred from examination of the processors. In a nice irony, the computer science analogy has come full circle with a provocative study that applied numerous neuroscience techniques to a single microprocessor (analogous to a brain) in an attempt to understand how it controls three classic videogames (analogous to behaviors) (Jonas and Kording, 2017). Crucial to the experiment was that the answer was known a priori: the processor’s operations can be drawn as an algorithmic flow chart. The sobering result was that performing interventionist neuroscience on the processor could not explain how the processor worked.

John W. Krakauer et al.

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