Neuroscience’s trajectory since 1980
Fewer than ten of us were in the cohort of new doctoral students. We were all budding neuroscientists, but at the time, the name of that field hadn’t fully permeated the academy yet, so we were in different, closely related programs: psychobiology, pharmacology, anatomy, and cell biology. When we headed out for beers at Don Vito’s, the local dive across from the still newly built UC Irvine campus, we discussed the synaptic organization of various brain regions like regular folks discussing professional sports teams. I loved the hippocampus and so did my closest friends. We were fans. Some of us liked neurotransmitters instead of brain regions, but it was more or less the same: fandom. The Rams and Dodgers couldn’t compete.
We were just starting out, so our professors were only loosely connected to us. We rotated between labs, and they checked us out the same way we checked them out. Committed mentor-mentee relationships would arrive in our second year. My first prof was the chair of the pharmacology department. He was kind of famous, but, honestly, he was kind of meh compared to some of the other faculty superstars. One prof was the provost and a world-class behavioral pharmacologist, and an accomplished jazz musician. Another was the charismatic shaman of a new model for learning and memory called Long-Term Potentiation. UC Irvine was the hot critical center of a new movement to understand brain function, and we students could feel it.
The first year was filled with challenging classes, which we mostly took together in one somewhat cramped, dingy space in a Brutalist monstrosity called Steinhaus Hall. When we weren’t in class together (or out at Don Vitos), we’d be in the lab. Early on, I blew up one of my prof’s precious Data General Nova minicomputers–it actually smoked when it went up. So I was in the doghouse. Computers in 1980 cost a lot. Eventually, I transferred to Ann Arbor to finish my doctorate not under a smoke cloud.
1980 was the beginning of a decade that would change the brain sciences. What had once been an ill-defined intersection between physiological psychology and neurobiology became a burgeoning new discipline with tens of thousands attending its annual meeting in cities like Los Angeles, Boston, and New Orleans. The expensive mini-computer that I blew up at the beginning of the decade was replaced wholesale by the almost commoditized IBM PC clone that I wrote my dissertation on. Noninvasive brain imaging of human subjects became routinized with positron emission tomography, and a new thing called the Internet made it possible to move large datasets from one site to another, thousands of miles away, in seconds.
And yet, the field’s inherent collective goals of delivering cures for brain diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia) and explaining the mind remained tantalizingly just out of reach over the 80’s and into the first two decades of the new millennium.
What gives? What went awry? To my mind, there are several inter-related strands:
First, biological brains (even simple ones) are far more complicated than either biology or psychology disciplinary frameworks can routinely handle. I enjoy showing students brain activity maps of living fish embryos as they behave, then revealing that even with the complete neural dynamics (the movie of all the neurons firing dynamically) and the behavior clearly visible, the mapping function between the two remains obscure. I also enjoy showing students the incredible 3-D reconstructions of actual complex brains at the electron microscopic level of resolution and then telling them that this wiring diagram is just a snapshot–real brain neurons literally dance and jiggle their connections all the time.
Likewise, beautiful cognitive frameworks with great explanatory power at the behavioral level become modular black boxes with arrows between them as soon as we try to map their modules onto real biology. Psychology feels solid to us because we experience consciousness and theory of mind. But where those two come from biologically is unclear. The simultaneous intuition of scientific relevance and inherent disconnection from the nuts and bolts of neurons creates the problems. Donald Hebb’s 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior, along with O’Keefe and Nadel’s 1976 work, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, represent the high points of trying to bridge this gap. The chasm is still with us.
The second problem is one that I’ve dealt with in an earlier piece: neuroscientists have too often become enamored with their own pet hypotheses to the point of misconduct: discarding evidence and fabricating data when experimental results are at variance with the beloved. So that’s a structural problem, and it may be related to how urgently the field’s many stakeholders and investors feel about those diseases in their personal lives. If you believe–even irrationally–that you’ve discovered the cure, then it’ll be an easy and tempting sell to funders.
Finally, there is the attraction of consciousness as a phenomenon produced by brains (we think) but not tractable in the usual sense of other phenomena–we each experience it only individually, even as we lose it collectively through sleep. The usual armamentarium of Popperian science fails here. How are we to test hypotheses on this most salient and yet most personal of brain-based phenomena? And yet, for curiosity-based neuroscience (as opposed to the biomedical part of this discipline), this is the King of problems. Like the singularity at the center of a black hole, it remains unknowable.
We graduate-student brain-science fans from 46 years ago might feel pretty rueful about our career choices if we’d known where the trajectory was headed. But all fields have different seasons. AI has weathered two winters and is now at the top of the heap. Just because a set of problems is hard doesn’t mean that progress won’t be coming down the road. In 19th-century physics, Kelvin was rumored (perhaps apocryphally) to have said it had all been figured out: how wrong that would have been. And how wrong it might also be to write off neuroscience now.
Not everything on my list above warrants the same treatment. Nature’s hidden discoveries about brain complexity and the mind deserve patience. The hypothesis trap is the field’s own particular ‘illness’ and warrants immediate treatment.
Discoverers and Discoveries 