I’ve enjoyed Scott Young’s writing since he’s the kind of interested amateur who dips into all kinds of areas without committing to professional work. So it was interesting to read his impression of literature research; What if You Don’t Feel Smart Enough?
The expectation is that as you learn more and more, you’ll eventually hit a bedrock of irrefutable scientific fact. Except usually, the bottom of one’s investigation is muck. Some parts of the original idea get sharpened, others blur as more complications and nuance are introduced.
And it’s true that it’s not well appreciated how tentative scientific explanation is as new areas are explored. It’s been exciting for me to watch COVID-19 science develop in real time, so quickly. Yes, scary and polarized in ways that we generally don’t see in medicine, but a predictable back and forth on the properties of the virus, its propagation, and treatment.
We generally know what we know
Scott misses the important point that there is a bedrock of knowledge, the literature just doesn’t bother to discuss it. In neuroscience, the basic physical architecture and cellular makeup of the brain was established with great clarity over the last 100 years or so. As techniques have been introduced, new areas opened up and took a while to get settled into bedrock, but much of that is done now. In fact, my first published paper in 1983 was part of a major chapter in that story when labs used retrograde tracing techniques to map brain connections. My paper established the identity of all of the areas that sent connections to the motor trigeminal nucleus in the rat. That’s the collection of motor neurons that innervate the jaw closing muscles.
We’re in an in interesting era where cognitive science is successfully exploring its underlying neuronal circuitry. As is typical, the process is messy but the picture is getting filled out, even in some very tricky areas like working memory and perception.
It’s of little importance to my day job in drug development at this point, but these are the kinds of questions that sparked my interest in brain science at the beginning. So while I look on as a spectator, I’m spending time reading papers and developing at least a superficial understanding of the techniques and progress.
Building models to explore the unknown
Neuroscience Twitter is a great resource to keep up with trends across cognitive science. Case in point: I’m reading through Bayesian models of perception and action which is a draft of a book by Wei Ji Ma, Konrad Kording, and Daniel Goldreich, to be published by MIT press. I’ve been dipping into papers published by the three authors to get a feel for the deeper applications of the approach. I learned about it on Twitter
I think this is an important area to watch. I’ve talked about the idea that the brain, in order to control behavior, has to contain a model of the system. One approach is create computer models of circuitry based on observed connectivity and activity in animals when these systems are active. If some models can reproduce the brain activity, then they are candidates for hypothesized mechanisms and be used to make predictions about how the real neural circuits behave. Think about it like a physicist using equations to model physical laws and then testing the predictions from those equations against new observations. Except for the brain we don’t have any such equations, so we can use the immense computer power we have at our disposal to do the same kind of abstraction as the physicist.
Just like the equations of physics describe reality, but aren’t reality, these neural models describe little bits of the brain, they aren’t thinking. But interestingly, some of these brain inspired models can be put to work for real life tasks like image or speech recognition because the escape simple algorithmic approaches to analysis and classification.
