Neuroscientists love to talk about the brain. Like all scientists, they feel the need to emphasise the link between their particular domain of expertise and the bigger picture. A neuroproteomics study might draw grand allusions to cognition, or a mathematics paper might speculate on the basis of drug-induced hallucinations.
The function of this hype is often to simply boost interest in the research: maybe to convince a hesitant editor of its importance, or to catch the eye of the academic trawling through the weekly table-of-contents email. For example, a recent neuroimaging study from Dick Passingham’s group carried the provocative title “Reading intentions in the human brain”. I do admit that these dramatics are at least understandable, if not usually justified. Researchers are often under pressure to publish work that will have benefits for humanity at large. Making these tenuous connections where possible might decide whether the next grant application is successful or not.
Beyond this, I sometimes feel that there’s still a more subtle motive at work. All the theatrics might be to purposely skew the reader’s opinion of a paper. Of course everyone wants to read interesting stuff. But what if I have nothing interesting to say? I could stay quiet. But maybe it would be better for me and my image to just say something, anything, then bathe it in a few buzzwords and round it off with some juicy speculation.
Let’s assume that I am presenting some valid, useful science which should stand up on its own. Why dress it up? I think that people often just want to make it publicly known that they too think about the big issues. It’s stealth advertising. It’s saying, I’m not just a fan of surfing; I’m part of the wave.
I was reminded of this last week when reading a couple of 1999 papers by Amit Manwani and Christof Koch (see refs belows). They attempted, with some success, to apply techniques from information theory to biophysical signal transmission within single neurons. The basic idea was to calculate how much information is lost as the electrical signal passes from the synapse to the soma along a dendrite, due to the interference of neural noise. I thought it was nice science, but a little buzzword heavy. This is a common irk I have with these information-theoretic-neural-coding papers. Here’s an excerpt from the second paper:
We are interested in deconstructing neuronal information transfer into its constituent biophysical components and assessing the role of each stage in this context rather than arriving at an accurate estimate of neuronal capacity.
It’s not that there’s anything particularly incorrect about the sentence. It’s just that it’s carefully constructed to include all the eye-catching jargon that goes into your typical Neural Computation article. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on Manwani and co. – I really think it’s great to see some biophysics in the mix. Much better than the usual info-theory-neural-coding approach: let’s split the big black box into lots of little ones. Even so, I wish papers like this didn’t feel the need to pander so blatantly. Let the science talk!
Another scenario which encourages this type of behaviour is the academic meeting. The post-seminar mingles and afternoon coffee breaks are filled with it. Sometimes people just want to talk. They will continue batting words around for a long time past the need. Maybe it’s just the nature of the arena. Topics of note include the mind-brain problem and consciousness. Every neuroscientist is an expert. Unfortunately, most of these discussions are circular rehashes of something someone else already said a long time ago. It’s even a rare thing if I come away from a scholarly paper feeling any new light has been cast on the workings of my mind (and remember, these arguments are presumably composed following some serious contemplation). But still, it feels good to talk about cool things, right?
Of course there’s nothing harmful in all of this. People can chat about whatever they want. I do all the time. It’s just that original, useful ideas rarely emerge this way. I am believing more and more that true conceptual advances are only born following deep immersion, consideration, time and, most of all, hard work. This PhD business isn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
Refs:
- Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex.
PC Bressloff, JD Cowan, M Golubitsky, PJ Thomas, MC Wiener.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. (2001) 356 (1407), 299-330.
PMID: 11316482 - Reading hidden intentions in the human brain.
JD Haynes, K Sakai, G Rees, S Gilbert, C Frith, RE Passingham.
Curr Biol. (2007) 17(4), 323-328.
PMID: 17291759 - Detecting and estimating signals in noisy cable structure, I: neuronal noise sources.
A Manwani, C Koch.
Neural Computation (1999) 11 (8), 1797-829
PMID: 10578033 - Detecting and estimating signals in noisy cable structures, II: information theoretical analysis.
A Manwani, C Koch.
Neural Computation (1999) 11 (8), 1831-73
PMID: 10578034
