Welcome to all! ❤️🐀
Potential new followers: can we try something out?
if you're a #Neuroscientist (of any status, yes, undergraduate students can be neuroscientists), could you answer with your neuro 'categories': Experimentalist, Computational, Philosopher, Fly, Human, Rodent, Whale, Tetrodes, Calcium imaging, fMRI, EEG, etc. This is so that I (and possibly others) can put you in a List! I'll share my lists once they have grown enough 😀
if you're not a Neuroscientist, this account will probably not follow you, but you are totally free to follow it, and also to tell us about you and any questions you might have about neuroscience!
if you want to learn about neuroscience, I will try to post beginner-level explanations with the hashtag #NeuroForNewbies. Just an experiment...
@elduvelle_neuro a reminder that people have an option to follow @cogneurophys for cognitive neurophysiology related topics, writ large. And @-mention it as you post relevant articles or discussions
I am a neuroscientist, abolitionist, unionist, cooperativist, information liberationist, trans/disciplinarian, social infrastructuralist, realistic demander of the impossiblist, solidarity is the most real magicalist, commons believerist, short circut the systems of oppressionist
@deboraha Cool! So when people say “Cognitive science” or “Cognitive neuroscience” I’ve found they sometimes mean “human neuroscience”. Is this how you mean it or are you studying cognition in general regardless of species?
@elduvelle_neuro@deboraha there’s a cabal of us who are interested in cognition in nonhuman models, too, who would benefit from a more inclusive definition. A more literal one. Yes, @AllenNeuroLab ?
@karihoffman@elduvelle_neuro@deboraha Well, this seems like an old post but I'm going to catch up and comment just because. Yes, cognition simply means thinking and remembering. Cognitive Science is currently many things, has been around as a term for ~70 years, and some people restrict their studies to human "representations" and information processing models. Cognitive Neuroscience has about a ~30 year history and the success of fMRI helped in coalescing the discipline, but it is NOT restricted to humans by any modern definition. Cognitive Neuroscience is a broad term for those studies interested in the neurobiological underpinnings of cognition (or thinking and memory) generally using any methods, species, or even models.
@AllenNeuroLab@karihoffman@elduvelle_neuro@deboraha While I totally agree with a more inclusive, sensible definition of cognitive (neuro)science, the actual usage in my experience has been exactly as El said. If someone tells me they're a cognitive neuroscientist it has always meant humans, and my colleagues and I studying high-level cognitive functions in rodents never called ourselves cognitive neuroscientists.
Do you have insight into the history of how that happened?
@beneuroscience@karihoffman@elduvelle_neuro@deboraha I’m a cognitive neuroscientist and I primarily use animals. The history I’m aware of is through my 20+ years training and working in the field, and random books like from Gazzaniga who I think claims to have originated the term. So read the below as an experiential take. The intro here is pretty good and matches my previous definition more or less: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience
Some history: fMRI is undoubtedly the major force that envigorated the movement toward Cognitive Neuroscience proper programs, which before were more likely to be called something like psychobiology from ~1960-1990+. Ogawa first demonstrated BOLD fMRI in 1990 and it only took a couple years for the first human studies to appear—the technique radically transformed experimental psychology departments. fMRI led to professors and students rushing (like a gold rush, a phrase used at the time) to the field of cognitive neuroscience (1990-present). They could now use cognitive research tools developed over decades and study the brain too. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC55275/
Sometimes there were undertones in this rush to think maybe animals were no longer needed in brain research. That was great to some because what they thought really mattered was humans. I have experienced this explicit position from faculty during my training and job interviews (2003-2013), and it still sometimes (though rarely now) comes up at conferences. Some cognitive scientists hold an undertone view that only humans truly posses cognition—this view persists today. For example, see my take with N. Fortin on the neurobiology of episodic memory which necessarily stands in contrast to the scientist’s view that coined the term (Tulving, who we sadly lost recently). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1301199110. Notably, I don’t think coining a term means you have it right or own it necessarily, you just the right to define what you meant when you said it. Science is the pursuit of natural truths after all.
Only if you think the proposition that only humans possess real cognition would you equate cognitive neuroscience with human neuroscience. In fact, cognitive neuroscience that prefers the term human neuroscience often does so to claim the scientific value of their territory so to speak. This wrongheaded view has seriously diminished in the last decade in part because of the growing recognition of the limitations of fMRI and in part because of the huge gains animal neuroscientists have contributed to cognitive neuroscience which seems to have no end in sight at the moment.
Notes: Human neuroscience is a term that covers far more than cognition of course. It can be reasonably used to simply say one studies the human nervous system in any way, and cognitive neuroscience uses many tools besides fMRI. I also call myself a behavioral neuroscientist but that does not mean animal neuroscience.
I could go on but I feel like I’ve written a brief report! Apologies.
@karihoffman@AllenNeuroLab@elduvelle_neuro@markgbaxter@beneuroscience@deboraha
Really fascinated by this discussion! From a reader's perspective (as you pull this together), one thing I'd really love to see is an explicit description of how these ideas relate to impactful brain research down the line. As "basic" researchers, we're here to create the foundational knowledge that we can then build on to create societal impact. That impact can take on many forms (fix it, build it, educate it, understand it ...). But what does the path from here to there look like, in broad strokes? Absent that, perspective pieces that assert we should do basic brain research one way versus another always strike me as incomplete; there's always this unstated assumption that understanding the brain is a good thing (and I of course agree). But if we are going to discuss why that's important, we have to specify what some of the long term goals are, I think - understanding every possible thing about it probably isn't useful; some things will be more useful than others.
For instance, I was very swayed by this article highlighting the need for "Interactionist Neuroscience" where animal and human researchers understand the same things on multiple levels: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.10.021
That article takes the stance that basic research contributes to "fixing the brain" and that's not the only reason we do it, of course. There are so many good reasons to pursue cognitive neuroscience in animals. When I read the piece you are talking about, I will be very curious to know: what's yours?
Also possibly a side reason is showing that non-human animals can do pretty much the same type of things that humans do, with maybe a difference of degree in some things, but that’s it - and maybe if we realize that we will treat them better.
Of course if my research helps somehow fix Alzheimer’s in the process, and understand better why humans act the way they do, that’s even better!
@elduvelle_neuro@karihoffman@AllenNeuroLab@markgbaxter@beneuroscience@deboraha
I think that’s true for a lot of folks, and there’s no problem there! To be sure, I suspect that we all agree that arguments that the field of brain research should do X should incorporate some notion about the value of our work for others.
@NicoleCRust@karihoffman@AllenNeuroLab@markgbaxter@beneuroscience@deboraha Hmm this basically says that basic research is good because it will be eventually useful, which I definitely agree with… but… can I say that I am doing basic research just because I enjoy it, because I’m curious, because I want to know how things work, really just for myself first? If someone told me that none of my stuff would lead to any application, but I would eventually understand how it works, I’d still do what I’m doing. I’ll do it for free lol
@elduvelle_neuro@karihoffman@AllenNeuroLab@markgbaxter@beneuroscience@deboraha
You can say whatever you like! As you hinted at, if you want buy in from others (like the govt to fund your work or others to acknowledge that understanding cognitive function in rats is worth knowing) you’ll need to broaden the case.
One might think about it as a win-win: what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning is your curiosity, but your curiosity leads you to impactful knowledge.
Relevant excerpts from a manuscript under review for a workshop/special issue organized by @Iris and @devezer
Hopefully a full preprint coming soon 😬
Would also highly recommend this one from Heather Douglas re: pure vs applied science, the history of their distinction, and how a notion of “progress” in science only makes sense without it.
@elduvelle_neuro@NicoleCRust@karihoffman@markgbaxter@beneuroscience@deboraha I don’t know that I’m going to put anything together as a write up but to answer your question I got into this field because my grandfather developed Alzheimer’s and forgot who I was. He died in 2004. I’ve since had other family members die such as from FTD or other mental illness. I want to help and we still don’t know how memory and behavior works mechanistically so that’s where I have put my efforts. I study and develop animal-human neuroscience research pipelines (two-way street). Restricting cognitive neuroscience to human neuroscience would be an enormous strategic mistake.
Generally, the topic of long-term cognitive and behavioral neuroscience specific strategies, and their value to society is always on my mind. I teach bench-to-bedside lectures in my behavioral neuroscience methods course because there is simply a general misunderstanding of how science generates value for the clinic and society. mRNA vaccines exists because of basic science foundations which remains fueled by decades of curiosity-driven science. The origins of CRISPR/Cas9 is entirely basic and many foundational papers literally say that any value of the findings are not known and maybe amount to nothing. Notably it takes much larger amounts of basic science to fuel smaller amounts of applied science.
(It’s worth adding that the my comments above should not be taken as neglecting the increasingly well developed disciplines of translational and preclinical neuroscience, which are not basic or applied but somewhere in between and unique).
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