I really wanted to write this last week. Looks like I’m already slacking on publishing these newsletters weekly. I read a bunch of articles last week, for inspiration purposes, ones by Science writers— Can I just say- What talent! A common thread was all these articles were more than just the science. They were as much about the people doing them, the stories that hold them together, making them whole.
An excerpt from an abstract to a talk I received over e-mail
I saw this the other day while going through my e-mails, the first thing I did was take a screenshot and share it on the group. Sanjay’s lectures have primed me to think now, there’s no real way one can say anything is simple or complex. So that’s exactly what I wrote - Sanjay probably would have disagreed.
Sanjay was taking a Systems and Behavioral Neuroscience course while I was doing my dissertation project. Since I had a lot of ‘free time’ (thanks long incubation times), I enrolled to the course. Let’s just say I appreciate the diversity of behaviour and the neuronal circuits underlying them a lot more. I would have considered a more inter-connected circuit to be a more complex one earlier. Now I’d say it is a tie between connections, efficiency and necessity. What Sanjay’s course did was, in essence offer a new perspective.
Sanjay’s lectures were philosophical too, in a sense. Our last few lectures were him, taking us through the history of how neuroscience was conducted across time. From ‘the heart is the seat of the soul’, to animals were ‘automatons’ - living machines essentially, with a fixed set of behaviour. Some theories also suggested that behaviour was a result of activity of a lot of connected reflex circuits. Much later, the discovery of central pattern generators in the 60’s, caused a lot of debate within the community. As Sanjay did always, he asked what we thought was the reason for the debate. While I came up with it defied everything that was known upto then, Sulu offered that it was the free will argument.
Central pattern generators are circuits formed by connected neurons that fire rhythmically once stimulated. Their discovery meant that every action might not be a result of a thought, as proponents of free will firmly believed.
Neuroscience, as with all sciences, has benefited with multiple perspectives. I watched a few lectures of the Beyond Networks series recently. The first few lectures touched upon themes centered around the philosophy of science. Turns out, people have been thinking about the ways of science for a long time. What is real, how different a belief is from a perspective, what causes differences in perspective, can science be really practiced without biases and other questions, have found answers we adhere to, through philosophy.
The world we live in, is full of simple-complex problems. At micro, macro-levels and a combination of the two. What biology needs, now, more than ever is multiple perspectives- if you will, multiple lenses to look through.
Find the Beyond Networks series by Johannes Jaeger on YouTube here.
That’s all for this edition. We’ll keep in touch, expect the next edition next week, maybe ;P?
Feel free to write back in the meantime :)