In a commentary published on October 17 in the journal Cell, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Angelo Forli and faculty member Michael Yartsev argue that recent technological and theoretical breakthroughs finally set the stage for a much-needed paradigm shift in how neuroscience studies behavior.
Yartsev is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and associate professor of neuroscience and bioengineering. He is also director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses and the Center for the Neuroscience of Natural Behavior. Forli is a member of Yartsev’s lab. In the article, Yartsev and Forli highlight some of the critical limitations of traditional laboratory research on neural mechanisms of behavior. Most current studies focus on a limited set of laboratory species (like lab mice) and use highly artificial settings. These conditions, they argue, often lack the “real-world” settings for which brains of animals have evolved and where they are put to the test.
Forli and Yartsev advocate for research done under conditions that more closely resemble the complexity of natural settings. Moreover, they urge the scientific community to embrace the diversity of animal species and the unique “superpowers” (or specialized capacities) evolution has granted different species, which may reveal mechanisms with significant theoretical and practical implications. They point out that these types of studies are now feasible, thanks to recent behavioral, neurophysiological and computational advances that can be readily applied both inside and outside of the lab. Forli and Yartsev believe that these more naturalistic types of studies can, and should, complement the traditional reductionistic approach to yield a more thorough and accurate understanding of natural intelligence — the set of abilities that allow animals to behave and survive in the real world.
Read the commentary: Understanding the neural basis of natural intelligence by Angelo Forli and Michael M. Yartsev, Cell, Volume 187, Issue 21, P5833-5837, October 17, 2024.
