EP 339 John Krakauer on Why Neuroscience Needs Behavior

About this episode

Jim Rutt interviews John Krakauer about the importance of behavior in neuroscience and the implications of his research.

Jim talks with John Krakauer—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins, and external faculty at SFI—about his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias." They discuss defining behavior as ecologically valid goal-directed action within an animal's umwelt, behavioral decomposition being epistemically prior to neural investigation, bipedal running and Sherrington's spinalized cat experiments as illustrations of that decomposition, what a satisfying neural explanation should actually look like, emergence and neuroscientists' resistance to it, the concept of explanatory autonomy and the "wings don't fly, birds do" framing, downward causality and the traffic jam analogy, Sherrington's own epistemic humility about understanding thought, whether consciousness will eventually be explained the way life was or remain permanently fuzzy, the three traditions of studying the nervous system and their persistent tensions, the problem of double-dipping with coarse-grained behavioral language in neural data, "filler verbs" like "involves" and "underlies" that add surplus meaning to a…

People in this episode

Host: Jim Rutt

Guest: John Krakauer

Topics covered

• neuroscience
• behavior
• motor learning
• consciousness
• emergence
• neural investigation

Keywords

• neuroscience
• behavior
• motor learning
• consciousness
• emergence
• neural explanation
• double-dipping
• dopamine
• oxytocin

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Johns Hopkins, SFI

Books & works: Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias

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