[WTI-trainee] APHINE Presents Stuart Firestein, November 19th, 4:00 PM " Towards a Pluralistic Approach to Neuroscience."

[Natalia Castelo Branco Matos]

We are thrilled to announce an upcoming session of our neurophilosophy
seminar series featuring *Professor Stuart Firestein *from Columbia
University.

🎙️ Talk Title: Towards a Pluralistic Approach to Neuroscience.
📅 Date: Tuesday, November 19th, 2024
🕒 Time: 4:00 - 5:30 PM
📍 Location: 100 College Street, Room 1167

*About the Speaker: *Professor Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of
Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences. His laboratory
studies the vertebrate olfactory system as a model for investigating
general principles and mechanisms of signal transduction. Alongside his
scientific work, Professor Firestein is equally recognized for his
thought-provoking perspectives on the scientific process, emphasizing the
critical role of ignorance and failure. In his 2012 book, *Ignorance: How
It Drives Science*, he explores the idea that scientific progress thrives
on what we don’t know rather than what we do. In his follow-up 2015
book *Failure:
Why Science Is So Successful, *Professor Firestein underscores failure as
the engine of discovery, reframing it as an integral and positive part of
the scientific journey.

*About the Talk: *There is an old Chinese proverb that says one dog barks
in the night and a hundred other dogs bark at that dog, and someone says,
Wow! I wonder what’s going on!!? Too often scientific research, and in
particular neuroscience research, is like a hundred dogs barking at a new
result.  The classic case of this in neuroscience is what I call the
tyranny of Hubel and Wiesel, although I am using that provocatively to
consider the larger concept of maps in the brain.  This has been a
pervasive idea from phrenology to the connectome and has directed millions
if not billions of research dollars and millions of graduate student and
postdoc hours into efforts to track down these maps.  In this talk, I’ll
have a closer look at maps in the brain and suggest why it may not be the
best way to imagine brain function.  The problem is not that it may be
wrong - it surely is at least partly correct. The problem is that it has
dominated neuroscience research to the exclusion of other useful
perspectives that don’t get funded or published. One solution to this is
that neuroscience needs to adopt a more pluralistic approach. Pluralism
admits of more than one correct answer to any problem even if those answers
are incommensurable.  How this might be practiced in Neuroscience and what
that entails will be the subject of the last part of the talk and hopefully
the discussion.


Looking forward to seeing you there!

Yours Truly,
APHINE Leadership (Clayton, Alec, Natalia)

*If you are unable to attend in person and would like to attend virtually,
join the discussion over Zoom
<https://yale.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b04ef1c576332f4626a1db32b&id=53cdeb38ec&e=8691455c16>.*

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