I’ve been reading through Lynn Nadel and John O’Keefe’s book on spatial memory, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. I heard John O’Keefe speak at a conference right around the time I was discovering, though without quite knowing what it even was, neuroethology. He mentioned this book, and as I started gathering my thoughts for my next project, whether that’s starting some postdoctoral research or writing a book of my own about memory, I began working my way through it. It’s really a delight to read a book: after a steady diet of journal papers one begins to wonder if it’s possible to think about science outside that dismal land (first spied by Bertrand Russell) of perfect precision and total incomprehensibility. In a book you have the latitude–no, the responsibility–to speculate, to talk about philosophy and methodology; you have to gather a miasma of information (and the hippocampus literature is as miasmic as a Lovecraft story) into a coherent whole.

One of the discussions Nadel and O’Keefe have on methodology is the distinction between the psychological and the ethological approachs to the brain. The psychological approach is predicated on the existence of the psyche, an idealization of “mind”. In other words, there is such a thing as a mind, and if you have one then you (or it, but that’s another discussion right there) have all the properties of a mind. Psychology is concerned with those properties, things like memory, attention, and percepts. Whether these things exist in themselves or merely as formal categories is somewhat irrelevant, but the neuropsychologist chooses to look for neural correlates to these general, abstract entities: brain structures and processes that embody specific types of memory, perception, or attention. The methodology that results from this choice, O’Keefe and Nadel point out, is the “classical” type of experiment: control as many variables as possible in order to isolate the mechanism that generates a particular type of behavior.

The ethological approach, on the other hand, is less concerned with the existence and workings of “the mind” than it is with the way in which particular organisms behave in their environment. Neuroethology looks for the mechanisms that a particular brain uses to contend with a particular problem. What this leads to in terms of methodology are more open-ended questions: instead of restraining a dog and only interesting oneself in salivation as The Response, the neuroethologist is interested in the whole range of behaviors, and how those are related to the ecological needs and role of the animal.

There is something to be said for Nadel and O’Keefe’s contention that the psychological approach has its place in more advanced branches of science. Human minds are drawn to models and abstractions, and in realms like physics, chemistry, and possibly molecular biology there is tremendous analytic power in abstractions like mass, charge, bonds, and so on. Perhaps as we come to understand better how brains work we will have some properly articulated models to work with. Until then it seems to me that an ethological approach is not only more effective but also more ethical, less wasteful of animals. But there is also something in me that wants to draw a thicker line, to say that science really has no business generalizing human existence, in sacrificing individuality to Humanity or Knowledge or any of the grand and lovely statues of Man that seem to sprout up at the hands of dictators and technocrats. I don’t suppose it’s my line to draw, except for myself. So here is what I’ll probably be doing in a year or so.

Also, here are many, many pictures of bees.

(cdm | AgainstPsychology )