One of the assumptions behind neuroethology is that the brain and the genes that are involved in its development are shaped by the success of the behaviors exhibited by a species so that the genes can be transferred to the next generation (Dawkins 1976; Ewert 1982; Teuber 1970). This idea, which can be traced to Charles Darwin, if implemented fully would have prevented the wastage of over a billion dollars by Henry Markram, who failed to work out the neural code, a failure that was anticipated as early as 2012 (at a conference I attended in Northeastern Brazil spearheaded by invertebrate neurophysiologists) since the work tried to reverse engineer the function of the brain in the absence of any behavioral analysis and culminated in the tell-all documentary about the failure, In Silico (Abbott 2020). One of Markram’s supercomputers is now languishing in the jungles of Northeastern Brazil, in a town called Macaíba, which was seen as goodwill gesture (between Swiss and Brazilian politicians) so that Markram’s methods could be extended to Brazil vis-à-vis his colleague, Miguel Nicolelis, whose methods—also detached from behavioral reality in the quest to make the paralyzed walk by way of brain-machine interfaces—ended in failure because the behavioral measures to evaluate the prosthetic effectiveness were absent, which caused millions of dollars to be squandered from the Brazilian treasury mainly spent in the US, Germany, and Japan (Regalado 2014; Tehovnik 2014, 2017; Tehovnik et al. 2013). In addition to grounding the brain to a species’ behavior for cost-saving reasons, taking an neuroethological approach also protects against the development of an opaque and highly abstracted and anthropomorphic nomenclature such as—attention, intention, expectation, deliberation, imagination, intelligence, arousal, and so on, a lexicon that is based on introspective-phrenology and that is often used without consideration of a construct’s transparency and generalizability vis-à-vis psychophysical measurements subjected to environmental parameters. Neuroethology attaches the circuits of the brain to behavioral measurables that can be evaluated immediately by an experimentalist that is not in the field thereby enhancing scientific clarity. The environmental features that an animal encounters for its survival must ultimately be represented by its nervous system thereby focusing one’s research toward environmentally-utilized features per animal. There is no point looking for features related to the English language if the subject speaks only French.
References
Abbott A (2020) Documentary following implosion of billion euro brain project. Nature 588:215-216.
Ewert J-P (1982) Advances in vertebrate neuroethology. Trends Neurosci 5:141-143.
Regalado A (2014) The top technology failures in 2014. MIT Technology Review. Cambridge, MA.
Tehovnik EJ (2014) Do cérebro para a máquina. Será? Mente e Cérebro, Fev.
Tehovnik EJ (2017) Waking Up in Macaíba. Paramirim, RN, Brasil.
Tehovnik EJ, Wood LC, Slocum WM (2013) Transfer of information by BMI. Neurosci 255:134-146.
Teuber H-L (1970) Subcortical vision: a prologue. Brain Behav Evol 3:7-15.
Simply measuring neural activity, it is possible to manipulate neural activity using electrical and pharmacological methods where adaptive behavior emerges from the coupling of brain, body, and environment.
Computational neuroethology on the other hand emphasizes that nervous systems are embodied, that is, sensory preprocessing, biomechanical properties, and the integration of sensing and action during active perception are all critical for behavior.
A good question with obvious answer: studying neurons is a part of studying brain. However, not totally agree with the last sentence. There's no evidence shows that different languages are not sharing similar logical intuition.
Neuroethology is the study of the neural bases of behavior. August Krogh, the Danish physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1920 for his seminal work in capillary function, said "“For a large number of problems, there will be some animal of choice…on which it can be most conveniently studied,” or “Organisms that exhibit extremes of adaptation may reveal general principles not readily observable in less extreme species.” Krogh is now considered the Father of Neuroethology.
The brain processes input coming from the external world via the senses, and since the output of the brain is behavior, it follows that neuroethologists study neurons and neural networks and their associated cells in the context of the environment for which they have evolved. Having said this, it also must be said that studying the mammalian brain is a daunting process due to the extreme complexity of the brain structures. As a result, neuroethologists often study "model" vertebrate species such as birds, reptiles, amphibians or fishes with brains that often exhibit many of the same organizational principles found in the mammalian brain yet lack their enormous number of cells and in some way may be considered "simple." Of course, even the fish or frog brain are enormously complex structures that perform extraordinarily complex behaviors.
It is interesting that much of what we know about neuronal function in the brain comes from Hodgkin & Huxley's classical studies of the squid- an invertebrate! H&H also shared the Nobel in 1963 for their studies of this animal's giant axon and worked out in exquisite detail, the ionic currents flowing during an action potential- changes in membrane potential used as information currency by the nervous system. H&H were clearly neuroethologists sensu Krogh, having chosen the squid giant axon as a model system precisely because it afforded them a very large neuron which was amenable to electrophysiological studies. Why is it so large? This large-diameter invertebrate neuron, with its rapid propagation velocity, subserves the squid's escape response used to avoid danger, and was under intense evolutionary selective pressure to increase in size to better protect its host, and thus itself.
Simply measuring neural activity, it is possible to manipulate neural activity using electrical and pharmacological methods where adaptive behavior emerges from the coupling of brain, body, and environment.
Computational neuroethology on the other hand emphasizes that nervous systems are embodied, that is, sensory preprocessing, biomechanical properties, and the integration of sensing and action during active perception are all critical for behavior.
Dear Peter Narins,
Thank you for your insightful comments. We are about to start a visual neuroethology course at the Baylor College of Medicine. I will make sure we include the work of August Krogh.
Sincerely,
Ed Tehovnik
Dear Edward,
Thanks for your note. Does your course include other senses besides vision?
Peter
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