Simple does not mean easy to understand. There are many scientific concepts that are hard to grasp at first but then become very simple once a sufficient level of understanding has been achieved.
What I mean by simple here is that the truth is clear, concrete and unclouded by any f**kery.
In recent times, the neuroscience field has seen an explosion in development of new tools and technologies. Some of these technologies include optogenetics (controlling brain activity with light), CLARITY (rendering a whole brain transparent) and live imaging of brain activity in intact and awake animals. Never before have there been so many options available for dissecting the mechanisms of brain function.
Although the explosion in tool development is very exciting for both basic scientists and even clinicians (especially as some of these technologies make their way to human applications), it is important to keep the end goal in sight — to discover truths and facts.
However, the end goal has now become far more convoluted. Who can afford the most fancy equipment? Who can use the latest techniques in their experiments? There are now more and more papers published in high-profile journals in which 90 percent of the focus is on fancy tools and technologies rather than answering scientific questions. Scientists are now spending thousands and thousands of dollars on massive equipment just for the sake of saying that they used the latest tool in neuroscience.
It is not necessarily wrong to focus on technique if your end goal is to make new tools. However, when you are claiming that you are answering a scientific question even though all you’ve done is show off that you can pull off challenging techniques, then that is false advertisement!
Many systems neuroscience papers do such false advertisement. These studies will often have the following pattern: 1) Make a mouse do a behavioral task, 2) Buy ultra-expensive microscope, 3) Perform crazy difficult surgical procedures to implant imaging window, 4) Image brain activity during behavior, 5) Find that region X is activated following a behavior, 6) Make conclusion that region X is involved in cognition, 7) Concoct a florid paper published in Nature.
The problem is that these kinds of flashy studies have not really found anything new. After all, what do you expect the brain to do during a behavior? Of course there will be some kind of neural activity that goes on to produce the computation underlying the behavioral task. The most important questions remain unanswered: What is the logic of such neural circuit activity? Why are these neurons active and not those? So in the end, we have not really learned anything new, except that X and Y scientists in Z lab are just crazy good at doing flashy and fancy experiments.
Science does not have to be that complicated. You can teach anyone to perform work on the lab bench. What is very important (and not as easily taught) is the ability to ask a good scientific question and design simple and easy-to-do experiments that adequately address the question.
In the words of the legendary neuroscience professor Dr. Solomon Snyder from Johns Hopkins University, “The best experiments are ones that you can do in a day, and that will teach you something no matter the outcome.”
