Given Their Narrow Studies and Slim Narrow PhD Dissertations, Why Are We So Swayed by Neuroscience PhDs?

The tendency of the average person to be in awe of someone holding a PhD is a tendency that often does not make sense. Let us consider some reasons why you should not assume some person is speaking correctly about some complex topic merely because that person has a PhD in some subject relevant to that topic. 

The first reason is that people often don't have to do all that much studying relevant to some topic to get a PhD that may be considered relevant to that topic. To get a PhD in some field, you need typically to first do one or two years of study on that topic, taking courses in a graduate school. You normally cannot enter such a graduate school until you first get a bachelor's degree. But it is not at all true that you need to have first got a bachelor's degree with a major in such a topic. For example, you do not need to get a bachelor's degree in neuroscience before being admitted into a graduate program in neuroscience.  In fact, you do not even have to have a bachelor's degree in biology before entering a graduate program to get a master's degree in neuroscience.  So it typically works like this:

Getting a neuroscience PhD

Some universities are granting master's degrees in neuroscience after only a single year of study. 

Very many people make the mistake of thinking that someone with a PhD in some subject must have spent much more time studying the topic than someone with a bachelor's degree in that topic. That is not necessarily so. A person getting a bachelor's degree in some topic may have earned 60 college credits by taking courses in that subject, along with 60 general education credits in other subjects. A person getting a PhD in some subject might earn only 72 college credits in the subject, with between 28 and 60 of the credits being course credits (the rest being credits granted for doing research).  The courses in graduate programs are normally harder than the courses you take to get a bachelor's degree. But the total amount of time someone took in studying a topic to get a master's degree or PhD in that topic may be not much greater than the total amount of time someone took to get a mere bachelor's degree in that topic. 

The second reason for not being so in awe of PhD's is that the program of study you must complete to get a PhD is often a narrow program of study. So, for example, you can get a PhD in neuroscience without doing hardly anything to study the human mind and human behavior. We should not make the mistake of assuming that a person getting a PhD in some topic relevant to a question is a person who has studied most of the information that is relevant to that question. Such a person may have had a very narrow type of studying in which he learned about only a small fraction of the things relevant to the question being studied. 

For example, someone lecturing you about the mind-body relation may have done much studying of bodies and very little studying of minds. You can get a neuroscience PhD without doing much of any studying of human minds and the full spectrum of human mental states and human behavior.  Let's look at one example.  One of the leading universities near me granting medical-related degrees in New York state is Stony Brook University (also called SUNY Stony Brook). Below (as listed on this page) are the "core courses" that are required to get a neuroscience master's degree from this university:

• Introduction to cellular neuroscience 
• Introduction to molecular neuroscience
• Sensory and motor systems
• Neural Plasticity, Learning and Memory
• Introduction to Neural Computation
• Statistics and Data Analysis
• Intro to Computational Neuroscience
• Statistics and Data Analysis II 
• Intro to Mammalian Neuroanatomy

Below are the "elective courses" that you can choose from to meet the requirements for the master's degree in neuroscience:

• NEU 517: Cellular Signaling (Fall, 3 credits)
• NEU 534: Principles of Neurobiology (Spring or Summer, 3 credits)
• NEU 537: Neurotransmission and Neuromodulation (Spring, 3 credits)
• BNB 563: Advanced Topics in Neuroscience I (Fall, 1-3 credits)
• BNB 564: Advanced Topics in Neuroscience II (Spring, 1-3 credits)
• BNB 565: Developmental Neuroscience (Fall, 1 credit)
• BNB 566: Neurobiology of Disease (Spring, 1 credit) 
• BNB 597: Seminar Themes (Fall, 1 credit)
• JRN 501: Foundations of Science Communication I (Fall or Spring, 1 credit)
• JRN 503: Foundations of Science Communication II (Fall or Spring, 1 credit)
• GRD 500: Integrity in Science (Spring, 1 credit)
• BGE 510: Graduate Genetics (Spring, 3 credits)
• MCB 503: Molecular Genetics (Fall, 3 credits)
• MCB 520: Graduate Biochemistry I (Fall, 3 credits)
• MCB 656: Cell Biology (Spring, 4 credits)

Notice something missing here? There isn't a single course in psychology or human behavior.  There isn't a single course that will involve studying the topics of the human mind and the vast variety of human mental states and the vast variety of mental experiences that humans have. My guess is that the course on "Neural Plasticity, Learning and Memory" is mainly devoted to discussing neuroscience experiments on memory, which is mainly research based on rodents. 

Why should we think that anyone is qualified to lecture us on the source of human minds or the nature of human minds when they have merely taken courses such as those listed above?  Why should we think anyone is qualified to make claims such as "all mental states are brain states" or "all behavior is brain produced" when they may not even have decently studied human mental states and human behavior and human mental experiences? A thorough study of human mental states and human mental behavior requires reading many hundreds of long volumes. You can probably get a neuroscience PhD without reading any of such volumes. 

Similarly, the page for the Rutgers Neuroscience PhD program tells us you get a PhD from that program with as little as 28 course credits (a typical college freshman will earn 30 course credits in his first year). The page lists a narrow course of required study that does not require any psychology courses:

"All students must complete a total of 72 combined credits required for the Ph.D. degree. Of the 72 credits, at least 28-course credits (at a minimum B grade average) are required, of which 24 must be at the 500 level or above. Required courses include 8 seminar credits of Advanced Studies in Neuroscience, 1 credit of Ethical Scientific Conduct, 3 credits Neurobiology 555, a Statistics course, one biochemistry-cell biology course, and an Ethics Refresher course. Up to 44 research credits are also required to bring the required total to 72."

Since the "research credits" mentioned are typically limited to some extremely narrow topic, we have here a narrow and very limited course load to get a neuroscience PhD. It seems that you can a get Rutgers PhD in neuroscience while doing very little to study minds or human behavior. 

But should we be very impressed by PhD's because they have written a PhD dissertation, typically a document of more than 100 pages? Not really. One reason is that PhD dissertations are almost always on extremely narrow topics.  The fact that the dissertation was written does nothing to show that the person did much more to gain general broad knowledge about the subject he is getting a PhD in.  So, for example, you might study two years to get a master's degree in US history. You then might do your PhD dissertation on some very narrow topic such as the social and economic factors that helped caused the Panic of 1893. But research so narrow does little to show that you improved your general knowledge of US history after getting your master's degree in US history.

A similar situation holds true in regard to neuroscience PhD dissertations.  Such PhD dissertations are almost always extremely narrow in focus. The page here allows you to see the titles of some recent neuroscience PhD dissertations submitted at Emory University. In the first 3 pages of search results, we see the following examples:

• Voltage-gated Sodium Channels as Modifiers of Scn1a-derived Epilepsy
• On the mechanisms of presynaptic inhibition of primary afferents
• Cellular oxygen-sensing through HIF-1α and NF-κB: A therapeutic target for ischemia.
• The role of calcineurin in the recovery of cognitive function following isoflurane anesthesia
• Inhibition of the schizophrenia-associated microRNA miR-137 disrupts Nrg1α neurodevelopmental signal transduction
• Characterization of LR11/SorLA in Mild Cognitive Impairment
• Modulators of behavioral sensitivity to cocaine following dopamine β-hydroxylase (DBH) inhibition
• Transcriptional regulation of Homer1a during Pavlovian Fear Conditioning
• The cellular role of Atoh1 in development and regeneration in the mammalian cochlea
• A role for the synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2C (SV2C) in dopamine homeostasis and Parkinson's disease
• Neuroadaptive Changes in the Serotonin System Associated with Chronic SSRI Treatment in the Context of Cocaine Use
• Functional and structural subdomains of the intracellular loop domain of the GABAAR α1 subunit
• Cellular Trafficking and molecular heterogeneity of amyloid beta seeds. How similar are beta amyloid aggregates and prions?
• Protective Actions of the Brain-Expressed Receptors GPR37 and GPR37L1 in Models of Neurological Disease

As we can see from the examples above, neuroscience PhD dissertations tend to be extremely narrow in focus. There's no reason to think that anyone doing research on topics so narrow would necessarily acquire much more general knowledge about neuroscience by doing research so narrow. 

Another reason we should not be too impressed by people doing neuroscience PhD dissertations is that such dissertations tend to be rather slim in length. There is a very interesting graph in the long blog post here, entitled "How long is the average dissertation?" According to the graph at the end of the post, PhD dissertations in history tend to be an average of about 300 pages, but PhD dissertations in neuroscience tend to be average of only about 130 pages. The graph lists neuroscience PhD dissertations as being some of the shortest PhD dissertations of about 100 subjects examined. 

The post also reminds us that there may be relatively little prose required to produce a PhD dissertation, telling us this:

"However, most don’t realize that dissertations are filled with lots of white space, e.g., pages are one-sided, lines are double-spaced, and the author can put any material they want in appendices. The actual written portion may only account for less than 50% of the page length."

PhD dissertations can be filled up with graphs, long quotations, and long data tables, requiring the author to write relatively few words. My guess is that the average neuroscience PhD dissertation has maybe something on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 original words. Ignore online statements claiming that PhD dissertations are about 60,000 words. It seems that people are getting neuroscience PhD's with dissertations that are several times shorter than  60,000 words. 

For comparison, one or more of the individual blog posts that I have written (among thousands of posts on my blogs) probably have more original words of text than in many a neuroscience PhD dissertation. My post here has 9000+ words, and my post here has 29,000+ words (almost none of them quoted words). The total number of neuroscience-relevant words I have written for this blog's posts is probably several times greater than the  number of words in the average neuroscience PhD dissertation.  The total number of relevant citations of neuroscience papers I have made on this site is probably several  times greater than the number of neuroscience literature citations contained in the average neuroscience PhD dissertation. 

It is estimated that the vast majority of PhD dissertations are read by only very few people, fewer than twenty. It seems that most PhD dissertations do not even get published as scientific papers. A paper states, "Results showed that only one-quarter (25.6% [95% CI: 23.0, 28.4]) of dissertations were ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals." 

There is no particular reason why we should be in awe of someone's authority merely because that person has a neuroscience PhD. You only have to do about one or two years of coursework to get a master's degree in neuroscience, almost all of it very narrowly focused. No great amount of broad study is needed to move from a master's degree in neuroscience to a PhD in neuroscience.  No broad study of the human mind or human mental states or human behavior is required to get a neuroscience PhD. You can get a neuroscience PhD without ever having studied the full spectrum of human mental capabilities or human mental states or mind-relevant human observations. Very many neuroscience PhDs make statements suggesting they have dismally failed to make any broad study of human minds and human behavior, and very many neuroscience PhDs make statements suggesting they have failed to properly study relevant low-level research findings about brains and their components, findings suggesting brains or their components are too slow, noisy, unreliable and unstable to be foundations of human mind and memory (contrary to the typical claims of neuroscientists). Many of those findings are discussed on the posts of this blog. 

The human mind (including the full spectrum and diversity of human mental experiences and capabilities) is a topic of oceanic depth. Most neuroscience PhDs are not mind experts, but merely brain experts. Why should we have great confidence when we hear statements about the source of human minds, coming from those who are not mind experts? 

You can use Google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) to get abstracts of the published papers of particular neuroscience PhD's.  Just go to https://scholar.google.com/ and type in a person's name. You will typically find that their papers have a narrow focus, as if the scholar spent most of his time "looking through a strawhole." Don't be too impressed by a "strawhole scholar." If you want to hitch your wagon to some authority, look for some scholar of very broad learning. Better yet, never put too much weight on the teachings of any one person, but let the "universe of observations" in all its spooky diversity be your main guide.