Neuroscience within academia suffers from a social disease. That disease is the sick culture of academia, a culture suffering from many problems. They include the following:
(1) Neuroscientists are members of a belief community clinging to unwarranted and groundless dogmas such as the dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind and that memories are stored in human brains (a place where microscopic examination has never discovered memories or any trace of anything anyone learned).
(2) This belief community exists within a hierarchical structure of authority having many resemblances to the hierarchical structure of authority within the Catholic Church.
(3) There is a "publish or perish" culture within this belief community, in which scientists are judged by how many papers they publish and how many citations such papers get. This culture incentivizes the production of low-quality "quick and dirty" papers, papers often untruthfully making important-sounding claims that may cause such papers to be cited, driving up the citation counts of the paper authors.
(4) There is a predominance of a variety of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of the use of blinding protocols, and the use of unreliable methods such as trying to judge rodent recall by "freezing behavior" judgments.
In the paper here we read a description of the Janelia Research Campus, which tried to do neuroscience in a different way. Part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, this campus was a very fancy set of labs set up on the Potomac River, 55 miles upstream of Washington D.C. The paper here describes this Janelia campus as "a state-of-the-art research campus and community of more than 350 scientists, split between individual research labs, project teams and shared scientific support groups." We read that "the new research campus would have organizational and reward structures very different from those found in academia." We read that one of its goals was to create an environment "insulating Janelia from the dominant academic culture through geographical separation," Wow, I guess the dominant academic culture must be in pretty bad shape if some giant lab would feel the need to insulate itself from that culture.
Below is a short video showing the palatial surroundings of the fancy Janelia Research Campus, which has a staff of 650, a budget of 300 million dollars, and a campus of 689 acres:
In the paper we read that after pondering what goals to pursue, it was decided that the big fancy new neuroscience research campus would undertake two grand goals: " i) understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits; and ii) developing novel imaging methods and computational tools for image analysis." The first of these research goals was quixotic folly. There has never been any good reason for thinking that learned information is stored in neuronal circuits. No one has ever come up with a decent theory as to how the very many types of things that humans learn could ever be stored in "neuronal circuits."
A recent article at The Transmitter site tells us that now this fancy Janelia Research Campus has decided to "pull the plug" on quite a few of its mouse researchers trying to find "how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits." We read of a "major course correction." We read, "As part of the change, Janelia is also shuttering two programs and plans to phase out projects that use rodent models, The Transmitter has learned." We may presume that one of these program was the big goal of "understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits."
Apparently the Janelia Research Campus was getting nowhere trying to back up claims that memory is stored by in neuronal circuits. Now the big fancy facility is switching gears, focusing on "whole-brain imaging of a transparent fish called Danionella."
The Janelia campus is offering a very comfy transition process for the floundering mouse researchers. The mouse researchers will be given "roughly three years to wrap up their projects and find new positions, and Janelia plans to provide each researcher with an additional $1 million in transition funding," But despite getting these ridiculously generous terms, we read below that the mouse researchers are furious, and are screaming, "Betrayal!"
In the Transmitter article we read this:
"The facility added the Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience program in 2019 and the 4D Cellular Physiology program in 2022. Janelia initially announced that it planned to fund each program for 15 years, but it now plans to close both to make way for the Danionella work".
No one should be surprised. "Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience" is a dead end that has produced no robust evidence that minds or memory could arise in any mechanistic or neural way. Those trying to produce such results have produced mainly dead-end misleading results guilty of Questionable Research Practices, results that fail to be reproduced in any convincing way. So we can hardly be surprised that some big lab would "pull the plug" on so failing a project.
But the Janelia Research Campus has not learned any humility from the failure of its earlier grand plans. Now it announces a different research plan, a plan making mistakes similar to its previous plans. We read that it now has the grand goal of "understanding how the brain generates complex behavior." The brain does not do any such thing, so this goal will fail as badly as the previous goal of "understanding how information is stored and processed by neuronal circuits." Nature never told us that brains generate behavior or that brain store learned information in neuronal circuits.
Janelia's press release announces this: "Janelia is betting on a decade-long scientific effort to understand how the brain generates behavior, pursuing a mechanistic account that links molecules, neurons, circuits, physiology, computation, and action in a living vertebrate." The vertebrate referred to is the transparent fish. They won't be able to understand how behavior arises from studying a fish.
You might say "Fool's Errand #1 has been replaced with Fool's Errand#2," but it would probably be more polite to say that Quixotic Quest #1 has been replaced by Quixotic Quest #2.
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