Approaches and Assumptions in Human Neuroscience

Book excerpt: The human brain is arguably the most complex system we know of. Over the past few decades, scientists have developed several methods and theories for studying the functional organization of the brain, and how cognitive/perceptual/emotional processes might arise from the brain's electro-chemical-computational dynamics. These methods facilitated and inspired large literatures on brain-behavior links, and yet there remains a seemingly endless chasm between our simple impoverished models and the unfathomable complexity of the human brain. The purpose of this Research Topic is to ask the question: Are we thinking about thinking about the brain in the right way? In most scientific publications, researchers describe a broad and established theoretical framework and briefly describe new experimental results consistent with that framework. Here, we encourage authors to express ideas that might be radical, controversial, or different from established theories or methodological approaches. Supportive data are highly encouraged. The aim is to spark discussions about the validity and usefulness of current methodological/theoretical approaches in human cognitive neuroscience, with the goal of inspiring new approaches and ways of thinking. Neuroscience is a massive field with myriad methodological and theoretical approaches; we focus this Research Topic on approaches most commonly used in human neuroscience.