Сатирическая статья о земной нейронауке:
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Brain Science on Planet Earth
This section of the Guide explains how the human species found on planet Earth attempt to study their own brains and behaviour, and what they have found so far. The answer seems to be that they use highly implausible methods and haven’t really worked anything out just yet. But careful inspection reveals that that is OK, because they weren’t actually all that interested in finding out the right answer in the first place.
Хорошо описывает для людей со стороны, чем занимаются нейроучёные (в широком смысле).
When the Article is ready the human scientist will try to submit it to a Journal, where it might be accepted and then others will be able to read about the experiment and how it supports the story. Curiously, each journal has a number, and the brain scientists are extremely motivated to have their Article accepted by the journal with the biggest number. The Journals with big numbers only accept articles that describe findings that are very unlikely to actually be true9, so the brain scientists have the difficult job of judging exactly how implausible to make their results sound, whilst making sure they still support the story10. A good tactic is to pretend that nobody has ever done an experiment like the one described in the Article before and thus because it is so new it is very unlikely to be true, and so it should be accepted in a big number Journal. When this doesn’t work the authors change the way the Article is written to make the results of the experiment sound a little bit less unlikely and then they send it to a Journal with a slightly smaller number. They then repeat this process, often multiple times, until their Article gets accepted. All the other brain scientists read the Journals with the big numbers, even though the Articles published there less likely to be true than in Journals with smaller numbers, but of course as discussed above the human brain scientists are not actually very interested in whether the story is true or not but mainly want the attention that comes with the big number Journals.
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There doesn’t seem to be much hope that human stories will improve over time, especially if most humans aren’t actually that interested in whether they are true or not. Indeed, this seems to be consistent with the history of the endeavour so far. Even over the few Earth-decades that humans have been studying their own brains and behaviour, the stories made up by brain scientists haven’t really got any better. Instead, what happens is that different stories become popular at different times, often in a slow cycle. The way it works is like this. Of course, humans have very limited imagination, and most brain scientists are not inventive enough to make up their own story, so they decide to believe the story proposed by other, more popular scientists. All the journals, including those with big numbers, want people to read their pages, so they try to publish Articles that support the most popular stories told by popular scientists.
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