The next revolution in neuroscience is happening outside the lab

Neuropsych - The next revolution in neuroscience is happening outside the lab Classical neuroscience has revealed a lot about the brain, but its controlled setups often miss how cognition plays out in real-world behavior. Neuroethology bridges neuroscience and ethology by recording brain activity in freely moving subjects, revealing richer, more varied neural dynamics. Though the field still faces major technical and analytical hurdles, it could reshape our understanding of human cognition and inform new treatments for neurological disorders. If asked to describe what sets a cognitively complex species like humans apart from others, many would list specific behaviors, such as telling stories, creating art, planning for the future, or navigating complex social structures. Given that, you might expect that neuroscientists attempting to understand the advanced brain would study it in action, as a person or animal moves through the world. For much of its history, though, neuroscience has done the opposite. “When I was a graduate student, neuroscience was almost entirely about isolating specific circuits to test how the brain controls your senses and movement,” says Dr. Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “You’d show an animal a stimulus, observe how it responded, and record which neurons fired.” This research defined foundational principles of the field, but according to Miller, when you study the brain at this level, “you’re really only looking at its edges.” “We know surprisingly little about how the brain manages more complex cognitive behaviors, like making a decision or socializing,” says Felipe Parodi, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, co-advised by professors Michael Platt and Konrad Kording. “Studying primates and humans in the confines of the laboratory, where they can’t interact freely, won’t tell you what the brain is doing when a primate forms a bond, infers an intention, cooperates, or manages conflict.” Classical neuroscience doesn’t fully capture how the brain operates in more natural, real-world contexts. Parodi isn’t the first to identify this problem. Researchers have long argued that we need to measure brain activity as animals behave freely, but this type of research has only recently become possible thanks to advances in the tech needed to study freely moving animals and in the computational methods used to analyze the massive datasets created through these studies. In 2025, Parodi co-authored a synthesis on primate neuroethology, an emerging field that blends neuroscience and ethology - the study of an animal’s natural behavior - to track brain activity under the messy, real-world conditions that brains like our own evolved to handle. Despite being in its infancy, the field is already proving its worth. Early studies show that freely moving primates display richer neural dynamics than restrained ones, for example, even when they are performing very similar tasks. That doesn’t mean results from classical neuroscience are wrong, but it does suggest they don’t fully capture how the brain operates in more natural, real-world contexts. For that, we may need a paradigm shift. The limits of classical neuroscience and ethology Neuroscientists...

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