Theory of spike initiation, sensory systems, autonomous behavior, epistemology
Editor
Romain Brette
The Life of Behavior (2019)
Alex Gomez-Marin, Asif A. Ghazanfar
PubMed: 31600513 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.017
In this paper, the authors remind us that in neuroscience, our “object” of study is living stuff, and they articulate three essential principles of behavior: 1) materiality, 2) agency, 3) historicity.
Materiality means that nervous systems are not just abstract “information processing” machines: they are embedded in a body, living in a world. Behavior is not just the “output” of the brain; brain and body have to be understood as a unit, and the environment as an Umwelt (the meaningful environment of that particular organism).
Agency means that organisms act on the world in a purposeful way. This implies that the very concept of stimulus is ill-formed. Animals do not normally respond to stimuli. On the contrary, they act according to some goals, and this is in turn produces changes in sensory signals. The sensory “input” is therefore not an independent variable: sensory variables and motor variables are circularly related. An important implication is the interpretation of motor variability: if the goal is invariant but conditions change, then motor variability must be produced in order to serve the invariant goal (this is basically the concept of feedback control), the variability is not necessarily “noise”. In summary, an action is not a response.
Historicity means that organisms are individuals. They differ from each other not because they are noisy variants from an ideal organism, but because they have a different history (evolution, development, learning). These differences are functional rather than noise to be averaged out.
The paper ends with this sentence, which I think is very important: “We hope we have persuasively articulated the obvious so as to expose the nontrivial”. What this means (in my interpretation at least), is that with our reductionist methodology, we tend to forget the living nature of our object of study and focus on relations between the various kinds of measurements that we can make. Of course organisms are living beings: this is obvious. But how? How is behavior organized so as to make this possible? Of course living beings are agents and have goals. But how? what does it imply for the way they interact with the environment? Of course organisms are individuals. But how does that relate to the organization of behavior and how it changes? Because these are obvious facts (living beings, agents, individuals), it seems at first that we don’t need to explain them. But the opposite is true. Explaining the obvious is highly non trivial: it is obvious because it is in front of our eyes and we are used to it, not because we have explanations for them. Therefore, explaining the obvious should in fact be our key goal.
A peeriodical is a lightweight virtual journal with you as the Editor-in-chief, giving you complete freedom in setting editorial policy to select the most interesting and useful manuscripts for your readers. The manuscripts you will evaluate and select are existing publications—preprints and papers. Thus, a peeriodical replicates all the functions of a traditional journal, including discovery, selection and certification, except publication itself.
Why set up a peeriodical? The traditional journal has changed remarkably little in centuries and many people feel that scientific publishing is stuck in a rut, subject to a corporatist drift, and is not serving science optimally. The advent of preprints in many fields beyond those served by the ArXiv is liberating the dissemination of research, but most other journal functions have not been replaced effectively. Now you—all researchers—have the opportunity to select and certify research according to your own criteria. We expect peeriodical subject matters and editorial policies to be extremely varied. Some peeriodicals may wish to target narrow domains, while others will adopt a generalist approach. Some peeriodicals will be inclusive, focusing on discovery, whereas others may aim to enforce stringent quality criteria, prioritising certification. The point is that all approaches are permitted and supported—we hope you will innovate! You can create multiple peeriodicals. It will be users and readers who decide which peeriodicals they find useful and interesting. Users can sign up to receive alerts from any peeriodical they wish.
A peeriodical has one or more editors. Anybody can set-up a peeriodical and either operate it alone or invite colleagues to form an editorial board or community. The editors can select "manuscripts"—existing papers or preprints—to consider, either spontaneously or through suggestions from other researchers, including of course the authors. Note that there is no obligation that the manuscript be recent; for instance, we expect that some peeriodicals could focus on underappreciated classics. After all, predictions about scientific impact are generally more accurate for the past than the future. If the editors wish, they can solicit reviews for the manuscript via the Peeriodicals interface. Reviews will be published and the referees will have the option of posting anonymously or signing their review. Editors may decide at any time to accept, reject or comment on the manuscript, taking into account the comments received. They may of course suggest improvements to the manuscript or underlying study. If they justify their decision, their editorial decision will also be published.
How will Peeriodicals fit into the publishing landscape? We see them as a space without entry barriers in which researchers can innovate and explore new approaches to scientific dissemination, in parallel to the traditional publishing industry. There are related and complementary initiatives, notably the overlay journals promoted by Tim Gowers, exemplified by Discrete Analysis, but also Science Open Collections, PLoS Channels, the APPRAISE initiative and Peer Community in... Each of these projects has their own specificities and goals. Nobody yet knows exactly what the future will look like, but we strongly believe that we are about to experience a period of rapid evolution in the dissemination of science and we hope that Peeriodicals will inspire and help you to share your imagination and expertise with the whole research community.
For those starting a peeriodical, you will discover that the hardest part is building up an audience. Unfortunately, we can't yet guarantee you the exposure you would get from a paper in a glamour journal. Reviews with scientific content will be mirrored on PubPeer, offering an audience through the PubPeer browser and Zotero extensions. However, it will be largely up to you to run your publicity, most likely through social media. We are on Twitter (@PEERIODICALS) and will of course help out as we can.
Get started now by requesting an invitation with the link in the top right menu.