Natural Neuroscience: Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors

by Nachum Ulanovsky

Genres: Science

302 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2025

Reviews

[Frederic]

This was a very convincing and thought-provoking journey into studying the animal and human brain in more naturalistic environments. Because the author primarily studies bats, I leaned a lot about their neural codings of navigation (over 10km each night in Egyptian fruit bats) and social bondings in vampire bats. Truly fascinating stuff. Will come back for great citations that argue for a “both-and” — that is, lab and naturalistic — approach to understanding the brain.

[Will Redman]

I didn't realize how much this book's vision sunk into my subconscious until I started off calmly telling Alyssa about it and ended by screaming that if I saw another goddamn drifting orientation experiment I was going to lose it. Fortunately, she agrees. A lot of interesting summary of neuroscience results that don't get too much attention in system's neuro labs, which was especially damning when put one after another. My dog Chester could see I was fired up reading this, so he decided to help me study natural behavior by stealing the book and trying to eat it.

[owlette]

I think chapter 1 could be a recommended reading for anyone interested in epistemology, philosophy and history of science, or research methodology to learn what the field of neuroscience has been doing, or more precisely, what they haven't been doing. It turns out, they don't really know jack shit about what brains do because decades of observations made in artificial, controlled lab environments don't reproduce in natural environments. This is a practical example of the harms of reductionism, which extends to the social sciences as well. The line, "Neuroscience is still in its pre-Newtonian age," sums up the state of the discipline very well.