Thinking about neuroscience: Essays from the field

Thinking about neuroscience: Essays from the field
- February 4, 2025
- UC Irvine social scientists Megan Peters, cognitive sciences, and Lauren Ross, logic & philosophy of science, offer expertise on authorship practices, memory and mood in The Transmitter’s new book
-----
In its first book, The Transmitter – an online neuroscience publication - has featured the work of UC Irvine social scientists Megan Peters, cognitive sciences, and Lauren Ross, logic & philosophy of science. Thinking about neuroscience: Essays from the field, available for download online, features “scientist-written essays that explore the culture, craft and practice of the field [of neuroscience]; some of its major questions and new ideas; and its evolution over time.” Broken into 10 sections, the collection includes pieces that capture the breadth and depth of the field and the opinions within it.
Peters, an associate professor of cognitive sciences who specializes in perception, metacognition and computational cognitive neuroscience, contributed an essay in the book’s Problem Solving section on the importance of properly crediting long lists of contributors.
“With larger, collaborative and increasingly interdisciplinary efforts, the question of who really gets credit for a given scientific output becomes much more complex—and established cultural norms no longer work,” she writes. “Research contributions in neuroscience and psychology are more numerous, more varied and more specialized than ever, and the increasing adoption of open-science practices calls for even more nuanced credit assignment.”
She closes with a possible roadmap on how to move forward, focusing on credit assignment systems that “make information obvious, transparent and accessible in daily life.”
Ross, an associate professor of logic & philosophy of science who specializes in the general philosophy of science as well as the philosophy of biology, neuroscience, and medicine, contributed an expert response to the question posed in the book’s Big Picture section: What, if anything makes mood fundamentally different from memory?
“Memory and mood both have genuine causes within and outside of the brain, but they also differ in important ways,” she writes. “In particular, it is worth considering whether mood states have more psychological causes and characterizations (in contrast to biological and neurobiological causes), especially when compared with memory.”
Focusing on the influence of self-interventions as a key differentiator, her piece argues for further exploration to support advances in both areas.
To read more, download the book in full at https://www.thetransmitter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/TheTransmitter-thinking-about-neuroscience-essays-from-the-field.pdf.
-----
Would you like to get more involved with the social sciences? Email us at communications@socsci.uci.edu to connect.
Share on:
Related News Items
- UC Irvine's Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science earns top spots in latest faculty rankings
- What are mechanisms? Unpacking the term is key to progress in neuroscience
- Driving diversity and inclusion in logic & philosophy of science
- At the credit crossroads: Modern neuroscience needs a cultural shift to adopt new authorship practices
- UCI Experts On: Causation in science
connect with us: