The next revolution in neuroscience is happening outside the lab

""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 largely examined isolated circuits by presenting controlled stimuli and recording neuron responses during constrained tasks. That approach produced foundational principles but limited insight into complex cognitive functions such as decision-making, social bonding, inference, cooperation, and conflict management. Laboratory confinement prevents natural interactions that underlie these behaviors. Technological advances in portable neural recording and computational analysis now permit measurement and analysis of brain activity in freely moving primates and humans. These methods generate large datasets and enable study of cognition in ecologically valid contexts, opening possibilities to understand how neural circuits support real-world behavior.

Read at Big Think