By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

A standard response to people who say “everything is everywhere” is that we just haven’t found the right question yet. Our response is, we should care about explaining function, not finding areas, and if the functions we are interested in aren't arealized, that’s important to know.

From this preprint

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

When people, on occasion, DO careful lesions that spare white matter then tend to get VERY different results than classic lesion studies, for example, Broca's Area lesions sparing language, or this:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Lesions needs to be revisited because almost all lesions intrude on adjacent white matter. Lesions disrupt complex circuits, not areas. This problem was ignored until recently because it was believed, incorrectly, that white matter was largely composed of connections to adjacent gray matter.

Agreed! And I suspect we'll get there quicker if we all adopt an attitude of openness to heterodox ideas. Unfortunately, all too often in neuroscience whenever people have suggested ideas that are even a small step outside orthodoxy they're met with extreme hostility (I don't mean from you!).

As I see it, we're facing similar problems in brain research, including the biggest mysteries like understanding depression. We have a sense of what depression is and some crude scales to measure it; the end goal is the equivalent of thermodynamics. How will we get there? Epistemic iteration! 🤞