Natural Neuroscience Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors

A new approach to brain research that emphasizes studying the brain under naturalistic conditions.


Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift toward real-world relevance, natural behaviors, and ecological validity. In Natural Neuroscience, Nachum Ulanovsky presents the conceptual, empirical, and technological underpinnings that enabled this new field. Natural neuroscience researchers posit that when studying any brain region in any animal, whether standard mammalian species such as rodents and primates or nonstandard species, it is crucial to pursue the animal’s natural behaviors and to consider the natural problems it needs to solve. By preventing rich natural behaviors, says Ulanovsky, we miss key aspects of brain function—and we may not even know what we miss.

The author surveys recent studies that have begun to move in this direction across multiple subfields of neuroscience, including sensory, cognitive, social, and behavioral neuroscience. He discusses technological advances that are allowing the pursuit of more naturalistic experiments, including methods for recording neural activity in freely behaving, freely moving animals (e.g., wired and wireless electrophysiology and imaging); methods for manipulating neural activity in freely moving animals (e.g., wired and wireless optogenetics); and methods for quantifying the details of behavior. He makes connections across the four major scientific disciplines that focus on understanding behavior—neuroscience, behavioral ecology, ethology, and psychology—bringing them closer together, and closer to real life.

Nachum Ulanovsky is Professor of Neuroscience and Head of the Center for Learning, Memory and Cognition at the Weizmann Institute of Science.