Björn Brembs

So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems.

The ultimate Open Access timeline

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.

What is the difference between text, data and code?

Lately, there has been some public dreaming going on about how one could just switch to open access publishing by converting subscription funds to author processing charges (APCs) and we’d have universal open access and the whole world would rejoice. Given that current average APCs have been found to be somewhat lower than current subscription costs (approx.

What happens to publishers that don’t maximize their profit?

Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials?

Come and do research with us!

While the first day (day 2, day 3) was dominated by philosophy, mathematics and other abstract discussions of chance, this day of our symposium started with a distinct biological focus.

 Martin Heisenberg, Chance in brain and behavior

First speaker for this second day on the symposium on the role of chance in the living world was my thesis supervisor and mentor, Martin Heisenberg.

Chance in animate nature, day 2

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA (

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

*During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Flashback: Programming Free Will – creative robots

For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their

 content

, rather than counting the applicants’ previous publications. However, not all of DFG’s panels seem to be on board.

Research assessment: new panels, new luck?

Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any further disruptions.

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000 (DOI: 10.1038/76606). Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

Over the weekend, I received the following short message from a Hotmail account:  This email is full of signs that the student may not have been all that interested in any information or discourse, but instead trying to make some sort of ‘gotcha’ statement. Curiously, the author first states that their scientific training is lacking and then they disagree with a scientific position.

How not to contact faculty as student

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to be relevant to almost every single scientist on the planet: research evaluation.

How scientific are scientists, really?

This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and a second one by Nelson, which just appeared in PLoS Genetics.

Laboratories around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from nearly every organism, past and present.

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

Yesterday, Alex Kacelnik published yet another fascinating discovery – one of many over the years out of his lab. This time, they show how birds can pick even five consecutive locks to get to a food reward:  According to the authors, the birds solve this problem by trial and error, i.e., in the operant, goal-directed way, which is the learning mechanism we study in our lab.

…and now for some lock-picking cockatoos

There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

Are we inadvertently supporting the defunding of public science?

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

I usually don’t write about politics, but there has been one or the other exception to this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I’ve been missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in recent times, perhaps one of the few readers of this obscure blog has found it somewhere and can point me in this direction?

Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?

UPDATE

: I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland.

[updated]Churchland: “Ignore science and live a make-believe life!”

In the process of migrating content from the old site to WordPress, I’m also moving some articles from there and re-publishing them here as posts. This one is such a case, originally published on December 7, 2006.

Brains as output/input systems

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion.

With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE

*, 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections.

The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle

At seemingly every possibility in a discussion on peer-review, people apparently feel the need to emphasize that in the current model reviewers (or most academic editors handling peer-review) are not being paid.

Peer-review is not free – it’s a subsidy for publishers

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times.

Free will:  it’s not what you think it is

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software:  Nothing really has changed in a dozen years, it seems

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion

Just before Christmas 2019, the Washington Post reported, based on “people familiar with the matter”, that the US Justice Department were investigating the Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan for potentially “working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors”. Besides such a highly unusual connection, the article also reiterated unsubstantiated (but mainly circulated by publishers) allegations that access

Is the SNSI the new PRISM?

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access”. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy

Is this Smits’ tripleC moment?

Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are fundamental prerequisites for evidence-based policies and informed decisions on how to proceed with bitterly needed reforms.

A study justifying waste of tax-funds?

Scholarly journals, on the face of it, emerged in the 17

 th

century as a medium to facilitate communication of scientific discoveries among interested scholars. In the 21

 st

century, it’s not all that different: researchers form communities around topics in which they share a common interest: Journal of Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Neonatology, Journal of Economics or the British Educational Research Journal.

Academic publishers and competition

This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013:

In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In most if not all fields, scholarly journals are ranked in a hierarchy of prestige.

Solutions to the looming crisis in science

In her recent editorial on Sci-Hub (an initiative I support), editor-in-chief of

 Science Magazine

Marcia McNutt wrote: The editorial is essentially trying to make the somewhat tenuous but not implausible case that using sci-hub may lead to subscription cancellations which, in turn, may lead to scholarly societies (like those of Dr. McNutts employer, AAAS) to miss revenue they need in order to pay for important services (such as paying

In which a Science editorial demonstrates the ineffectiveness of OA activism

Over the years, publishers have left some astonishingly frank remarks over how they see their role in serving the scholarly community with their communication and dissemination needs. This morning, I decided to cherry-pick some of them, take them out of context to create a completely unrealistic caricature of publishers that couldn’t be further from the truth.

How do academic publishers see their role?

You’d be forgiven if after reading the title of this post, you thought scholars have started to revolt against journal rank. Unfortunately, while there is DORA and of course the evidence that journal rank is like homeopathy, most researchers are still fine with ex-scientists rejecting 92% of all submitted articles and charging a grand sum of more than US$30,000 per article that they select on a whim.

Publisher selects the best open access science – authors complain

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968:  On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting.

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

Scientists as social parasites?

Time and time again, academic publishers have managed to create the impression that publishing incurs a lot of costs which justify the outrageous prices they charge, be that US$11M p.a. for an

 Elsevier

Big Deal subscription or an article processing charge (APC) of US$5,200 for a

 Nature Communications

article.

How publishers keep fooling academics

I have now posted the job ads for the PostDoc position in our lab at

 Nature

,

 Science

, SfN and FENS.

PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized

As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet (I started reading primary scientific literature for a high-school project around 1989), I have closely followed its digitization.

7 functionalities the scholarly literature should have

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net.

The

 F

orkhead B

 ox

P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies,

 dFoxP

, is necessary for a type of learning called operant self-learning, which resembles some aspects of language learning.

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

Maybe try another kind of mandate?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

It’s the time of the year again where 30,000 neuroscientists head to the US to talk neuroscience. This year the big annual conference is in Washington, DC, one of the three cities able to host this large event. Our first poster will be up on Tuesday morning and shows results from operant self-stimulation experiments using optogenetics and dopaminergic neurons.

Heading for #SfN23 with two posters

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

Who’s responsible for the lack of action?

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.

Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI’s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):  Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

Why academic journals need to go

“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality”

Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79

On the productivity of scientists

This is the tweetlog covering July 3-5: Interesting! We find something similar in flies: Live fast, die young: Long-lived mice are less active https://feedly.com/k/16RDz21 It smells fishy: Copper prevents fish from avoiding danger https://feedly.com/k/12gw14F @

 biocs

@

 google

Yes!

Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess

In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions.  At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption is very reasonable, as many more eyes see each paper in such journals and the motivation to shoot down such high-profile papers might also be higher.

Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?

Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in a long list of demonstration of what they think of the intellectual capacities of their customers. It’s precisely because it is only one in a long row that I initially didn’t feel like commenting.

Is this supposed to be the best Elsevier can muster?

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives.

 As a reader:

I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues.

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

For our course this year I was planning a standard neurogenetic experiment. I hadn’t ever done this experiment in a course, yet, just two weeks ago I tried it once myself, with an N=1. The students would get two groups of

 Drosophila

fruit fly larvae, rovers and sitters (they wouldn’t know which was which). About ten larvae from each group would be placed on one of two yeast patches on an agar plate.

If only all science were this reproducible

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis

 et al.

entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

The data clearly show that publications in

 Cell

,

 Nature

or

 Science

(

 CNS

for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.

No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles”. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Your university is definitely paying too much for journals

The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data:  The context here is that the “bottom” refers to scientific articles that aren’t cited, assuming that no citations mean low scientific quality of that article.

Citation inflation and incompetent scientists

Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank"&gt;Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

Sven Fund, CEO of the German publishing house de Gruyter was recently interviewed by Richard Poynder in his widely read interview series on open access. In the interview, he first avoided answering the question if de Gruyter had ever lobbied against open access.

Is de Gruyter’s lobby-by-proxy not lobbyism?

I just got the nicest decline to review ever:  That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Retiring from science?

It is one of these rare events when I can post a video of one of my own talks. This one was in Berlin earlier this year, organized by The Lost Lectures in a very unusual venue, the Stattbad Wedding:  I’m planning to work more closely together with our computing center here to be able to record at least the lectures I give in English here at the university. So maybe there will be some more videos here, soon.

Video: Free will as an evolved brain function

Since the birth of our daughter, we spend our summers in Sweden, just like I used to, when I was little. This not only allows her to get more practice in Swedish then she gets talking with just me or her grandmother, but we also get to really recharge our batteries in the fabulous wilderness up there.

How to recharge in Sweden

A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication

Following the example of Glyn Moody, I thought I’d start a log on the tweets I send around. One never knows what’ll happen to Twitter and besides, this provides a neat place to store and find everything. So here are the tweets for July first and second: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Science, red in tooth and claw

*During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from February 9, 2011: *     In this week’s journal club, we talked about an old paper from 1918!

Flashback: Nothing new in science?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from April 19, 2011:

Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!

*As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011: *

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):    BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

One more reason to publish negative results

The recently released development draft for SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), authored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the library-based publishing system I’ve been perpetually arguing for.

SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?

Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best: In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic

 Library

Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

This year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior (WCALB) will be on one of my oldest and most central research projects, the commonalities and differences between operant and classical conditioning.

Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning

Amazing bead chain experiment

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

No Evilsevier DEAL!

The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA.

German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?

tl;dr:
 
 It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article.

Collectively, the world’s public purse currently spends the equivalent of US$~10b every year on scholarly journal publishing. Dividing that by the roughly two million articles published annually, you arrive at an average cost per scholarly journal article of about US$5,000.

How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at

 F1000 Research

. The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

The way academic publishing should be

UPDATE
 
 , 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one virtual desktop and the text another. In this way, I can actually review on-screen, but it is one heck of a work-around and by no means convenient.

I cannot take it any more.

Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!

This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of

my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a fine line or any efforts to convince the community that action is required will fail.

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT:  Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction“follow the money!” a tad too literally?

Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot

The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

In support of subscripton cancellations

Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public?

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

Talk about egg on face!

 Nature

“the world’s best science”

 Magazine

sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science.

Even the most thorough peer-review at the ‘best’ journals not up to snuff?

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

Looking for a PhD student

After Mike Taylor kept complaining about how horrible my old e107 platform was (which obviously it isn’t: I love this CMS), I finally gave in and moved everything over to a new home. The entire brembs.net domain with all its subdomains is no longer hosted in the good old US of A, where its home was since about 2000, when I moved there myself. After almost ten years back in Germany, I’ve now brought my online presence back home as well.

A new home for bjoern.brembs.blog

I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some of the survey results here. The working group polled all faculty members of the university on various questions concerning scholarly publishing.

How important is the Impact Factor?

Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, tenure or promotion, or because of funders’ open access mandates?

How academic institutions neglect their duty

The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a peer-review leak a long-term preservation leak a link rot leak an evaluation/assessment leak a data visualization leak … … … and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.

Scholarly publishing in three cartoons

bjoern.brembs.blog

"[Standing on the shoulders of
giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants)"
is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It
is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the
primary literature preceding the current work. In today's competitive
scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely
misplaced. Instead, what many assume to be required is to convince
everyone that you are the giant, the genius, the prodigy who is
deserving of the research funds, the next position, tenure.

Facilitating this trend are
[journals](https://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/2008/11_1/briefs/03/) who
actively contribute to the existing institutional [incentives for such
hype](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2013/08/29/study-even-in-science-america-skews-toward-hype/)
by claiming to publish "[the world's best
science](https://www.nature.com/citation_pages/images/nature_com.gif)"
or "[the very best in scientific
research](https://www.sciencemag.org/site/help/about/about.xhtml)" and
by simultaneously allowing only very few citations in their articles.

Thus, it should not come to anybody's surprise that we find more and
more articles in such journals , which claim that they found something
unique, novel and counterintuitive that nobody has ever thought of
before and that will require us to [re-write the
textbooks](https://sandwalk.blogspot.de/2013/10/time-to-re-write-textbooks-nature.html).

Point in case is the combo of the article entitled "[Temporal structure
of motor variability is dynamically regulated and predicts motor
learning
ability](https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n2/full/nn.3616.html)"
with its accompanying [news-type
article](https://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038%2Fnn.3633) (written
by scientists). Both articles claim that the researchers have made the
game-changing discovery that something long though to be a bug in our
movement system is actually a spectacular feature. It is argued that
this is such a huge surprise, because nobody in their right mind would
have ever thought this possible. Their discovery will revolutionize the
way we think about the most basic, fundamental properties of our very
existence. Or something along those lines.

Only that probably most people in the field thought it should be
obvious.

[Skinner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner) is largely
credited with the analogy of operant conditioning and evolution. This
analogy entails that reward and punishment act on behaviors like
selection is acting on mutations in evolution: an animal behaves
variably and encounters a reward after it initiated a particular action.
This reward will make the action now more likely to occur in the future,
just as selection will make certain alleles more frequent in a
population. Already in 1981, Skinner called this "[Selection by
Consequences](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7244649)". Skinner's
analogy sparked wide interest, e.g. an entire [journal
issue](https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=BBS&volumeId=7&seriesId=0&issueId=04),
which later appeared in [book
form](https://books.google.de/books?id=3nY7AAAAIAAJ&dq=variability+mutation+operant+selection&source=gbs_navlinks_s).
Clearly, the idea that reinforcement selects from a variation of
different behaviors is not a new concept at all, but more than three
decades old and rather prominent. This analogy cannot have escaped
anybody working on any kind of operant learning, except they are
seriously neglecting most relevant literature.

Elementary population genetics shows that the [rate of
evolution](https://books.google.de/books?id=257cnXAoREwC&dq) is
proportional to the rate of mutation. This means that [the more variants
a population has to
offer](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/283/5400/404.abstract), the
higher the rate of evolution will be. This, as well, is very basic and
known since decades past.

It is thus no surprise that, for instance, [Allen
Neuringer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Neuringer) has been
studying the role of variability in operant conditioning for decades and
also our own lab is
[studying](https://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000443)
the neurobiological mechanisms underlying behavioral variability. It's a
well-known and not overly complicated concept, so of course people have
been studying various aspects of it for a long time. What was always
assumed, but never explicitly tested, to my knowledge (but see
**update** below!), is the relation between behavioral variability and
learning rate. Does the analogy hold such that increased behavioral
variability leads to increased operant learning rates, just like
increased mutations rates lead to increased rates of evolutionary
change?

Now, the authors of the research paper find that indeed, as assumed for
so many decades, the rate of learning in operant conditioning is
increased in subjects where the initial variability in the behavior is
higher. This is, at least to me, a very exciting finding: finally
someone puts this old assumption to the test and demonstrates that yes,
Skinner got something right with his analogy. To me, this alone is worth
attention and media promotion. Great work, standing on the shoulders of
a giant, Skinner. This is how science should work, great job, Wu *et
al*.! However, this was apparently not good enough for the authors of
these two articles.

Instead of citing the wealth of earlier work (or at least Skinner's
original 1981 article), the authors claim that their results were
surprising to them: "Surprisingly, we found that higher levels of
task-relevant motor variability predicted faster learning". The authors
of the news-type article were similarly stunned: "These results provide
intriguing evidence that some of the motor variability commonly
attributed to unwanted noise is in fact exploration in motor command
space."

The question is of course, if this is ignorance on the part of the
(seven in total) involved authors or a publication strategy, perceived
to be superior to the "standing on the shoulder of giants" approach (and
what a giant Skinner is!). It is, of course, moot to speculate about
motives or competence without asking the authors directly. Perhaps there
is even a third way besides incompetence or hype that I'm not aware of.

I don't know any of the authors personally, so I decided to ask a mutual
friend, [John Krakauer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Krakauer),
one of the leading experts in this field and whose papers the authors
cite, what he thought about these articles. Specifically, I asked him
what he thought about the citation of his article as a reference for the
surprising nature of their finding:

> Until now, motor variability has been viewed as an unwanted feature of
> movements, a noise that the brain is able to reduce only with
> practice^[8](https://jn.physiology.org/content/108/2/578.full)^.

In his reply, he corrects the authors:

> <div>
>
> It is true that in our paper we were focused on variability as
> something that needs to be reduced when best performance is required.
> That said, in the discussion we explicitly mention that variability
> can also be used for exploration. As an example of this distinction,
> we mention the difference in variability between when songbirds are
> rehearsing their song versus when they must perform perfectly for
> their mate.
>
> </div>

Apparently, at least one of the cited authors finds this citation not to
be in order. With regard to the original article, John wrote: "Given
that we posited that there is an operant component in error-based
adaptation in 2011, I'm glad to see that their results are consistent
with this view."

It appears to me that the authors may know the relevant literature and
selectively cite it in order to make their research results appear more
earth-shattering and novel. If that were the case, it is up to anyone to
speculate what the motivations behind this strategy were. In the best of
all worlds, the authors do know their ways around the more modern
literature of their specific subfields, but are unaware of the
historical work in their field nor of the relevant work in related
fields. In this case, the two papers are prime examples of the
insularity of some fields of inquiry and demonstrate how more deep and
interdisciplinary reading/training could improve the isolation of highly
specialized fields in science. That being said, the authors being
unaware of such a prominent concept at the heart of their method would
constitute an indictment in its own right, at least in my books. Then
again, one can never be sure to have read all the relevant literature
and perhaps this can happen even to the best of us?

The news-type article doubling down on the hype reveals another aspect
that has been worrying me for some time now. Given that the most
important factor for a manuscript to be published in the most
high-ranking journals is to get past the professional editor, the
ensuing peer-review is likely to be biased in favor of publishing the
paper. For one, the reviewers being experts in the field, they can cite
the resulting paper and make their own research look hotter. Moreover,
if the manuscript is published, it offers the chance of padding their
resume with such fluff news-type articles and get (or keep) their own
name out and associated with the big journals. Obviously, any
publication in such high-ranking journals benefits not only the authors
themselves, but also the field at large, creating a whole new set of
incentives for peer-reviewers and authors of news-type articles.

**UPDATE**, February 10, 2014:

Allen Neuringer just sent me one of [his
papers](https://web.reed.edu/psychology/docs/LearningToVary.pdf) in
which he showed that training rats to be highly variable enabled them to
learn a very complicated operant task, when animals trained to be only
moderately variable failed to learn the task or did do only very slowly:
[Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2002, 9 (2),
250-258](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03196279). In
contrast, Doolan and Bizo (2013) have tried to duplicate these findings
in humans and [failed](https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-349000232.html).
Thus, the principle behind the experiments of Wu *et al.* have already
been tested and established in a mammalian model, just not in humans.
Thus, it's still good to see that humans are no exception in these
processes, no doubt about that, but surely there is nothing
revolutionary or even surprising about this work. On the contrary, based
on work in rats, and from predictions many decades ago, the results
presented by Wu *et al.* are precisely what we would have expected.
Needless to say, the authors cite neither Skinner nor Neuringer.

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the primary literature preceding the current work. In today’s competitive scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely misplaced.

Hiding the shoulders of giants?

**UPDATE**: I'm still not completely sure I understood Churchland
accurately, but there are
[comments](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Bj%C3%B6rnBrembs/posts/bep7LyTYhDS)
suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the
interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself!

I really like [Patricia
Churchland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland). I've
read some of her articles, know a little about her conceptual framework
of 'neurophilosophy', really enjoyed her recent interview with Kerri
Smith on [Neuropod](https://castroller.com/podcasts/Neuropod/3839213)
and so on. I feel that we agree on pretty much anything and I think I'd
like her book she's promoting in recent interviews, if I were to read
it. But this morning a read a statement from her, which I found very
hard to understand. The statement appears in an interview for the New
Scientist, re-published on
[Slate](https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/12/the_self_as_brain_disturbing_implications_of_neuroexistentialism.html):
After she states that it's causal links all the way back to the big bang
and nothing we do has any impact on that, she states:

> If you are crippled by the thought that it is causality all the way
> back, you have essentially made a decision to make no decisions. That
> is very unwise. If by thinking that free will is an illusion you
> believe that it does not matter whether you acquire good habits or
> bad, hold false beliefs or true, or whether your evaluation of the
> consequences of an option is accurate or not, then you are highly
> likely to make a right mess of your life.

Apart from the slight non-sequitur of first saying what we decide makes
no difference whatsoever as it's all determined anyway and then turning
around and warn of the consequences bad decisions can have, what I find
particularly surprising is that she apparently doesn't find it troubling
at all to tell people to completely ignore that science she thinks tells
them to quit worrying about the consequences of their actions. I could
paraphrase her sentence above "It's very unwise to let your life be
crippled by pesky scientific facts!" In her words, taking science at
face value and derive a self-consistent world-view from scientific data
amounts to "metaphysical goofiness". Do I understand her correctly that
we should simply make up our own world and behave in it as we see fit,
scientific evidence be damned? Or, more sinister, only reference
scientific evidence if it suits your world-view and if it contradicts
it, it's ok to ignore it?

Now, given the scientific evidence, there is no justification for a
belief in determinism anyway. In that respect, [determinism is like a
religion](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n807.html): scarce
evidence, if any, but many adherents nonetheless. As such, there really
is no need to embrace non-sequiturs or to ignore scientific evidence:
science leaves us plenty of
[elbow-room](https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-Varieties-Worth-Wanting/dp/0262540428)
to allow for a [scientific
concept](https://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/14/rspb.2010.2325)
of [free will](https://vimeo.com/72751046) ([recent
article](https://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00920/full)
pretty much along the same lines). It is thus very surprising that
Churchland not only doesn't follow the evidence on determinism, but
moreover appears to suggest to ignore evidence if it doesn't correspond
with the way we'd like to live.

I'm not quite sure what to make of all that.


[*During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [June
13](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/news749.html),
2011:*]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

<div>

</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>

Most neuroscientists would subscribe to the sensorimotor hypothesis,
according to which brains mainly evaluate sensory input to compute motor
output. For instance, Mike Mauk wrote now over ten years ago: "brain
function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output
transformations and how they are produced" \[1\]. Tony Dickinson
recognized already in 1985 that "Indeed, so pervasive is the basic
assumption of this model that it is common to refer to any behaviour as
a 'response' and thus by implication \[...\] assume that there must be
an eliciting stimulus." \[2\]. Textbooks to this day mostly begin with a
graph showing sensory input entering the brain (usually via the eyes)
and then motor-output leaving it.However, more and more information is
now accumulating that to the extent that these stimulus-response
relationships actually exist, they may be the exception, rather then the
rule of what brains are doing when they're not in a laboratory
experiment. Perhaps most recently, in the area of human brain research
this change in perception has also begun. Marcus Raichle's "Two views of
brain function" \[3\] provides plenty of evidence against the
sensorimotor hypothesis. There are many more examples of this kind of
evidence. For me personally, the most eye-opening one was this famous
video by Ken Catania:

</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>

If all behavior were always organized according to stimulus-response
schemes such as the C-start response in fish, animals would be extremely
vulnerable not only to predators (or prey), but of course also to
competitors. [Evolution](http://brembs.net/evolution){target="_blank"
rel="external"} is a competitive business: if you're too predictable,
you lose.

In our labs, reproducibility is key to success. This is precisely the
reason why escape responses are so well-studied: these are the
exceptions where animals have specialized in speed and sacrificed
unpredictability in an evolutionary trade-off. I would hypothesize that
no species would survive for long if all other behaviors sacrificed
unpredictability in this way,

More likely, brains need to balance input-output processing with
[output-input processing](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/brains.php),
with the latter probably being both the more prevalent and the
[ancestral form of behavioral
control](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n532.html). It is this
delicate balance that brains must constantly strike to survive,
procreate and be successful. If we want to understand what the brains we
study are really doing when they are not in the lab, we need to take a
step back and design more experiments that don't require a response, but
an action. This process has already started, but the realization that we
have been heading down the stimulus-response direction for too long has
not widely set in yet, IMHO.

The stimulus-response approach has been hugely successful for the most
derived and simplified forms of behavior -- and we're still far from
done with the task. Now comes the vastly more complex task of
understanding how brains decide which action to take next, when there is
no simple stimulus providing unambiguous information. Many labs have
already started to embark on this task. In our lab, we study [animals in
the complete absence of discrete sensory
stimulation](http://brembs.net/spontaneous), in order to find out how
brains create "something out of nothing". Which actions are you
studying?

This post was originally written for the launch of the new social
network for neuroscientists,
[NeurOnline](https://neuronline.sfn.org){target="_blank" rel="external"}
(@[SfN](https://sfn.org){target="_blank"}).

</div>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

\[1\] Mauk, M. (2000). The potential effectiveness of simulations versus
phenomenological models Nature Neuroscience, 3 (7), 649-651 DOI:
[10.1038/76606](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/76606){rev="review"} 
\[2\] Dickinson, A. (1985). Actions and Habits: The Development of
Behavioural Autonomy Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, 308 (1135), 67-78 DOI:
[10.1098/rstb.1985.0010](https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1985.0010){rev="review"} 
\[3\] Raichle, M. (2010). Two views of brain function Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 14 (4), 180-190 DOI:
[10.1016/j.tics.2010.01.008](https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.01.008){rev="review"}

Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in
our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the
editors at the [New York
Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/opinion/brooks-beyond-the-brain.html).
The title of this op-ed piece says it all: "beyond the brain". The
author, [David
Brooks](https://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html),
claims: "The brain is not the mind." Last I looked (which was a few
seconds ago, I admit), beyond the brain was the Pia mater, the
subarachnoid space, the Arachnoid, the dura mater and the skull. I
wonder, just where precisely does the magic mind sit, if it's not the
brain? In the subarachnoid space, squeezed between layers of connective
tissue and blood vessels? Or is it even beyond the skull, hovering above
our heads? Now, Mr. Brooks doesn't mention the [Psychokinetic Energy
Meter](https://ghostbusters.wikia.com/wiki/P.K.E._Meter), but he makes
it sound as if in his world this is the scientific instrument with which
one would measure the capacity of the mind to move the body. Probably
most disappointingly, Mr. Brooks bolsters his magic-mind hypothesis with
the classic argument from incredulity: 'I don't understand it, so it
must be magic': "It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain
activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes
and desires of the mind." This is like saying "it's probably impossible
to build a heavier-than-air flying machine" before the Wright brothers'
first flight. More disturbingly, it's like saying: "I don't understand
no evilution, therefore magic man dunnit".

Mr. Brooks caps his magic-mind hypothesis off with a few short
paragraphs essentially saying "we have free will because I think so,
free will is magic, so there's magic in the head -- and science is too
limited to get into magic, don't you forget that!" Given that his main
point is that the mind is magic, one can only assume that he means
neuroscience is too limited to understand free will sort of like
medicine is too limited to understand homeopathy and physics is too
limited to understand astrology. This final point is probably the only
accurate statement of the entire piece: magic in the head is about as
thoroughly debunked as homeopathy or astrology.

What we call 'mind' exists in a similar way as colors exist: our brain
creates it. Colors are real in the sense that our brain makes colors
real, it constructs a reality with colors, but spectral properties of
light are not colors. Just like colors, the mind, free will, are real,
but not in the way Mr. Brooks apparently thinks: they're not magic.
Neural activity makes our minds just as real as colors, but neither are
magic nor do they exist outside of our heads. The fact that we don't
understand, yet, how the brain does that, is not a valid reason to
explain our ignorance away with magic, but a boon to neuroscientists (or
we'd be unemployed). The correct answer to the question: "what is the
mind?" is not "magic", but "we don't know how, but all the evidence says
it's our brain that somehow creates it".

This very fundamental insight of the last 40 years or so of
neuroscience, obviously entails that with every discovery we will be
better able to predict future actions. If that seems disappointing,
tough luck, live with it. Today, we clearly cannot "take pretty
brain-scan images and \[...\] use them to predict what product somebody
will buy", this is pop-neuroscience. However, much like we got better at
predicting the weather by studying it, we will get better at predicting
future actions by studying the brain -- as we have already become much
better over the last decades. Importantly, and I cannot stress this
enough, we don't need magic to understand that we will nevertheless, not
even with unlimited time and resources, *never* be able to fully predict
human behavior. Just like no neuroscientist postulates magic in our
heads, no meteorologist would postulate that it's magic that prevents us
from making accurate weather forecasts and no astrophysicist would claim
that magic messes with Pluto's unpredictable orbit. Apparently, it will
take a few more decades until it sinks in that the brain is a little
more complex than the weather or our solar system. Anybody who thinks
that the brain needs magic to bring about the mind with free will
thoroughly underestimates it. Everybody and their grandma today has
already realized that complex nonlinear dynamics ("butterfly effect",
"chaos" -- coincidentally coined in the same decade that dualism
essentially died) prevent accurate weather forecasts on a principle
basis, not out of technical problems. These effects even make the orbit
of Pluto unpredictable! The data from brain recordings and behavioral
studies show mathematically analogous nonlinearities, which lead to the
predictability of behavior to decay exponentially with the forecasting
period [even in
flies](http://brembs.net/spontaneous/mayeetal_2007.html). Clearly, one
can assume that humans are less nonlinear and more predictable than
flies as apparently [Joshua Greene at Harvard seems to
postulate](https://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/GreeneCohenPhilTrans-04.pdf),
but even as a fly researcher, I find that somewhat hard to accept. But
hey, what does a fly guy know? Be that as it may, as long as humans are
equally or less predictable than fruit flies, the data from our own
little lab alone already alleviate Mr. Brooks' fears: brains will not
become fully predictable with more neuroscience, only gradually more so.

It seems there is a deep-seated frustration that science explains away
magic, even in otherwise science-o-phile individuals. More and more
research ([some of it reviewed
here](https://bjoern.brembs.net/?wpdmact=process&did=MTQuaG90bGluaw==))
is accumulating that demonstrates that not only our flies, but many,
perhaps all animals have the capacity, given the right circumstances, to
make different decisions under identical circumstances. In fact, as has
[often](https://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/prote.pdf‎)
[been](https://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/4/831.full)
[argued](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00815496#page-1)
([review here](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/content39.html)) before,
such protean behavior is a prerequisite and an inevitable outcome of
[evolution](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n616.html){target="_blank"}.
Why should animal brains possess this capacity and human brains not? If
this kind of free will disappoints you, tough luck, live with it. Free
will is the capacity of the brain to make decisions that are
*influenced* by all the events leading up to the decision, but not
*determined* by them. Free will is a brain capacity that is of course
determined by neural activity, but the neural activity is no more
[deterministic](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n807.html) than
the weather is. In fact, I would postulate that our brains are even less
deterministic than the weather. Call it wiggle-room, or [elbow
room](https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-Varieties-Worth-Wanting/dp/0262540428),
the nonlinearity of decision-making relegates the question of just how
deterministic the brain really is to a (highly interesting!) academic
debate: in practice, brains will always be less predictable than the
weather, [irrespective of any quantum effects playing a role or
not](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finding-free-will){target="_blank"}.
This modern, scientific concept of free will emphasizes that our freedom
can of course not be absolute. Freedom is always a matter of degree, of
shades of gray between the blacks and whites of determinism and
stochasticity. In fact, this is precisely how such nonlinearities
operate, by implementing deterministic and stochastic components to
create phenomena that are neither fully deterministic nor completely
stochastic. As we understand the deterministic components better, we get
better at predicting nonlinear behavior, but the very nature of all of
these systems fundamentally prevents fully accurate forecasts. In
reality, we create [robots with free
will](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n778.html), we even start to
understand the neurophysiological mechanisms by which neural processes
become unpredictable, but Mr. Brooks writes in the NYT that because he
doesn't understand how the neurons are doing it, it must be magic.

For the life of me, I have no idea what is getting into people like Mr.
Brooks who at least give off the very succinct impression that they fear
that the human brain needs magic, or else we might one day understand it
too well for our own good. Have they no respect for the lump of tissue
between their ears? At least he gets a thorough bashing in the many of
the comments and of course by the inimitable
[Neurocritic](https://neurocritic.blogspot.de/2013/06/a-conversation-on-mindless-neuroscience.html).

One of our graduate students might have just discovered the neural
circuit that allows fly brains to decide which way to turn, even in a
virtual environment without any cues. Now please excuse me while I go
back to explaining away some magic by studying fly neurons.
