Neuroscience

I don't plan on writing much about neuroscience(!), but the following quotation caught my ear. It comes from BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific – a series of interviews with scientists about their life and work.

It's not a programme I'd usually seek out – it just happens to be on after the Today programme, but every episode I've heard has been really interesting, and has got me thinking.

Neuroscience calls itself a science (obviously), but it's very different from [a physicist's] science of physics, or a chemist's science of chemistry, because it's a set of techniques searching for a common answer, rather than a real structured level of analysis of a scientific problem.

... in physics, the questions are agreed. You could walk into any physicist's office or lab, and say, "What are the big questions in physics?", and they'd reel them off: "How did the universe start?", "What's matter made of?"; and everyone would agree. But if you ask that question to a neuroscientist, they'd just be puzzled by the question.

Neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, on The Life Scientific