Neural Circuits and Behavior

Abstract

The hypothesis has become widely accepted that behavior is the output of neural circuits; that a one-to-one relation exists between behavior and the spatiotemporal pattern of neuronal activity. One way to look at the physiology of the nervous system, sense organs, and effectors (chiefly muscles and glands) is to ask whether the observed behavior can be “explained” in terms of these systems. By “explain,” we usually mean describing what goes on at the next or another lower integrative level (organs, parts of organs, cells, parts of cells, molecules, ions, and processes including movements, modulations, reactions, triggering, blocking, gating, exciting, or inhibiting, etc.) leading to propagated signals that initiate or prevent organized and time-patterned activity of subsets, sets, and assemblies of sets of cells. The aims of this chapter are, first, to show that the hypothesis just stated can go very far in satisfying this definition of explanation (but see ref. 1, Chapter 6, “How Far Does Connectivity Get Us?”) and, second, to show that this “explanation” of behavior is quite inadequate and needs new terminology, new models, discovery of principles, phenomena and dependencies (which is to say, descriptive natural history), and the subsequent reductionist explanations of them.