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Rethinking Neuroscientific Methodology: Lived Experience in Behavioral Studies

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Abstract

The role of experience in the process of behavioral refinement has been undertheorized by philosophers of neuroscience and neuroscientists. By examining sleep studies in behavioral neurobiology, I show that scientists frequently invoke a variety of lived experiences—what I call experientially derived notions—to refine the behavior under investigation. Of note, these behaviors must remain sufficiently fuzzy throughout experimentation to permit refinement. The aim of this article is to recognize that neuroscientists’ use of lived experience necessarily helps refine behaviors and render those behavioral terms relevant to human life.

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Notes

  1. I note that this account, by focusing on behavioral neuroscientific methodology and moving beyond subjective experience, differs from standard neurophenomenological accounts that attempt to incorporate experimental subjects’ phenomenology in experimentation. Nonetheless, it shares perspective with arguments that have drawn attention to the naive assumption that cognitive scientists can separate cognitive experience from their own first-person experience. For a detailed discussion of this debate in cognitive science, see Gallagher (1997).

  2. Note that this also distances the present account from others strictly advocating for the use of folk psychology or everyday concepts.

  3. Sometimes the study explicitly addresses a component of sleep, whereas other times it is just taken to be representative of sleep more generally.

  4. Note that this characterization of reversibility says nothing about causality. Whether or not one achieves such tight redescription is a separate issue from establishing causal claims, as there are many challenges even when the conditions for reversibility are thought to be highly characterized and reliable. For example, see the discussion on challenges to causal claims in optogenetics by Jazayeri and Afraz (2017).

  5. Van Campen notes Proust’s influence on neuroscience, citing Bogousslavsky’s scholarship that Proust came from a family of doctors and was friends with many neurologists (Campen 2014, p. 47).

  6. Computer-assisted video tracking and supervised learning are changing these numbers by measuring the micromovements of flies, not just their usual walking (Geissmann et al. 2019).

  7. I note how this notion of experience captures the more complex relationship between the empirical and normative as well: eight hours/night might be a prescription cultivated by social, labor practices, but human experience that one needs this amount to function well can also arise from a belief about what science has told us about sleep. For more, see Gavriloff et al. (2018).

  8. Consider this passage, that mutant Drosophila sleep metrics, “should also consider ongoing changes in behavioral responsiveness and sleep intensity, in order to fully capture sleep functions in different strains. For example, a long-sleeping fly may be sleeping lightly, or a short sleeping fly might be sleeping deeply; activity monitors and simple webcam interfaces cannot distinguish between these possibilities” (Faville et al. 2015, p. 1).

  9. Consider our knowledge of the difference between a bout of insomnia and being endlessly stimulated. The consequent lack of sleep could be measurable and identical by duration; the experiences would not be. But it is our own lived experience that guides the criteria we set to distinguish the two.

  10. In the Afonso et al. study, referring to sleep that is seen to be in tune with human sleep actively plays a role in the conclusions researchers draw about the roles of TARA and CycA, which later allows them to claim that there is a “network of cell-cycle genes in sleep regulation” (Afonso et al. 2015, p. 1724).

  11. Examples include deciding the appropriate humidity and temperature of the fly room, when to age match flies, how to time and regulate light exposure, and so on.

  12. Paul Feyerabend also captures the failures of empiricism with respect to many ways persons can come to know science at the stages of testing, assimilating the results of a test, and understanding of theories (he mentions subliminal perception, latent learning, and posthypnotic suggestion, among others); however, he equates experience with sensory experience as opposed to working with an expanded notion as I have done here (Feyerabend 1969).

  13. For example, imagine deciding when two tasks measure the same capacity: “we appeal to the sameness of underlying mechanisms, but sameness of underlying mechanisms depends on sameness of capacity, and judgments of the latter depend, as we have argued, upon how capacities are operationalized in tasks” (Francken et al 2022, p. 10).

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Acknowledgments

I am incredibly grateful to Mazviita Chirimuuta, Colin Allen, Michael Dietrich, Jim Woodward, John Morrison, Evan Pence, Morgan Thompson, John Bickle, Jo Anne Fordham, Mahi Hardalupas, Annika Froese, Dasha Pruss, Rose Novick, Vivian Feldblyum, Nuhu Osman Attah, William Conner, and Yosef Kaplan Dor for providing invaluable comments and discussion at different stages and over many revisions. Thank you as well to the audience of the Philosophy of Neuroscience at the Gulf IV, where part of this work was presented. A special thanks goes to Dragana Rogulja and Alexandra Vaccaro for creating a space for me to work within the Rogulja Lab, where I was introduced to fly sleep research. Finally, my sincere thanks to the several anonymous reviewers whose helpful suggestions greatly improved this work.

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Lamentably, no funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.

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    Nedah Nemati

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Nemati, N. Rethinking Neuroscientific Methodology: Lived Experience in Behavioral Studies. Biol Theory (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-024-00460-w

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