Introduction

Abstract

Those who study the nervous sytem ultimately aim to explain behavior. They intend to demonstrate how behavioral responses are produced as a function of nerve cell activity. However, even for small bits of neural tissue and restricted forms of behavior, the numbers of nerve cells to be considered are so large and their connections so complex that all sorts of explanatory hypotheses can be imagined. As a result, in the history of neural and behavioral studies, many thinkers have felt free to “neurologize.” They could speculate broadly about the overall “organization of the brain” and the control of behavior because, virtually always, the number of facts available to rule out their hypotheses was small. No comprehensive model or hypothesis could be shown to be better than others.