The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival…

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing…

Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about how learning is inherently a future-focused exercise, and what that means for education. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Referenced in this episode:

Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias
John Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, David Poeppel

Two Views of the Cognitive Brain
David Barack & John Krakauer

On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
Richard Doyle

Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
Complexity Podcast Episode 72

Former SFI Fellow David Kinney, epistemologist (re: disciplines as levels of explanatory granularity)

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
Jessica Flack

Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens & Michael Zimmerman

Carl Cranor, moral philosopher (re: causation)

The Learning Salon: Toward a new participatory science
Ida Momennejad, John Krakauer, Claire Sun, Eva Yezerets, Kanaka Rajan, Joshua Vogelstein, Brad Wyble

Brain Inspired Podcast
Paul Middlebrooks

eLife Journal

biorXiv

W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)
Complexity Podcast Episode 68

W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on "Prim Dreams of Order vs. Messy Vitality" in Economics, Math, and Physics
Complexity Podcast Episode 69

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World
Tyson Yunkaporta