Behavior ‘in the wild’

What is behavior?

The definition of behavior is still unclear to some scientists. Is behavior any movement? Or is there something specific that makes behavior different from other movements?

Since the birth of neuroscience in the 1960s, the dominant attitude towards behavior was that nervous systems control behavior based on sensory stimuli. This attitude treats behavior as a convenient measurement for neuroscience research. Encouraged by the enormous technological advances made in the decades immediately after World War II, neuroscience as a field has focused our research efforts almost exclusively on extremely detailed descriptions of individual neurons and their interactions.

But after almost 50 years of studying nervous systems with this perspective, neuroscientists are feeling lost as we struggle to interpret the sea of data delivered by our tools. It’s becoming clear that we need to re-examine our assumptions about the nature of behavior. Luckily, if we look back to the birth of neuroscience we can find alternative attitudes towards behavior that merit a re-visit.

One in particular is the viewpoint of psychologist and control theory engineer William T. Powers, who in 1973 proposed that behavior is the control of perception. Put another way, if we consider “the body” (a.k.a. all of our parts that aren’t the nervous system) to be the brain’s sensors, then “the behavior” that we see is the brain moving its sensors so that it can get the input it wants. For instance, when we wish to cross the street, we turn our head so that our eyes can look for any oncoming traffic; when we’re in a conversation with a quiet talker, we lean our bodies in and direct our ears towards the speaker to better hear their words. In all these situations, we have a goal, and we move our bodies in order to get the sensory input that lets us achieve our goal.

Here at Every Mind Online, we want to study behavior with this definition in mind: out of all the movements that our bodies can make, behaviors are movements with a purpose.

What do we mean by ‘in the wild’?

When we are trying to differentiate between all movements versus behaviors, we need to understand the goals of the creature we are studying. Context – location, timing, and history – have a huge influence on one’s goals.

To better understand the contexts that picked and shaped the brains that we want to study, we need to observe with rigorous detail the movements of free humans and animals in their natural environment. This is crucial to interpreting the movements of humans and animals in the lab, where we can measure things with greater precision but run the risk of completely misunderstanding the purpose of those movements.

Neuroscience is currently in great need of theories of behavior that can predict what meaningful movements might look like, so that researchers in the lab can know what kind of signal to search for in their data.

Why does neuroscience need to study behavior in the wild?

We need to understand brains within their bodies

The last few decades of neuroscience research have made it clear that neurons are always active in a living body, even during sleep and before birth. Movements of any kind always cause neural activity somewhere in the nervous system, regardless of whether those movements are part of a natural behavior or not. Certain non-movements, like posture, can even cause neural activity because of the purpose they serve to the organism, not because a body part is visibly moving.

Most of our current knowledge about neural activity comes from studying brain tissue in a petri dish. These neurons have been disconnected from the bodies that provide them with purpose to their activities and information about the environment they must navigate and survive. In a way, these neurons are “deaf, blind, and mute”. In the same way that a deaf, blind, and mute human might display behavior that is significantly different from that of a hearing, seeing, and talking human, we must assume that the activity patterns of a “brain in a dish” are also significantly different from the activity patterns of a “brain in a body” – or we must prove methodically that such an assumption isn’t true.

We need to understand the full range of neurodiversity in the human species

Another bias in neuroscience is the fact that most of what we know about “typical” or “normal” human brains and behavior is based on studies of American college-aged white males. This is a tiny sample of the great diversity in brains and behavior in the entire human population. In order to build a more accurate picture of human brains, and to expand our understanding of brains in general, we need to rigorously study a more representative sample of the human species.

By conducting human behavior research “in the wild” using interactive installations located in places where humans of all ages, abilities, nationalities, and socio-economic backgrounds can participate, we hope to build a better understanding of nervous systems, behavior, and their relationship.