(Medical Xpress)—"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This so-called "law of the instrument" has shaped neuroscience to core. It can be rephrased as, if all you have a fancy voltmeter, everything looks like a transient electrical event. No one in the field understands this more Douglass Fields, an NIH researcher who has re-written every neuroscience dogma he has turned his scrupulous eye to. In a paper published yesterday in Nature, Fields questions the conventional wisdom that informs recent efforts to map the brain's connectivity, and ultimately, its electrical activity. In particular, he questions the value of making detailed maps of neurons, while at the same time neglecting the more abundant, and equally complex "maps" that exist for glia.
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