2023: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience
Yikes. Let’s skip straight to the neuroscience this year, shall we? Even this one small area of human endeavour has not escaped the forces unleashed by tech bros who think ethics are something that happen to other people. A once thriving neuroscience Twitter community dissolved thanks to He Who Shall Not Be Named, the battle-hardened remaining to rail against the dying of the light, others scattered to other platforms, sadly disconnected from one another. ChatGPT and its ilk, tools of such potential, also brought with them a wave of garbage science, including tranches of grammatically-correct, woefully-poor student essays, full of fun facts about studies that did not happen: did you know, for example, about Geoff Schoenbaum’s primate studies on decision making? And yet, science prevails. This machine for creating knowledge moves at such pace and fury that even Musk is but a pebble causing a scant ripple in its flow. As you’ll see, we’ve learnt a lot about the brain this year, about wha...