New Books in Neuroscience: M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)

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Listen here to New Books in Neuroscience, a podcast from New Books Network featuring interviews with neuroscientists about their new books. For more information, visit New Books in Neuroscience.

Originally released: March 10, 2025

This book is available open access here.

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them.

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