Neuroheuristic
Neuroheuristic or neuristic is that branch of science aimed at exploring the assumptions of the Neurosciences through an ongoing process continuously renewed at each successive step of the advancement towards the understanding of the brain in its entirety. The word comes from the Greek root "neuron": νεύρου and "euriskein","heuristic": εύρισκω, which means "to find", "to discover".
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The neuroheuristic paradigm
The possible strategies that we could use in trying to comprehend cerebral functioning hinge on the subsequent problems arising from interdisciplinary studies of molecular, cellular, individual and social behavior. Many disciplines have an interest, and an important contribution to make, in obtaining an acceptable solution: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, pharmacology, physics, Artificial Intelligence, engineering, computer science and mathematics. Whilst such interdisciplinarity makes the problem more exciting it also makes it more difficult. The languages of various scientific disciplines have to be used, and appeals to the knowledge bases in those disciplines also made.
Scientific thought as we know it today, is based upon the assumption of an objective, external world. This conviction is supported by a rationale which calls upon Mechanism (philosophy) of causal determinism. The information processing effected by the brain appears then as a result of an accordance of Nature versus nurture (“bottom-up” vs. “top-down”).
Research strategy based on the “bottom-up” information flow, the preferred view by neurobiologists, seems potentially necessary and sufficient; however it is not wholly viable to actual experimentation considering the impossibility of simultaneously examining, even in a primitive species, all cellular elements of the brain and all variables that affect those elements.
The “top-down” strategy with the assistance of “dark boxes” is easier to bring to fulfillment but insufficient and irrelevant in understanding the mechanisms coordinating the local networks of cellular elements. It seems therefore that a distinct approach to the neurosciences, "neuroheuristic" or "neuristic", is needed and is possible. In this framework, the “result” cannot be simply positive or negative because the process itself cannot be reduced to proficiency as such. Dynamics is an essential feature of the neuroheuristic paradigm, but it cannot merely considered as the neurobiological facet of holism as opposed to reductionism.
It is important also to make a distinction from Henri Bergson’s psychophysical viewpoint and from the interactionism. In Bergson’s perspective the transition to a successive stage is dependent upon the vital impulse which appears at each stage. Therefore, it is the vital impulse which is the activating agent of transition between the stages. In the neuroheuristic paradigm, the change occurs when an essentially new and unexpected combination develops from the preexisting properties.
Neuroheuristic appears as a biosemiotics approach to the neurosciences, emphasizing the functional and pragmatic principles of the scientific investigation. At the dawn of the 21st century, such an approach can reap benefits from the new sciences and technologies which promote the emergence of new concepts; molecular biology and computer science can be an integral and crucial extension to the field of neuroscience.
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Further reading
- The "Conscious I": A Neuroheuristic Approach to the Mind, John G. Taylor and Alessandro E.P. Villa, in: Frontiers of Life, Eds. David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, Francois Jacob, Rita Levi Montalcini, Academic Press, Vol. III, pp. 349-270, 2001, ISBN 0120773406
