The Atlantic
Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain
“Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused.”
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Carl Schoonover and Andrew Fink are confused. As neuroscientists, they know that the brain must be flexible but not
too flexible. It must rewire itself in the face of new experiences, but must also consistently represent the features of the external world. How? The relatively simple explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons reliably fire when their owner smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations these patterns of neural firing presumably stay the same from one moment to the next. But as Schoonover, Fink, and others have found, they sometimes don’t. They change and to a confusing and unexpected extent.