What do you think are the most promising fields of neuroscience for the next +/- 20 years?
I feel like computational neuroscience might develop some breakthroughs, i feel like there’s only so much we can conclude from biochemical / mol. biological research alone so for fundamental insights, we’ll need mathematical/physical models as well. Functional imaging also seems like an interesting field.
I’m a clinician, not a neuroscientist. From my perspective I wonder if you might be confusing the tools of your trade with the questions you hope to answer. I’d assume that any tools that would advance the fields’ ability to answer questions will be used and if computer modeling is useful then of course you’d use it. What are the questions you want to answer is more interesting to me. I’d personally like to see more development along the lines of Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience which body of work has been exceptionally useful in helping clinicians to understand trauma and how to treat it.
I think I understand what you’re saying. I have a medical background as well and I guess clinicians mostly use the results of (neuro)science in their work. Neuroscience can seem as one big field but many labs do exclusively mol. biology work, others work exclusively on developing theories/models, others focus on functional imaging. Even within the computational field, there are multiple subfields. These people often have very different backgrounds so not every neuroscientists will be able to do wet lab stuff, computational work is often done by physicists, engineers or mathematicians, … Everything is so specialised and crossing over from wet lab stuff (near zero math/physics experience) to computational work is extremely difficult so scientists often need to choose a field to focus on early in their career. It’s not as simple as running some simulations or doing some modelling for a specific question. For example some neuroscientists with a psychology background do functional imaging studies (fMRI, EEG, …) but if they would have a certain hypothesis that would require wet lab stuff, they would probably not have the knowledge or tools to do this. There are very few neuroscientists who know their way around all these different fields.
I’m more interested in the ‘fundamental’ questions in neuroscience, how information is represented and processed, how consciousness can be defined and studied, how memory works, … These topics can be approached in multiple ways. For example memory requires both knowledge of the biochemical/cellular pathways and the mathematical/computational aspects so wet lab skills and computational skills could both be valuable. I’m wondering which field will be most likely to come up with some groundbreaking discovery.