Leaping from firing neurons to human behaviour is tempting, but it’s a perilous gap

Neuroscience is in the midst of a revolution: aided by increasingly sophisticated brain-scanning technologies, it offers more insights into the inner working of our brains than we’ve ever had before. But as this animated short featuring the musings of the comparative neuroscientist Danbee Kim and the philosopher of mind David Chalmers explains, a multifaceted approach to cognitive science is necessary for us to make any real progress towards understanding our minds. The extremely complex ‘interplay between brains, bodies and the world’, as Kim puts it, requires squaring the bottom-up business of neuron activity with the top-down methods of psychology, and several biological systems in between.