Nachum Ulanovsky, Natural Neuroscience: Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors, MIT Press (2025).
- Purchase the book on MIT Press website, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.
- Read a short excerpt of chapter 1 published in The Transmitter.
Description
A new approach to brain research that emphasizes studying the brain under naturalistic conditions.
Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift toward real-world relevance, natural behaviors, and ecological validity. In Natural Neuroscience, Nachum Ulanovsky presents the conceptual, empirical, and technological underpinnings that enabled this new field. Natural neuroscience researchers posit that when studying any brain region in any animal, whether standard mammalian species such as rodents and primates or nonstandard species, it is crucial to pursue the animal's natural behaviors and to consider the natural problems it needs to solve. By preventing rich natural behaviors, says Ulanovsky, we miss key aspects of brain function—and we may not even know what we miss.
The author surveys recent studies that have begun to move in this direction across multiple subfields of neuroscience, including sensory, cognitive, social, and behavioral neuroscience. He discusses technological advances that are allowing the pursuit of more naturalistic experiments, including methods for recording neural activity in freely behaving, freely moving animals (e.g., wired and wireless electrophysiology and imaging); methods for manipulating neural activity in freely moving animals (e.g., wired and wireless optogenetics); and methods for quantifying the details of behavior. He makes connections across the four major scientific disciplines that focus on understanding behavior—neuroscience, behavioral ecology, ethology, and psychology—bringing them closer together, and closer to real life.
Praise
“I highly recommend this fascinating book. A superbly documented and inspiring plea for neuroscientists to embrace natural neuroscience: that is, adopt emerging technologies to uncover truly meaningful behavior and neural representations in free-roaming animals exposed to real-world stimuli.”
Catherine Dulac, Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Harvard University
“Natural Neuroscience is a visionary book about where neuroscience needs to go. The book offers a conceptual framework for breaking out from our laboratories, a must-read for students and teachers of neuroscience.”
Michael Brecht, Professor of Neurobiology, Humboldt University, Germany
"In an era where controlled laboratory findings often fall short of capturing the true intricacies of natural behavior, Natural Neuroscience emerges as a transformative work. This book is an essential read for those seeking a deeper, more ecological understanding of cognitive neuroscience.”
Uri Hasson, Professor, Princeton University
“A must-read, this book is a call to action for behavioral researchers: break free from the constraints of simplified lab studies and embrace the complexity of the real world to understand how brains truly function.”
Iain Couzin, Director, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
“A welcome and timely plea to study nervous systems in naturally behaving animals experiencing their natural environment—because this is why nervous systems evolved. Natural Neuroscience is truly inspirational and destined to become a classic.”
Eric Warrant, Professor of Zoology, Lund University; author of Visual Ecology