Is neuroscience a coherent field? Or is it becoming more fragmented?

Neuroscience is a vast—and fast expanding—field. So we wanted to know: Do researchers think their efforts are converging? Do they feel that neuroscience subfields are growing increasingly apart? Or do they see some other pattern? We polled our readers and contributors and engaged a market research firm to interview senior scientists from leading neuroscience programs around the world.

In short, we heard a range of perspectives. About half of our respondents credited factors such as the sheer volume of research generated today, specialization in neuroscience education and competition for building walls between subfields. Another quarter or so cited technical advances, shared methods, social media and grants for multidisciplinary work, among other things, as helping to bring the field together.

Others expressed mixed views—seeing diverging trends between trainees and leaders, for example, or between experimentalists and theorists—and the rest were undecided or told us it was “too wide a question.” Here is what a selection of these researchers said, in their own words.

“It is a very fragmented field with many different silos that do not talk to each other and do not share a common language. We routinely call with the same name different concepts, and use different names for the same concept. Implementations of the same concept also differ widely between different disciplines. It is a mess, and with increasing specialization it is only getting worse. There are also little to no incentives in harmonizing different subfields.”
—Mattia Chini, postdoctoral researcher, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

“I don’t think the field was ever really coherent, but there has been a greater divergence in specialties that, in my opinion, make it difficult for students to obtain a good sense of ‘how the brain works.’ This sense needs to be rooted in an understanding of cellular and molecular mechanisms through to systems, cognitive and motor functioning. It is increasingly difficult to offer students this perspective as departments and the programs they house are increasingly specialized.”
—Leanne Chukoskie, associate professor of physical therapy, human movement and rehabilitation sciences, Northeastern University

“It’s always been interdisciplinary—like me, molecular biologists study nervous systems, people in psychology study motivation and cognition in people and also everything in between. We’re very diverse. We’re not a unified entity. SfN is one of largest societies in the world, with molecular, cellular, systems, circuits, clinical, translational, cognitive, psychological. Possibly we are getting even more diverse.”
—Elva Diaz, professor of pharmacology, University of California, Davis

“It’s always been fragmented. Human and animal, cellular and systems—it’s never been one field.”
—Jimmy Dooley, assistant professor of biological sciences, Purdue University

“It has always been fragmented, there is very little coherence and the main attempts to add cohesive theories are becoming increasingly fragmented or narrowly focused on ‘hypes.’”
—Renato Duarte, researcher at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra

“There’s a trend towards fragmentation because of the size and the sheer abundance of research and papers. Even in my field, I find it hard to keep up with. And then when you look at the field next door, it becomes almost impossible. Without adequate tools to keep abreast of this literature and just this exponential increase in knowledge, I think there will be a trend toward fragmentation.”
—Johannes Kohl, group leader, Francis Crick Institute

“It’s such a massive field that I think it’s impossible for someone to ‘keep up’ with the whole thing.”
—Caitlin Mallory, postdoctoral researcher, University of California, Berkeley

“[The field of neuroscience is] intellectually fragmented in a way, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We know so little that we need to have crazy, out-there ideas.”
—Gregory W. Schwartz, professor of ophthalmology, neuroscience and neurobiology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

“It is becoming very increasingly fragmented, with everyone and anyone developing their own set of tools and ideas to convey what the brain does, or what does it mean to think, compute, decide etc. And it is very problematic and a useless waste of money for people suffering from brain disorders.”
—Abhinav Sharma, postdoctoral neuroscientist, University of Oxford

“I think it makes sense as a whole but would benefit from more events spanning multiple subfields.”
—Hugo Fluhr, doctoral student, University of Zürich

“As far as I can judge and see, I would describe it as a very coherent field. There’s not a divide that I can make up anywhere in the field of neurobiology. I would describe it as a continuum. If you go to the big conferences, like Society for Neuroscience, I think it’s fair to say that you see all areas of neuroscience represented there … and they seem to mix and mingle well. And I think this again goes back to the fact that they use so many approaches, but that also aren’t separated. For example, genetic approaches are used by molecular neuroscientist systems, people who study diseases, and so on. So, there’s an integration that’s happening through the methods that are used that goes beyond the specific interest of a subfield. It sort of seems like a little bit of a glue.”
—Jorg Grandl, associate professor of neurobiology, Duke University

“Social media has helped a lot with [communicating science]. I spend far too much time on social media, not so much to doom scroll, but actually to find new work and it’s a great resource to find new papers. And papers in areas I would never have actually necessarily looked at, like things in molecular neuroscience, for example, like, ‘oh, that’s kind of neat.’ So, I grab that preprint and take a look at it. It comes together.”
—Randy McIntosh, director, Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, Simon Fraser University

“There has always been a healthy amount of chaos. It’s more consolidated now. There is a risk of tunnel vision.”
—Drew Robson, research group leader, systems neuroscience and neuroengineering, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

“Neuroscience has always been interdisciplinary. And now I think it is becoming much more interconnected. Areas will always grow deeper and become hyper-specialized, but fragmentation is not the right word. It is more likely the case that a web of cross-cutting ideas is becoming more common and more impressive. This can contribute to overall more coherence, but the field needs to check in periodically and take some more holistic takes.”
—Brian Sweis, assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

I think the field really used to be very fragmented. And that’s why funding is very important—because those large-scale collaborative grants will really shift the field from fragmented to more collaborative. Because especially for the neuroscience we’re talking about, it’s multidisciplinary research.”
—Lin Tian, scientific director, Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience

“We are always interdisciplinary, and we are all focused on questions about the brain, but we bring different methods to answer those questions. We will tend to stay with our tribes in terms of who we invite as seminar speakers and which meetings we go to because we need those details, but I think that neuroscience more than any other community unites across methods to answer questions.”
—Anne West, professor of neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine

“[Neuroscience] has always been incoherent. No recent changes.”
—Britt Anderson, associate professor of psychology, University of Waterloo

“The field at large? I think it ebbs and flows as usual. It’s an incredibly big field, and I’m just a slightly odd physicist working at the interface, trying to help improve functional MRI. In my corner of the field, there is steady progress with most research following a relatively consistent trajectory. Departing from this path can be difficult; strong work that diverges from the mainstream may fly under the radar. Conversely, bold new ideas can sometimes attract significant attention—only to fade just as quickly.”
—Martijn Cloos, associate professor of bioengineering, University of Queensland

“Since I entered the neuroscience world, I’ve always felt it is pretty fragmented. I don’t think it is becoming more fragmented than before, and I think that recent technological developments provide the potential to make it more coherent.”
—Sara Matias, postdoctoral research associate, Harvard University

“Neuroscience is a coherent field if we look at the discoveries confirmed along the dimension of time, but it is necessarily fragmented from a space perspective that shows the different laboratories at work in a specific unit of time. To quote Ramón y Cajal: ‘es adaptable a la ciencia total en el tiempo, pero no en el espacio.’”
—Tiziana Metitieri, clinical neuropsychologist, Meyer Children’s Hospital

“Neuroscience is becoming fragmented as branching discoveries lead to a widening tree of knowledge. Simultaneously, general theoretical work has sought to provide structure and connectivity to this branching network which holds the field together coherently.”
—Sidney Rafilson, doctoral student, New York University

“Most leaders of neuroscience, like the National Academy of Sciences members, still have a vision of neuroscience as a whole, and for them it is not more fragmented. Future leaders probably will as well. All areas of neuroscience research feed and enlighten one another. The people who make the biggest discoveries will not see it as fragmented. Education is lamentably fragmented at the Ph.D. level, but those who become leaders, out of necessity, will appreciate that the field is concerned with issues common to all its parts.”
—Michael Stryker, professor of physiology, University of California, San Francisco