Modern Discoveries in Neuroscience... And What They Reveal About You (Collection)

6. Exploring brain systems

Despite many years of investment, giving up the work I had been doing in the peripheral nervous system was not that hard. I had gradually come to feel that working at that level would yield diminishing returns, similar to my sense in the 1970s about the future of invertebrate nervous systems as they were then being studied with electrophysiological and anatomical methods. By the mid-1980s, it was hard to ignore the fact that neuroscientists were shifting to what might be described as either a lower or a higher level of interests. The revolution in molecular biology and the powerful methods it provided were attracting many neuroscientists to pursue the organization of the nervous systems of worms, fruit flies, and mice ...