Exploring social neuroscience and animal behavior. Based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario
Nathan Insel
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One of the best books I read in 2025 was Nachum Ulanovsky's _Natural Neuroscience_. If my copy looks a little worn, it's because I was intent on reading it in natural habitats.
I realized it's because I cared about how brains deal with layers of uncertainty by forming and updating many levels of expectations. And a good way to get uncertainty, along with the behavioral agency to address it, is letting animals behave freely in dynamic, uncontrolled environments.
Personal note: when I started my own lab I had a small crisis: why study extremely complex brains when we still don't understand how simpler brains do the same things?
On the Nobel Prize winner, Camillo Golgi (from Cani and Mazzarello, 2016)
The back-and-forth between "control all variables" and "observe systems as they naturally occur" is probably as old as science. Nachum explains so many reasons, with so many elegant examples, why systems neuroscience needs a diversity and balance of approaches.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
There are many pitfalls and challenges. Nachum discusses this in the book, and one chapter is about technological developments that make it more feasible (this is also why @wheelerlab.org and I put some years into developing DIPLOMAT). But he also describes so many ways it has paid off
