Neuroscience is the broad inquiry into the structure and function of animal nervous systems. Neuroscience begins with the consideration of how the simplest animals on the planet interact with their environments. The deep sense that develops in humans who study and understand life is that every creature that lives on planet earth shares common properties. Nervous systems allow organisms to sense, decide, act and remember. These properties begin as simple strategies and devices and evolve into strategies that are increasingly complicated, more accurate and more effective. A complex device such as the human eye is easier to understand if you already understand a simple device such as light detecting pigment spot in a snail.  Thus, it makes sense for a neuroscientist to study all animals and to assume that principles learned about older, simpler animals can be applied to newer, more complex animals such as humans.

In the year 2000, the Nobel committee awarded the Prize for Physiology or Medicine to three neuroscientists, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric R. Kandel. Their research revealed basic processes at work in animal brains. Carlsson identified dopamine as at brain neurotransmitter. Greengard revealed the molecular cascade inside neurons initiated by the dopamine signal. Kandel realized that the molecular basis of learning should be studied in simple animal systems as the basis for understanding learning in human brains. He spent many years studying the nervous system of Aplaysia, the Moon Snail. His 1976 text “The Cellular Basis of Behavior” can be considered a classic in the study of nervous systems.  

Kandel stated: “All animals are faced with the universal problems of reproduction, adaptation and survival. An important assumption of biology is that phylogenetically diverse organisms share similar sets of solutions to these problems. Since in the end we are concerned with identifying biological principles applicable to human behavior, the invertebrate is a convenient but necessary substitute for people. Although a solution found in invertebrates may not be the only mechanisms for a given problem, the solution is likely to be a common mechanism that might be found as well in vertebrates, including man.”

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Neuroscience Notes

Neuroscience views minds as products of the biological function of brains. Brain science does not "explain" mind, or consciousness, but does give us strategies for understanding the properties of mind. Neuroscientist have made progress in the past few decades and are asking the same sorts of questions that only philosophers used to ask. The difference is that neuroscientists are then able to ask better questions in more detail and with more insight into the basic principles of the human experience. Neuroscientists are motivated and equipped to find real and practical answers to philosophical questions, leaving many philosophers behind in an anachronistic philological niche.

Cognitive philosophers increasingly provide commentary on what neuroscientists are doing and thinking. Tim Smith stated that:

” A large number of articles and books have monitored the growth of Cognitive Neuroscience… motivated by a feeling that "things are about to be understood." As advances in imaging has added new potential to the neurosciences, so too neural networks and computational models have added new power to the cognitive approaches. Neural networks are tools that enable researchers to "probe how high-level functions such as perceiving, attending, learning, planning, and remembering emerge from the massively parallel neural architecture of the brain."

Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Davis, states that "Psychology departments across the country have realized that they've got to get into brain science- in humans and not just rats." He goes on to say that departments looking for "people who can liaison with clinicians working with brain-damaged patients, with people doing brain imaging, with the computer jocks".

Cohen notes that research efforts in the various fields have not been connected:

"People have been working at both ends with nothing in the middle. Filling the gaps in the middle is a process, which calls for uniquely trained individuals. Neurology departments, too, see the need for such liaison. In order to take advantage of the most recent tools for clinical work, people who can span the various fields are crucial. As stated above, neuroscientists see the necessity of such a background if the university based efforts to understand higher cognitive efforts are going to be advanced. Since those backgrounds were not the standard fair in university education in the past, a dearth of people with the right combination of skills has developed. University of Pittsburgh, Walter Schneider has observed that finding staff with the right blend of "cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, computational modeling, brain imaging.... is a tall order. One of the founding figures in cognitive neuroscience, Michael Gazzaniga, predicts that the challenge and the opportunity will last well past the decade.  "Figuring out how the mind arises from the brain - there's a couple of hundred years of work yet."