The map and the territory: Why diversity advances neuroscience

The Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) is probably best known for his dictum ‘The map is not the territory’. It refers to the map-territory relation problem, or confusing reality with its abstraction. A literal example is when the geographical vastness of Africa is undermined due to its representation on two-dimensional maps, where it appears squashed relative to nonequatorial regions. Another instance is the gross domestic product, which measures a country’s economic output within a capitalist framework but is often taken to mean the overall prosperity and well-being of its people. Maps are models, and unsurprisingly, Korzybski’s message resonates with many scientists, including neuroscientists. As researchers, we form, test, and describe scientific ideas to understand the brain correlates of behaviour and vice versa. Maps and models are integral to our work. Yet, most neuroscientists also acknowledge the idiosyncrasies, overlapping distributions, and fuzzy edges in our data that belie the idealised, tidy contours of Brodmann areas and group grand averages – anatomy is individualised and messy. Korzybski’s interests, however, went beyond the maps we consciously make and name. He proposed that, as humans with language and culture, the entirety of our perception and experiences are shaped by mental maps, which are self-organising and emergent, dictated by a combination of biology, environment, and intergenerational learning. To invoke another truism, our subjective maps are the unknown knowns: They exert themselves structurally, and impose parameters upon our thinking that we do not always realise are there.

Like a camera’s viewfinder frames the shot, our personal and culturally shared maps mediate how we experience and document the world around us. Consider how we typologise cognition and behaviour: This is active, that is resting state; this is language, that is memory; this is self, that is other. These boundaries write our textbook chapter headings, decide the content of our journals, and shape the scholarly conferences and communities to which we contribute. But are they, in fact, immutable, objective, and universal? As an exercise, imagine how recent theoretical advances might have transpired across different cultural contexts. Take the multisensory nature of language processing: A researcher accustomed to languages that are concurrently signed and spoken, a property of some Indigenous cultures in Australia and the Americas, may have anticipated that the visual perception of facial movements affects auditory speech processing (Peelle and Sommers, 2015), or that vocal and gesture production would be controlled in concert (Pouw and Fuchs, 2022). A psychophysicist who conceives of time as cyclical and entangled (as in some South and East Asian societies) might predict the convolutional nature of sensory systems and their bidirectional flow of information (Kveraga et al., 2007), subverting the linear and unidirectional schematic diagrams found in many textbooks. A cognitive neuroscientist whose understanding of music includes movement rather than sound alone – typical among West African traditions – could expect to find the involvement of motor areas in the brain during passive auditory rhythm perception (Grahn, 2012). Finally, so-called mirror neurons, or cells that activate in association with both self- and other-produced actions, become less mystifying (Heyes and Catmur, 2022) when viewed from a collectivist rather than individualist lens, as would be the case in many parts of the world outside of Europe and its diaspora (i.e. where most neuroscientific research is currently conducted). These historical re-imaginings are speculative but they indicate promising futures. They suggest that cultivating diversity could lead to generative new theories and paradigms that resist or transcend long-standing, if arbitrary, assumptions in our discipline.

When neuroscientists design experiments, we try to disentangle complex interactions and identify hidden confounds. This is typically realised with clever manipulations or by employing many different experimental items to ensure generalisability. Although we are never without our own cultural and personal biases, we can engage with differing viewpoints, life experiences, and sources of knowledge to control for structural biases and epistemological limitations in the field at large. Korzybski’s life’s work was to develop an applied philosophy that could destabilise the myopic influence of language and culture, which he deemed necessary both as a matter of justice as well as a mechanism for advancing scientific knowledge. It makes sense that Korzybski was interested in how we understand, remember, and communicate our subjective experiences to others: In addition to Polish, he spoke German, French, Russian, and English. Each language conferred him with access to alternative narratives and worldviews, notably those of imperial powers that regarded Poland as little more than a pawn during his lifetime. Neuroscience also exists in time and place, and for most of our discipline’s short history, there has been vanishingly little space made for people outside of specific, socioeconomically advantaged groups. Yet, one manner of representation cannot tell the whole story. To see the territory for itself, we will need as many different maps, or views of the world, as we can envision.