Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Prog Neurobiol. 2010 Jan 11;90(1):16-28. doi: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2009.10.003. Epub 2009 Oct 25.
This article aims at making readers, experimentalists and theorists, more aware of the abstractions made by an observer when measuring and reporting behavioral and neural timescales. These abstractions stow away the fact that, above lower boundaries that reflect fairly well understood physical constraints, observed and reported timescales are often not intrinsic to the biological system; rather, in most cases they reflect conditions that are imposed by the observer through the measuring procedure. This is true at practically every level of organization, from behavior down to molecules. I analyze the impacts of the resulting temporal manifold in behavioral and brain sciences on experimental designs and mathematical modeling.
本文旨在使读者、实验家和理论家更加意识到观察者在测量和报告行为和神经时间尺度时所做的抽象。这些抽象隐藏了这样一个事实，即高于相当清楚地反映物理约束的下限，观察到和报告的时间尺度通常不是生物系统固有的；相反，在大多数情况下，它们反映了观察者通过测量过程施加的条件。这在从行为到分子的几乎每个组织水平上都是如此。我分析了行为和脑科学中由此产生的时间流形对实验设计和数学建模的影响。
