Concept
Behavioral neuroscience
Overview
Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is part of the broad, interdisciplinary field of neuroscience, with its primary focus being on the biological and neural substrates underlying human experiences and behaviors, as in our psychology. Derived from an earlier field known as physiological psychology, behavioral neuroscience applies the principles of biology to study the physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.
Behavioral neuroscientists examine the biological bases of behavior through research that involves neuroanatomical substrates, environmental and genetic factors, effects of lesions and electrical stimulation, developmental processes, recording electrical activity, neurotransmitters, hormonal influences, chemical components, and the effects of drugs. Important topics of consideration for neuroscientific research in behavior include learning and memory, sensory processes, motivation and emotion, as well as genetic and molecular substrates concerning the biological bases of behavior. Subdivisions of behavioral neuroscience include the field of cognitive neuroscience, which emphasizes the biological processes underlying human cognition. Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience are both concerned with the neuronal and biological bases of psychology, with a particular emphasis on either cognition or behavior depending on the field.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that one…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
States what Behavioral neuroscience is; the author is tied to Behavioral neuroscience in the knowledge graph.
Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple physiological conception of what an instinct is. If it be a mere excito-motor impulse, due to the preëxistence of a certain 'reflex arc' in the nerve-centres of the creature, of course it must follow the law of all such reflex arcs. One liability of such arcs is to have their activity 'inhibited' by other processes going on at the same time. It makes no…
William James, Psychology
The author is tied to Behavioral neuroscience in the knowledge graph.
(3) Intelligence and reason, through which experience is interrelated, viewed as a whole, enlarged in imagination. (4) The process of judgment and choice, in which different elements are brought together, considered in one conscious universe, evaluated or measured, thereby giving rise reciprocally to a self on the one hand and to approved or chosen objects on the other.
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
Close in meaning to Behavioral neuroscience; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Cognition
- Mind–body problem
- Motor cortex
- Genetic engineering
- Mind–body dualism
- Learning
- Monism
- Neuron
- Nobel Prize
- Neuroscience
- Nervous system
- Psychology
- Plato
- Paris
- Motivation
- Phrenology
- René Descartes
- Pineal gland
- Experience
- Aristotle
- Memory
- Neuroimaging
- Phineas Gage
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Behaviorism.