TY - JOUR T1 - The Brain–Cognitive Behavior Problem: A Retrospective JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0069-20.2020 VL - 7 IS - 4 SP - ENEURO.0069-20.2020 AU - György Buzsáki Y1 - 2020/07/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/7/4/ENEURO.0069-20.2020.abstract N2 - In 2001, I was invited to write a review for a prominent journal. I thought that the best way to exploit this opportunity was to write an essay about my problems with ill-defined scientific terms and question whether the dominant framework in neuroscience is on the right track. My main argument was that many terms in neuroscience are inherited from folk psychology and are often used in two ambiguous ways: both as the thing-to-be-explained (explanandum) and the thing-that-explains (explanans; e.g., “we have memory because we remember,” “we remember because we have memory”). These postulated terms are assumed to be entities with definable boundaries, and within this framework, the goal of neuroscience is to find homes and mechanisms for these terms in the brain with corresponding boundaries (I called this “the correlational approach”). I warned that a framework dictated by human-centric introspection might not be the right roadmap for neuroscience and argued that there should be another way of carving up the brain’s “natural kinds.”A month later, I received the rejection letter: “Dear Gyuri, … I hope you understand that for the sake of the journal we cannot publish your manuscript” (emphasis added). One reviewer was very enthusiastic while the other strongly dismissive. I took a deep breath, put the issue on the back burner, and went back to the lab. Perhaps the harsh reviewer was right. Although I recognized the problem correctly, I failed to provide the right strategy to solve it. Yet, the issues I exposed in the manuscript kept bugging me, and I have since written two books (Buzsáki, 2006, 2019) as attempts to clarify my views and offer alternative strategies to explore brain-behavior relationships. In the intervening two decades, perhaps thinking along similar lines, other investigators have also addressed the explanandum-explanans issues (Krakauer et al., … ER -