In behavioral neuroscience, there seems to be an emphasis on simple behavior paradigms. Behavior is complex and messy, so it needs to be tidied up. The more prestigious journals favor simple, highly controlled and easily interpretable behavior paradigms typically linked to a clean, molecular manipulation yielding a tractable, digestible tidbit of data… nothing sprawling, confusing or nuanced.
The problem is, if you seek a simple answer, you are likely to find one. And the world is filled with simple answers, mostly wrong. The question is do we want our complexity— and the world is complicated— reflected in the data or in piecing together the tidbits?
