In the beginning of The Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch presents us with a compelling question: is science as a whole getting deeper or broader? That is, will our theories tend to unite over time?

Another way to look at this question is Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a pre-paradigmatic field of science. For an example, think about civil engineering before the theories of stress and strain. When designing a building to not fall down, people relied largely on rules of thumb passed down over time rather than a systematic theory of structures. Now, however, the field has systematic theories of why things fall down, enabling the construction of ever more complicated structures with confidence. Writing in 1962, Kuhn argued that medicine was still in a pre-paradigmatic state of affairs, with doctors relying on rules of thumb rather than systematic theories of human health.

How does this all apply to neuroscience? I am not interested here in asking whether theories of science will generally be unified — instead, this is an attempt to answer whether a coherent paradigm exists in the field of neuroscience, and if so, what it might look like.

First, let’s get some ideas on the table. These ideas broadly fall into a few categories:

Attention

Memory

1. Biased competition
2. Gamma-wave synchronization
3. Geometric representation
4. Complementary learning systems
5. Scene construction