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People sometimes wonder why i am so worried about popular ideas in neuroscience being misleading.
Well, I joined my undergrad and later PhD lab to show that the brain was doing binding by synchrony. My thesis proposal with @konigpeter was truly ambitious, using natural scenes and in vivo recordings to truly convincingly show that the brain does binding by synchrony.
But the longer I worked on it and the more I thought about it I realized that the idea just does not seem to be good. It got some aspects of the problems of brains right while being misleading on many others. And the experimental data was somewhat dicey.
Peter is an amazing supervisor so he helped me find topics that I believed in. And he never pushed me to accept the theory. And I was not cut out to be an experimentalist anyways.
But when I see new bubble like excitement about anything in neuroscience I can not forget that time. The "new ideas" that seem so easy and obvious, often just hide the problems out of plain sight.
And for completeness. Here is Singer, one of the people popularizing the idea writing about it: scholarpedia.org/article/Bindin… and here are @shadlen and Newsome hating on it: cell.com/neuron/pdf/S08…
So if I do not buy the "Neural Manifolds", "Spinal Synergies", "Neural Network Science", "Understanding Deep Learning", or "human like AI" ideas it is because I can not unsee "Binding by Synchrony". With apologies to that community (and my failure as an experimentalist).
