On the Data-Driven Road from Neurology to Neuronomy

Excerpt

At the inaugural editorial board meeting of this journal some 15 years ago, one of the topics of discussion was how to measure overall success for the nascent field of neuroinformatics. The critical context for this question was the sprawling growth of the “NeuroX” vocabulary: not just neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neurocomputing, and neuroimaging, but also neuroethics, neuroevolution, neuroeconomics, neuropolicy, and neuroaesthetics. Among the most controversial ideas that were floated, it was predicted that, if fully successful, neuroinformatics would disappear as a subfield of neuroscience because all of neuroscience would become neuroinformatics. The rationale for such a seemingly preposterous proposals was rooted in one of the defining goals of neuroinformatics, namely to provide an information infrastructure for neuroscience.¹ Thus, the argument went, when neuroscience becomes a sufficiently mature discipline to fully integrate experimental design and analysis, theory, and computational simulations, neuroinformatics will simply be the underlying framework for data flow among all approaches. …