In brief, neuroscience is, to me, a science of systems in which first-order and local explanatory schemata are needed but not sufficient. Reductionism, by its nature, takes away the distributed interactions that underlie the global properties of systems. Theoretical approaches provide different means to simplify. We must thus learn to understand, rather than avoid complexity: simplicity and complexity often characterize less the object of study than our understanding of it. Maybe one day, neuroscience textbooks will finally start slimming down
