Inspired in part by @LeslieKay & the #OldNeuroPapers initiative, I read Tolman's 1948 paper "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men":
https://personal.utdallas.edu/~tres/spatial/tolman.pdf
Not sure how I got this far without reading it, and I recommend it to anyone who also hasn't. We simply do not see this type of paper anymore. I wonder: Are we better worse off for it?
At it's core, it contains the thing we all still aspire to: a clear illustration of competing ideas about how the brain/mind works, compared with the evidence. But it also contains two things we don't do anymore.
First, it's peppered with saucy: "Most of the rat investigations, which I shall report, were carried out in the Berkeley laboratory. But I shall also include, occasionally, accounts of the behavior of non-Berkeley rats who obviously have misspent their lives in out-of- State laboratories."
While this is amusing, it's probably best that we've left this snark behind?
Second, the discussion extends ideas around cognitive maps, tested with rats running through mazes, into thoughts around social justice: "I am not myself a clinician or a social psychologist. What I am going to say must be considered, therefore, simply as in the nature of a rat psychologist's ratiocinations offered free ... the expression of these their displaced hates ranges all the way from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations ...What in the name of Heaven and Psychology can we do about it? My only answer is to preach again the virtues of reason—of, that is, broad cognitive maps."
This might not belong in scientific papers per se. But I wonder is something has been left behind here in the narrowing of the field?
Parsing the actual paper right now but re: "While this is amusing, it's probably best that we've left this snark behind?"
I don't know, I guess it wouldn't be proper form to see journal articles in that style but I think I would quite enjoy it because I find that it makes it more memorable as a narrative as opposed to what might be considered dry, almost clinical writing.
But that might just be me.
@aazad I'm also pro aspiring to memorability in our writing. Fortunately, memorability has many dimensions beyond snark!
Yeah, snark is risky to operationalise and best left for personal discourse with close peers with whom you can gauge the mood and read the room accordingly, and who, hopefully, find the humour in it.
But yes, I think my idea of memorability would be satisfied with papers written like conversational discourse.
