Neuroscience as technoscience: The importance of materiality in simplification
Nedah Nemati
This commentary examines Mazviita Chirimuuta’s The Brain Abstracted through the lens of productive simplification, which balances epistemic, cognitive, and material considerations in experimental practice. I extend her argument by exploring how material and technological constraints – ranging from standardized tools to computational infrastructure – condition which simplification strategies become viable and entrenched. Examples from behavioral and computational neuroscience demonstrate that sim