That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience is Broken

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss our opinions on why neuroscience might be declining. 

Hi, my name's Olo Fugolson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So I'm dialing this one in from the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. This is the largest body of neuroscientists gathering together in the world. You know, the first time I went, the attendance was 35,000 people, and it was neuroscientists from all over the world and at all levels of neuroscience. There were neurosurgeons.

There were people doing cellular neuroscience. People studying individual neurons. People like me taking pictures of people's brains with EEG or FMRI or FNIRs, just anything and everything to do with neuroscience. And in fact, the conference is so big. There's only a few spots in the United States where they can have it, because you have to have a venue where you can have a conference that holds 35,000 people. And it's incredible.

Like, you know, when you go to the poster session, it literally takes about two hours just to walk through the posters, and that's without even stopping to read anything. And, you know, that first time I went, I'll never forget, It was a neuroscience gathering in Washington, D.C. And the keynote speaker was the Dalai Lama. I know kind of a weird one for a neuroscience meeting, but the idea was the Dalai Lama.

It shared his thoughts on the human brain and what he thought about it. And those of us, you know, with training like I have, we're supposed to step back and, you know, think about that. And, you know, what does that mean? And how does it all fit together? And this is where I have to flip this, because I was hoping to wander through the SFN meeting and talk about all the amazing things I saw. And that's not what I saw.

The meeting is down to 15,000 people. Now, part of that is due to new visa requirements and entry requirements for the United States. But part of that is just a decline in science. And standing there in the event hall today, you know, something that I've been thinking about for a question. a while now and I've talked about it before and expressed bits and pieces to you on this podcast, to colleagues, to students, to my friends. But science is broken. It truly is.

I can't speak for the other disciplines, but for the ones I work in neuroscience, psychology, and kinesiology, science is broken. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I've mentioned this in the past, but you've probably heard the mantra publish or perish. And that's a true reality. If you get a job as a professor, especially in North America, you're expected to publish X number of papers per year, and if you don't, you get fired. It's really that simple. If you want to get grants, you have to publish two X papers per year.

And a lot of students and people think it's all about the teaching. In fact, when I say I'm a professor, the first question I get is, what do you teach? And the reality is 95% of my job is research and 5% is teaching. But I live under this publish or parish umbrella, and we all do. And it's horrible. It's ruined science. There's a massive impact on professors. Basically, you're forced to drive.

drop everything and just focus on publishing papers. You're not going to get into the nitty-de-gritty and design the best experiments possible. You're just going to get papers out the door. So your whole life just becomes papers. You know, my teaching suffers, my other duties at the university suffer. Heck, my personal life suffers because I'm just trying to publish papers. And this has a massive impact on the quality of the papers we publish. You know, I'm not going to pull any punches here. A friend of mine coined the phrase the least publishful unit, the LPU. And it literally translates to what's the least amount of work you can do to put in a paper and get it out the door and get published. That,

ladies and gentlemen is not how you could do good science. We should be spending our time designing great experiments and if they fail tweaking them and redoing them as opposed to doing anything possible to salvage the data that we get, do anything we can to make it work. Now I've never crossed the line. I've never faked data, but it must be happening everywhere because there's so much pressure to publish. Change a few numbers and next thing you know you've got a publication. The sole reason I don't do it is probably the biggest form of financial security I have is my pension and I won't do anything to mess that up because I want to grow old and that's the way I'm going to do it. But the quality of our papers isn't great because we're simply trying to

get as many out the door as possible. There's a massive negative impact on grad students. You know, the honest truth is, and if you're a grad student, I hate to break it to you, but we have too many grad students. We need probably one-tenth, 10% of the grad students we currently have. Each professor should train a grad student, maybe two, and train them as well as they can, teach them everything they know. Instead, we run Megalabs. And why do we run Megalabs? Publish or perish. The more students you have, the more papers you publish. Funnily enough, in my own experience, that's not true. My best year for publications was 10, and that was one graduate student and three undergraduate students. That's a whole other dilemma. But a lot of people operate on

this idea that if I have more grad students, I'll publish more papers. And what's horrible about that is it means we're using graduate students as paper labor. We're not training them as well as we could. We're not spending enough time with them. They're just literally data slaves. They're people that we use to get the data so we can publish more papers. And as a result, poor course. quality papers. I've already mentioned that. And I saw that at the conference today. I was going

through the poster session, and I'll be honest, I saw a lot of garbage. There are a lot of posters out there that just, I was like, what? Why? And then I realized it was a very simple study. It was very safe, and it would lead to a publication. I didn't see a lot of groundbreaking stuff. I wish I could say I did. I wish I could say, yeah, I saw three things that were going to change the world, but I didn't. I saw a vast number of grad students running very simple studies to just get another paper out the door. Now, it's actually worse than that. How do you get published? Well, I've mentioned this in the past, and again, I'm not going to pull any punches, but it's a club. If you want to in science or nature, which are supposed to be the two best journals in the world, for at least in my discipline,

you need to know somebody that's published in science or nature, and you put them in the paper, and lo and behold, you get published in science or nature. In fact, it's so funny that colleagues of mine have called science and nature the journals of irreproducible results. Get some quirky effect that you can't replicate, but it tells a really good story, and stick it in science or nature. But just make sure you know somebody so that you can take advantage of the rampant nepotism that occurs in the academic community. You know, my own story intersects here. One of my claims to fame is I turn down a PhD at Oxford for a PhD at the University of Victoria,

and I turned down a post-doctoral position at Princeton for one at UBC. Now, as it turns out academically, I'm glad I did because at UVIC I met Dr. Clay Holroyd, who was one of the most brilliant men or scientists I've ever met. And at UBC, I had the privilege of working with Dr. Todd Handy, who again, one of the most innovative thinkers I've ever met. But the problem is, if I had Oxford and Princeton on my CV, as opposed to UVIC and UBC, I'd probably be getting published in science and nature because those journals like to publish papers that come from Oxford and not the University of Victoria,

and that come from Princeton and not the University of British Columbia. Now, can you get published in nature coming from the University of Victoria? Yeah, you can. I've done it myself. It's just incredibly hard relative to the ease that other people have it. But what does that mean? Science is broken. Because these people that are getting published in these top journals aren't necessarily the best scientists. They just happen to know the right people. This problem exists into the realm of pay journals.

Now, the idea of open access has good intent. The original intent was to publish and let the world see it. A lot of academic journals are hidden behind paywalls, so the average person can't read these articles. So Open Access journals came along, and they basically said, well, if you pay to publish, we'll let anyone read this paper, and that's how these journals make their money. But sadly now, the vast majority of pay journals, well, they don't really do the peer review process properly. You're just paying to get your name on a paper that gets published so you can up your publication count and meet the publisher parish criteria. Now that's not all page journals. There are some really good ones out there, but the vast majority don't do a decent job of reviewing, and as a result, garbage science is published.

This problem also extends to grant funding. The Nepotism Club is strong. there as well. You know, I sit on a couple of major grant review boards and I don't want to name any names, but one of the ones I sit on is a pretty important funding agency and people put together 30 to 40 page applications and they get reviewed in 12 minutes. That's how much time is given to decide the future of that particular scientist research program, 12 minutes. And guess what? That nepotism bias is rampant. They look at the names.

Oh, is someone famous on this grant? Does this person know someone famous? And I've heard those comments. Oh, they worked with so-and-so, so they must be good. No, that just means they worked with so-and-so. And there's incredible outside pressure as well. Again, I don't want to talk politics. It's none of my business, and I don't know much about it.

But whether you're in Canada, the United States, or any other country, there's a lot of incredible outside pressure in terms of the research that's being done. I will mention that within Canada, under a previous government, not the current liberal government, which means you can probably do the math, all of the basic scientists in the country were basically forced to do applied science. Funding for basic science dried up, everything was about application. Now, as someone that does a lot of applied science, I was actually a fan of this to an extent, but you can't shut down basic science as well.

In other countries, science is being directed and curtailed to an even greater extent. So I wish this had been upbeat coming out of SFN 2025. I've got another full day there tomorrow, and my goal is I'm going to find five cool papers from people that are just trying to do some good science, and they're not playing the game. I really hope I can report back to you that I did. But for now, I will say that science is broken. There are some incredible grad students out there

and some incredible professors doing good science, but I think it's more like they're trying to do good science in a broken system. All right. Don't forget the website that Neuroscience, Guysguidecguy.com links to Etsy and Patreon. If you can buy our merch, the money goes to grad students to help them pay their bills. If you sign up on Patreon, your donations go to grad students to help them pay their bills.

Social media, X threads and Instagram at that neuroscience guy. Please reach out to us. We do want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. Tell us. There's also Gmail, that neuroscience guy at gmail.com. Last but not least, the podcast itself. I'm still swooning over the million downloads. I won't lie.

I never thought it would get there. I remember when we broke 100, and I was really excited a couple years ago. But, you know, I'm motivated. The team is motivated. Heck, let's go for 2 million. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Olaf Krig Olson coming to you from SFN 2025 in San Diego. And I am that neuroscience guy.

See you soon for another full episode of the podcast.