Big Think - Mind Matters: Brain science's "Family tree"

"Ideas grow out of experience, in science as elsewhere. Pascal's gambling focussed his attention on probability, for example, and French brewers gave Pasteur a reason to study fermentation. That's why I'm fascinated by Neurotree, a volunteer-run website for brain and behavior researchers that tracks their "academic genealogy." Neurotree shows, for some 30,000 scientists, the biographical roots of ideas. It maps who trained whom—which mentors brought forth which proteges, who in turn mentored others…

If you know about a scientist's interests and achievements, Neurotree is as compelling as a family album, and sometimes as surprising. (Who knew that some very molecularly-oriented brain scientists have Anna Freud among their intellectual great-grandparents?) I think it might also become a useful tool for journalists who want to avoid giving the common (and false) impression that ideas just float around the universe like loose atoms, until they fall into the mind of a researcher for no particular reason.

For example, the other day The Scientist published this article of mine on behavioral epigenetics (the search, at the molecular level, for the ways that experience changes the brain). If I'd known about Neurotree when I was writing it, I could have known that one of the researchers quoted, Michael J. Meaney of McGill University, numbers among his intellectual ancestors Donald Hebb and Wilder Penfield, and that he is three degrees of separation from Eric Kandel, making Kandel (who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000) Meaney's "closest Nobelist."