JLB – Hi everybody, welcome to the monthly Sychotic Public, a podcast broadcasting laves from Nantes, France. Today’s November 4th, it’s 1022am and right now you’re listening to Juliette.
Today’s topic will be interdisciplinarity. Let me first introduce this subject: Since the beginning of globalisation, the quantity and diversity of information and discoveries also brought the separation and increasing specialisation of scientific disciplines. (and) This tendency was reinforced during WW2 because of Taylorism and the economic approach.
(so) Disciplines naturally tend towards autonomy, because as they become more and more specialised, they develop boundaries and even idiosyncrasies, such as methods, techniques, or domain-specific vocabulary. However, increasingly, people are seeing the benefit of crossing different disciplines together – because the reality of life and science is such that nothing exists in a vacuum. To understand many complex phenomena, we have to grasp elements of the context in which they belong: related concepts, fundamental mechanisms, broader perspectives, and all of that at once. For example, to send a rocket into space – which is, granted, a very complex operation – we rely on hundreds of specialists intertwining their knowledge, from mechanics, programmers, and engineers to astronauts, psychologists, and theoretical physicists.
Ok, so, Now, to understand the particularity on a confrontation of interdisciplinarity, we received James Moultrie, a Scottish neuroscience student from the University of Amsterdam
Hi James !
JM – Hi Juliette, thanks for having me on your podcast
JLB – So you have a bit of an eclectic background… geography, animal behaviour and now neuroscience… which no doubt grants you an interesting perspective on interdisciplinarity. Can you perhaps start by telling us a bit more about your background?
JM – First at all, I studied geography for 3 years. I learned about … urban planning, climatology, paedology (study of rocks), geopolitics, and all kinds of other domains relating to how humans occupy the planet. So, it wasn’t really specific as a field. After that, I spent a few months studying animal behaviour, I was studying wild monkeys in the rainforest of Malaysia. After that I moved onto this master in NS. It’s great because a lot of us come from different disciplines so it’s very interesting to work together.
JLB – Wow that’s an interesting journey! Well, neurosciences involve thinking about perception, environment, brains areas, cognitive mechanisms, which means a lot of different ideas and concepts, different scales of reasoning too. You can’t only focus your work on one single micro-perspective, It’s really an integrative approach. And so… What benefits and disadvantages do you think you can tell us about it?
JM – Well first of all, it turns out neuroscience doesn’t necessarily have an integrative approach… A Lot of my colleagues chose to focus on a single thing, say, one particular neuron in the rat cortex, or one particular structure of the basal ganglia, or one particular type of dopamine receptor in relation to the expression of one particular type of gene. So neuroscience can be very micro-perspective, so to speak. On the other hand, yes, lots of neuroscientists choose to integrate different concepts: to understand how a behaviour works, you have to go back to what triggered that behaviour in the environment, what hormonal or neurotransmitter balance there was in the brain a couple of seconds beforehand, all the way back to the childhood environment the individual grew up in, their genetic make-up, or even evolutionary reasons for selecting one behaviour or another. In that sense, it’s quite integrative indeed.
JLB – If you’re working with people from different disciplines, you might Encounter a problem in communicating with them. You have some kind of domain-specific knowledge, they have another … Doesn’t that make it difficult to work together and understand each other?
JM – Yeah I totally understand what you mean, but I disagree: I think it makes conversations and exchanges a lot richer! We get to learn a lot from having conversations with other disciplines, and to be honest, it’s often a lot more complementary than you might expect. In an integrative science such as neuroscience, you can make your own micro advancements on your own micro scale, but in my opinion the most interesting findings are when different disciplines come together and put all the pieces together. A bit as if different disciplines all had different parts of a puzzle.
JLB – Oh I see. So it creates a learning environment where people can benefit from other people’s knowledge. — I don’t really have the same experience as you because I only study one single field of social sciences which is psychology. The most general approach you’ll find there, is during the bachelor years. You study different specialisations of psychology like cognitive, social, developmental or clinical psychology for example, but you don’t really connect them together. It’s really airtight. What do you think we can do about this?
JM – I think it’d be a great idea to try and have some talks with different disciplines – not only during the bachelors but also at higher levels of education. For example, you were mentioning off the air that you had to conduct interviews together with people from your masters. Well, wouldn’t it be interesting to do that with people from different masters? Like anthropology, or linguistics. Your masters are more work-related, right? So maybe students from business, or management.
JLB – Yes, that’s true! I think it would be a good idea for sure. We should be doing that as early as the first year of Bachelors! I mean work psychology is the most collective field in psychology, which means we will be confronted with people who come from very different fields, like management, human resources, sociology, engineering or business for example, and we will have to work with them. So It would be nice to spend a little time in different companies, maybe just one day per month for instance, to get to know the real tasks and concrete jobs of employees, that they have to do every day. This would get us out of our psychology box and onto the field which is where we’ll end up once we enter the job market. Getting a bit of field work experience beforehand can’t do any harm.
But to speak a bit more broadly, I think psychology should use more interdisciplinarity because to work on any human concept, we need to understand many different aspects of a person’s environment, social influences, emotions, and even brain mechanisms which may determine their behaviour and reactions.
Ok, now, It’s the end of our time together. Thank you so much for coming! This was Sychotic public, see you all next time!