More About JMN | Neural Press

More about the Journal

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Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience is not about clinical studies in medicine, whether in psychiatry, neurology, or neurosurgery. Nor is the clinical application arising from genetic studies, pharmacological studies, or other studies investigating a single level. This is evident by the medical definition of consciousness as self-awareness. Thus, measurement of consciousness through brain scans is a gross way of measuring consciousness from the top-down and carries no multiscale mechanisms. That is why multiscale neuroscience is the epitome of theory-driven exploration of the numerous "integratory lynchpins" followed by testable experimental studies.

While consciousness is based on a wide area of the brain, including the limbic system, sensorimotor cortex, and association cortex, a large part of it appears to operate at the unconscious and subconscious levels. These levels within the dynamic hierarchy exhibit signals in the brain being information-rich. What does this suggest about mechanisms of signal transduction across scales? Neuroscience reveals chemical signal transduction as the dominant sign of changing boundary conditions. For example, in quantum potential chemistry, energy processing entails the transition from potential to kinetic energy as a sign of changeable boundary conditions. Non-integrated information suggests that evanescent meaning is not transferred but is transformed due to various integratory signal-transduction processes called “integratory lynchpins”. To clarify how all the diverse activities of the brain eventually converge onto consciousness or the final integration to consciousness is the ultimate goal of the Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience.

In Multiscale Neuroscience, we do not dispense with the integratory lynch-pins across the scale. Indeed, we explain them and that is how discoveries are made.

Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience combines the operational organization of neuroscience data to better understand complex structures and behaviors—the relationship between structure and function and how the regions and functions connect. Different parts of the brain carry out different tasks, interconnecting together, allowing complex behavior. Systems neuroscience works to fill gaps in knowledge that can largely be accomplished with data sharing to create an understanding of systems, currently being applied to simulation neuroscience-computer modeling of the brain that integrates functional groups. Yet systems neuroscience is not integrative since the former provides a false sense of realism as multiple-scale phenomena cannot be explained without harnessing bridges across multiscale mechanisms.

Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience is a journal that spans brain function across the scale from the submolecular to the system level. Yet, it differs from regular neuroscience in its heavy use of mathematics to enable the integration to be achieved theoretically. Multiscale neuroscience's uniqueness is that it sculpts theoretical neuroscience with mathematical neuroscience, different from computational neuroscience, showing that compartmentalization and discretization are subject to dynamical misalignment through nonlinear analysis.

Why multiscale neuroscience and not multilevel neuroscience? Scales are a more neutral description than levels and refer to dimensions and boundaries instead of distinct forms of organization. The concept of level can denote a main or privileged level of the experiment's focus. Some of the levels occur at different scales, yet there is no central or privileged level. This is essential in forging a multiscale approach in neuroscience. Although ‘boundary conditions’ set the limits of scale mathematically, they also give new information that leads to a better understanding of processes at different scales organized by the whole.

The Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience aims to elucidate the integratory lynchpins needed to unify scale in understanding how the brain function. Such studies include the circadian rhythm based on molecular cascades, motion detection based on receptive fields of retinal neurons leading to the visual cortex, etc. However, applying mathematics in most circumstances is necessary to achieve the integration theoretically when experimental studies cannot bridge the different brain functions that define integrative neuroscience.