ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2019
The Value of Failure in Science: The Story of Grandmother Cells in Neuroscience.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 72 citations in OpenAlex.
- Wider Than the Sky: An Alternative to "Mapping" the World Onto the Brain.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- The present and future of peer review: Ideas, interventions, and evidence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Dawn of a New Pharmaceutical Epoch: Can AI and Robotics Reshape Drug Formulation?Advanced healthcare materials · 2024Article
- Sensory encoding and memory in the mushroom body: signals, noise, and variability.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
- A Biomorphic Model of Cortical Column for Content-Based Image Retrieval.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The case for formal methodology in scientific reform.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The annals of science are filled with successes. Only in footnotes do we hear about the failures, the cul-de-sacs, and the forgotten ideas. Failure is how research advances. Yet it hardly features in theoretical perspectives on science. That is a mistake. Failures, whether clear-cut or ambiguous, are heuristically fruitful in their own right. Thinking about failure questions our measures of success, including the conceptual foundations of current practice, that can only be transient in an experimental context. This article advances the heuristics of failure analysis, meaning the explicit treatment of certain ideas or models as failures. The value of failures qua being a failure is illustrated with the example of grandmother cells; the contested idea of a hypothetical neuron that encodes a highly specific but complex stimulus, such as the image of one's grandmother. Repeatedly evoked in popular science and maintained in textbooks, there is sufficient reason to critically review the theoretical and empirical background of this idea.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.