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Reply to ‘Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience as collections of practices’

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 27, page 80 (2026)Cite this article

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Our purpose in describing two research cultures in neuroscience in a recent Comment article (Rosas, F. E. et al. Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00946-x; 2025)1 was to highlight that multiple worthwhile scientific values exist, and that trade-offs between them are not scientifically unsound but an inevitable consequence of studying a system as complex as the brain. van Bree and Poeppel’s correspondence (van Bree, S. & Poeppel, D. Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience as collections of practices. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-01004-2; 2025)2 provides a valuable opportunity for clarification of our views.

van Bree and Poeppel raise the concern that some of the properties listed for top-down and bottom-up research approaches are ‘normatively loaded’2. This, however, is fully intentional in our characterization, because the distinction is precisely about scientific values: both research cultures pursue scientific understanding in good faith but prioritize differently among different scientific values3. As such, it is important to clarify that the two cultures we described1 are to be understood as poles of a continuum. It would be erroneous to view the challenge faced by neuroscientists as an either–or, all-or-none choice between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Instead, this challenge requires them to be balanced in different contexts, just as statisticians carefully weigh the relevance of precision against accuracy (depending, for example, on the cost of observation or whether false positives or negatives are more harmful), rather than simply ignoring one of the two. All good work in neuroscience cares about solid foundations and worthwhile questions: top-down and bottom-up research just balance these desiderata differently.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Andrea I. Luppi & Fernando E. Rosas

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Andrea I. Luppi

  3. St John’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Andrea I. Luppi

  4. Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Andrea I. Luppi

  5. Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Fernando E. Rosas

  6. Sussex AI, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Fernando E. Rosas

  7. Department of Brain Science, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Fernando E. Rosas

  8. Centre for Complexity Science, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Fernando E. Rosas

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  1. Andrea I. Luppi
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  2. Fernando E. Rosas
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Correspondence to Andrea I. Luppi or Fernando E. Rosas.

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Luppi, A.I., Rosas, F.E. Reply to ‘Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience as collections of practices’. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 27, 80 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-01006-0

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