That was at least a relatively short lived belief. That glia, the other half of brain cells, got ignored and relegated to “support” for so long is, to my mind, the worse mistake: https://www.quantamagazine.org/these-cells-spark-electricity...

That said, science wouldn’t need to be self-correcting if it was always right.

Science is like a group of people with lights of varying strength exploring a dense forest at night. We often mix up shadows and caves and rocks and animals and people… there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation. To demand otherwise, to demand some kind of mistake free march in good order as if we’re on a brightly lit field, is to ignore that we are… ingnorant.

This is like calling the python in a flask app "junk html" ;-)

Reminds me of when we thought proteins were the be all and end all and this goopy stuff bundled up in chromosones was just some useless goop.

There's a pattern which we see again and again in nature, where incredibly complex structures and behaviours emerge from interference and feedback patterns between waves - from deciding whether your toenails grow on your face or your feet to the formation of planets, from ant colony foraging and spacing to whether it will rain on Tuesday.

I suspect elements of cognition are similar.

Does make me worry about the competence of scientists that they make that mistake.