What Makes Neuroscience a Hard or Soft Science?

written by Adriana

When I was at school, we had to pick a minimum of two subjects out of ‘hard’ sciences, such as physics, biology or chemistry, and two out of ‘soft’ sciences like history, geography or psychology.

Nowadays with the advanced technology and fast-paced world bringing new fields closer to the public, the idea of categorising science into ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ becomes a challenge.

In this article, I will discuss why neuroscience is considered a ‘hard’ science, and why this categorisation is no longer relevant, especially in relation to this discipline.

Is neuroscience a 'hard' science?

Neuroscience may be considered a ‘hard’ science, since it is a sub-discipline of biology, although nowadays it is often referred to as a separate science. You may see neuroscience as a ‘hard’ science, as it also follows systematic methodology, mathematical models, and provides replicable results.

All of this leads to reliable evidence-based findings, frequently published in ht peer-reviewed journals. However, due to the interdisciplinary aspects of the biological and behavioural sciences, a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science may not applicable.

Before we jump into the discussion, let’s first define what is science.

According to the Science Council, that’s a definition of science:

"Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence."

Previously, formal sciences such as physics, maths and biology were described as ‘hard’ sciences because of the more scientific approach, which included clear hypotheses, methods, data analysis, and quantification of the measures.

It was based on the experimental design, which you could follow systematically, isolate the variable you want to measure and get the same results several times as you repeat the experiment.

In contrast, sciences such as history, geography or psychology are commonly described as ‘soft’ sciences, since they rely on subjective observations, theories, and models.

In the modern days, where a multi-disciplinary approach and combination of several sciences are used to solve problems, it may be difficult to draw a line between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences.

Neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field

Neuroscience is a field, where you can find enormous complexity of research methods, systematic approaches based on programming, and statistical analyses. Although you get precise measures of human behaviour or physiological response variables, your predictions are based on an observational hypothesis and subjective questions proposed by other researchers.

As a result, you have evidence-based findings, but the interpretation of your data and the conclusions you draw are limited.

In my research project, for example, I found that faster visual processing is correlated with another measure.

However, I can’t be 100% sure that subject differences, such as age, gender, personality traits or life experience didn’t affect the performance on a visual task.

To explain my results I had to review literature, and theories on visual processing, attention, and explain concepts such as attention disengagement or critically discuss how age affects visual processing, eg. number of projections that rely on neurotransmitter dopamine transmission may affect it.

If you don’t know anything about eye movements, then you can read my article on Medium where I describe how a saccadic system works – that’s what my research project is about!

Subjects that make neuroscience a 'hard' science

If you study neuroscience, you may find yourself learning about action potentials, cell metabolism, synapses, the development of the neural cord or even programming in Matlab!

Yes, you are expected to learn how to code when studying neuroscience.

Studying the brain at different levels provides you with a great overview of a variety of methods, a current understanding of the problem and the shared aim – to answer one question:

How does the brain work? What leads to this behaviour?

Only when you have a solid foundation across several areas, ranging from biochemistry to psychology, you are able to develop constructive and critical thinking, which in turn facilitates problem-solving.

That was a short summary of what it’s like to srtudy a neuroscience degree. Here you can see an example of a Neuroscience Bsc 1st year course outline. Although there are elective modules, throughout 3 years you build knowledge by studying different subjects.

Personally, I was exploring the relationship between visual processing and autism. If I would be in the psychology department, I might have measured reaction time or attention spent on a particular object.

But, as a neuroscience student, I had the advantage – I could use the neuroscientific method to measure a specific variable, such as an eye movement latency, accuracy or velocity.

This allowed me to extract a valuable measure, assessing only one process without the effect from other variables, which leads to more reliable findings.

That’s why, in my opinion, studying neuroscience is harder than doing a degree in psychology.

Final Word

If you have ever wondered, what disciplne can let you to investigate your brain and behaviour using experimental procedures, applying mathematics, and programming skills, it is neuroscience.

Previously described as a subfield of biology, it was considered a ‘hard’ science. However, with the recent increase in data, dependency on statistics and research methods, as well as a close link to biology, chemistry, and psychology, neuroscience is a cross-disciplinary field, combining ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences.

Thank you for reading this blog post and I hope you found it useful!

Do you think neuroscience is a hard or soft science? What makes a subject hard? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Thank you for stopping by! We are neuroscientists by day and digital creators by night who are passionate about self-development, personal growth and a healthy mindset. 🧠

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