**3. Brain-behavior relationship**

Disorders of the brain and nervous system (such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, stroke, and traumatic brain injuries) highlight the importance of the biological bases of behavior. The *brain-behavior relationship* seems to be the

### *Introductory Chapter: Neuroscience* Wants *Behavior DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.86504*

descendant of the Cartesian mind-body dualism, where the brain is the biological component and behavior the psychological one.

Despite the passing of the centuries, the body-mind dualism continues to be an unresolved problem in this day and age. At the beginning of the history of neuroscience, the mind and brain were kept apart as if they were separate and distinct concepts. Nevertheless, the notion that the brain and behavior function separately turns out to be an impediment to scientific progress, since they are related in a more complex way than one might imagine. Indeed, the brain-behavior relationship is modulated by different factors: the environment, sociocultural and historical aspects, phylogeny, genetics, and ontogeny.

Today we still find ourselves having to answer this question: *Are we our brain?*

As recently suggested by Dede and collaborators, "the development of brainbehavior relationship depended thereafter on interdisciplinary collaboration, and scientists' ability to formulate new experimental questions and designs, but mainly on the methods devised for studying both parts of this dipole" ([6], p. 12). Today, behavioral neuroscientists balance three general research perspectives in designing their research [6]:


Indeed, behavioral neuroscience research is now conducted at a level of analysis ranging from molecular events to the functioning of the entire brain and complex social situations.
