This is just a guess, but speculative, radical stuff seems risky from a career point of view.

You're going to give up years of your life and work your ass off tirelessly toward the PhD that is necessary to open other doors. Do you bet it all on a far-out idea that might not pan out? You don't want to get too conservative, but you don't want to go wild either.

Then the same thing repeats when you're working on research or directing research. You need to get grant money. You need to publish.

You want to advance yourself within the field, and the way to do that is with either one amazing breakthrough or (more likely) a string of solid, significant work.

And once you've built a reputation, which is important, you can lose it all by venturing too far out.

Thus, while it's not necessarily that people are closed-minded, there are incentives for most people to take a middle road, which means a lot more evolutionary progress than revolutionary progress.

Living with academics for many years now, I believe this to be very well put!

> Is there a resistance to new concepts no more than normal.

Compared to tech, though, there is a broad consensus that we have a very large Rumsfeld problem: we know that we don't know what we don't know.

Come play in a wet lab for 5 years and see how you feel.

This made me laugh, I just wanted to say thanks.

There definitely is, as academics life work and achievements are often tied to specific concepts and therefore they resist new ideas.

See what happened with Alzheimers, where as specific theory that is probably wrong dominated for years and received most funding, sending a cure back years as well.

https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...

It might be a self-reinforcing cycle? To get funding researchers write grant proposals to target the most trendy research topics, which when funded lead to more research papers and momentum around those topics. Speculative research is thereby forced to survive more as side projects than the primary research areas of successful labs.

while technology is very advanced it still has a lot of limits. Watching what is happening in someone's brain without damaging them is quite difficult. From the article "Currently, people who volunteer for such experiments have to be able to fall asleep while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap inside of a noisy MRI machine—no easy feat." So it would seem that studying internal brain activity during healthy sleep is indeed a challenge.

Imagine some years into future we will find that sleep does not work the way we thought because all data was from selected few unnormal enough to be able to sleep inside mri machine.

and EEG is noisy as shit (SNR wise) and fMRI has a 2-second lag and MEG's ill-posed spatially and repeatability is hard and imaging only gets you a few hundred microns into the grey matter and you can't do it in humans and "single units" usually aren't and you can't do that in humans either anyway and and and ...

yeah, it's not easy.

I think it's less culture and more specifically that humans are squishy and wet and incredibly complicated and hard to separate into obviously separate pieces. The body has a kind of almost fractal complexity that makes it devilishly hard to cleanly separate things from each other in many cases.

Also dead bodies (easier to study and dissect) are very different from live bodies (you can get a quick look during surgery, but that's nothing like detailed dissection).

I suspect it's because there are a lot of wrong new concepts constantly fighting established ones, both from scientists who are sloppy or misguided and from total crackpots, and it's hard to tell in all that noise when something new is actually worth considering.

Grab a college-level biology intro book.

If you're the kind of person who enjoyed physics, you'll probably like it. And it will teach you why there are some many unknowns.

Life is complicated, and studying the essence of it is difficult.