Template:Did you know nominations/Phase precession

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:56, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Phase precession edit

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~~... that the brain uses phase precession to code for location?~~

Source: This is simplified from the last sentence of the page, for which there are multiple inline citations:

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Ethel Page‎

Created by Tryptofish (talk). Self-nominated at 22:22, 29 January 2018 (UTC).

Review

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

Adequate sourcing:
Neutral: - My impression is that the article focusses too much on place. This may be an artifact of the typical maze-running experiment. See Phase precession in the nonspatial domain.
Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:
Other problems: - Per MOS:JARGON, the text should be more accessible for the general reader. "Phase precession" may not be the best title as it often seems to be called "theta phase precession" and that provides better context.

Hook eligibility:

Cited:
Interesting:
Other problems: - The hook seems to over-simplify the matter. As I sit here and contemplate my location in space – London, UK, Earth &c. – is this coding all done by phase precession? I'm not convinced.

QPQ: Done.

Overall: It's an interesting and promising topic but I'm wary of results in brain science because they are part of the replication crisis and I was especially impressed by the lessons we learned from a dead fish. Andrew D. (talk) 18:57, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Andrew D.: thank you very much for this thoughtful review. I particularly appreciate you making me aware of the source material about nonspatial findings, because I had not been aware of that. I'm going to take about a day to look carefully into all of these points, and I'll get back to you here when I've done it. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:45, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson: I've made a series of revisions that I hope address the points that you raised:

Neutrality: I've added a new section to the page, about "other systems". In this section, I cover the material to which you alerted me, about nonspatial coding. I also summarize some of the debates that occurred during the time when scientists were deciding whether or not the phenomenon is a real one. I'm very sure that there are not any recent reliable sources that say that precession is an artifact. I hear you about the need to be careful about preliminary results (after all, I'm both a professional neuroscientist and a user whose username involves fish!), but every secondary source, such as the Buzsáki book that I added to the sources, concludes that this is a robust phenomenon that has been replicated by multiple laboratories, and after all, it was part of a body of work that led to a Nobel Prize. It would be original research to raise any more questions than what the page currently does.

Jargon: I made this edit to try and make things clearer to the general reader: [1]. I've made sure that any technical terms are blue-linked. (Please tell me if there is still anything that is hard to understand.) As for the pagename, there was already some discussion of that on the talk page, and I made Theta phase precession a redirect to the page. Although current sources only report it at the theta wavelength, I think it best to allow for the possibility that non-theta results may be found in the near future. I see sources calling it by name either with or without "theta", but I don't think that either with or without is much more common than the other. Also, adding "theta" to the page name would actually add a bit more jargon there.

Hook: Agreed. I have struck ALT0, and I replace it with:

ALT1

... that phase precession is part of how the brain codes for location?

Thanks, --Tryptofish (talk) 23:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Ok, I'll take another look but will need some time please as I'm not a neuroscientist and so the material is still quite unfamiliar and difficult. More anon. Andrew D. (talk) 23:06, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
- @Andrew Davidson: It's been a long time. I'm pretty sure that I have addressed all of the issues. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:05, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
  - Sorry to keep you. I made a note on my memo page and was hoping to catch up this weekend but a bathroom renovation project overran, I caught a cold/flu and then there was the Chinese New Year to celebrate. I'll see what I can do this evening. Andrew D. (talk) 20:19, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
    - Oh, I'm so sorry all that happened. If you need more than this evening, that's fine, but I just didn't want this to sit here without checking with you. Anyway, I really do think this is ready to go, or at least close to ready. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:22, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
      - @Tryptofish: On the whole, it has been a good, busy weekend but there's even more ideas to follow up on Wikipedia now. Anyway, I've taken another look and I'm afraid I'm still dis-satisfied. Let's start with the big claim which is made in the lead "John O'Keefe shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine partly for his co-discovery of this phenomenon with Michael Recce." I wondered whether this might make a better hook and so looked into it. Neither of the sources cited seem to provide adequate support for the claim. Please consider the announcement made by the awarding body: "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ... for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain". This and other sources indicate that the prize was awarded for the discovery of place and grid cells. Phase precession doesn't get a mention and seems to be a comparatively unimportant detail.

Note also the language that the Nobel people use to describe this:

"In 1971, John O'Keefe discovered the first component of this positioning system. He found that a type of nerve cell in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat was at other places. O'Keefe concluded that these "place cells" formed a map of the room."

The way they explain this seems to be much more accessible for the average general reader than the language of our lead. MOS:JARGON is therefore still a significant issue.

The good news is that ALT1 does enough to qualify the hook and so that will do. So, please reconsider the Nobel claim, try simplifying the language of the lead and that will probably get us there. Andrew D. (talk) 21:10, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson: Thanks! Those are helpful things to have pointed out. (I could quibble about whether it was really unimportant to the Prize, given how, for example, the Buzsáki book places it within the body of work, but I accept that the Nobel's précis for the general public says what it says, and I have changed the lead accordingly. Also please note that the Nobel quote is more about what place cells do than about how phase precession works, so I was only able to use part of it for the lead here.) I've made this edit: [2]. I hope that helps. Thanks again. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:18, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
@Andrew Davidson: Bump. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:46, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
@Andrew Davidson: Can we please wrap this up? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:28, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I still think the language is more technical than it needs be but I suppose that readers will not be too surprised that this is a difficult topic. I'll give it a tick so that it can advance but I'll keep an eye on it and may have a go at editing it myself when I've got more time. Thanks for your patience. Andrew D. (talk) 19:45, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! By all means, feel free to edit it whenever you want. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 22 February 2018 (UTC)