 The impact of science-in-practice on philosophy of science generally has been felt acutely in the philosophy of neuroscience, most notably in increased philosophical interest in neuroscientific experimentation. In itself this should not surprise. Neuroscience relies heavily on laboratory experimentation, especially within its cellular and molecular, “Society for Neuroscience” mainstream. So the call to understand experiment should beckon any philosopher who ventures into neuroscience’s cellular/molecular foundations. Two papers by Jacqueline Sullivan (2009, 2010) have been important in this new emphasis. In her (2009) Sullivan acknowledges both Bickle’s (2003) and Craver’s (2007) focus on cellular and molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation, and experience-driven form of synaptic plasticity. But she insists that broader philosophical commitments, which lead Bickle to ruthless reductionist and Craver to mosaic unity “global” accounts, obscure important aspects of real laboratory neuroscience practice. She emphasizes the role of “subprotocols”, which specify how data are to be gathered, in her model of “the experimental process”, and illustrates these notions with a number of examples. Her analysis reveals an important underappreciated tension among a pair of widely-accepted experiment norms. Pursuing “reliability” drives experimenters more deeply into extensive laboratory controls. Pursuing “external validity” drives them toward enriched experimental environments that more closely represent the messy natural environment beyond the laboratory. These two norms commonly conflict: in order to get more of one, scientists introduce conditions that give them less of the other. 