At a time when research often seems to suggest that humans are neural puppets, Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon are chasing projects intended to show how brain functioning is connected to free will and personal freedom. And they are believers in transparent, open-source science: They are committed to publishing findings and data without restrictions — sometimes even as they happens during experiments.

Their ideas have raised eyebrows in scientific circles — and hopes.

“The lab is one of the laboratories that has a chance to become a place where new ideas in artificial intelligence and neuroscience come from,” said Hava T. Siegelmann, a professor of computer science who studies neural systems at the University of Massachusetts.

But their rigid opposition to animal research in particular may come at a steep price.

“They don’t want to play the game,” said W. McIntyre Burnham, a neuropharmacologist at the University of Toronto, with whom Dr. Ohayon studied. “They may be the wave of the future, but I think they may also have trouble getting support.”

The two came to the idea of an alternative approach to neuroscience on a backpacking trip on Vancouver Island in 2011. Dr. Lam was ending a postdoctoral fellowship, and the two scientists were worried about the direction of neuroscience. As it turned out, they were not the only ones.

Eventually they found a kindred spirit in the neuroscientist Jay S. Coggan. The Green Neuroscience Laboratory is affiliated with — and shares offices with — the NeuroLinx Research Institute, which he founded.

Dr. Coggan had earlier grown disappointed with the “establishment” science in which, he says, academic research and corporate profit priorities are increasingly indistinguishable. He bootstrapped the research laboratory with his own money and now supports it with funding from a variety of private individual contributions and scientific research grants.

NeuroLinx now supports a range of research projects, including an exploration of the way dolphins sleep, an effort to create a computer simulation of the ubiquitous lab worm C. elegans (known as the Open Worm project), and an exploration of nerve damage in diseases like multiple sclerosis.