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Neuroscience Can't Explain How a Microprocessor Works (economist.com)
mspohr writes: The Economist has an interesting story about two neuroscientists/engineers -- Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording of Northwestern University, in Chicago -- who decided to test the methods of neuroscience using a 6502 processor. Their results are published in the PLOS Computational Biology journal. Neuroscientists explore how the brain works by looking at damaged brains and monitoring inputs and outputs to try to infer intermediate processing. They did the same with the 6502 processor which was used in early Atari, Apple and Commodore computers. What they discovered was that these methods were sorely lacking in that they often pointed in the wrong direction and missed important processing steps.
Neurons aren't digital processors. A set of connected neurons isn't either. Neuroscience already knows that it's really difficult to learn about the structure and function of the brain from the available tools. What was more interesting was that they were able to pick up anything. They found that the chip had a master clock, for example.
There are people already challenging the use of viewing the brains as a computer (signal ins and outs) in terms of really understanding how brains organize and function. So, given all this, it's not surprising that the methods didn't fare well. The neuroscientists already knew they had a very tough task, it's those in CS and AI that are assuming that understanding the brain is the same as understanding a collection of digital circuits.