I have recently befriended a post-doc in neuroscience and in one of his lectures he referred to "part of brain lighting up" as a legitimate research method. So it's not pop-science, it's how the actuals science is being done today.

The brain is vast in it's complexity, so much so that we don't even grasp the magnitude of the complexity itself. There are between 10^11 and 10^13 neurons, depending on the method of approximation. There are 10^4 dendrites (inputs) to each neuron, and one output (axon). The inputs are analogue and mediated by chemistry. The output is binary, thankfully, however the axon is fairly long and itself can go in/out of order based on certain chemical balance along its entire length.

It's a heck of a job.

This is a journalistic account of a scientific result. It's important to keep that in mind.