Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?

journals.plos.org

16 points·hprotagonist··7 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780565

Alternative TL;DR: The experimental methods you use can color the results you get.

E.g., lesioning different parts of a microprocessor may reveal "clusters of function" much as such studies do in the brain.

Prior article: "Can a biologist fix a radio?"

http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/abstract/S1535-6108(02)00133...

TL;DR: electronics are designed modularly, for easy analysis by end-users (mainly for repair). Biology is ... not designed so much as evolved, and evolves in a way that is not easily comprehended by human brains.

You can easily understand how to fix an electronic device, but understanding how it works at a fundamental level is where the complexity comes in ;)

For the purposes of this article, the neuroscientists aren't concerned with the molecular level of how brains work. Just the higher level components. ALthough it's argued both ways, it seems like you can understand "how a brain works" without understanding the neuron's molecular behavior (diffusion, electric propagation), you can just model it at a coarse grained level.

The difference in understanding is the nature of the wiring, in that electronic systems tend to be wired in highly modular ways, while biological systems tend to be wired in highly interconnected ways.

The modularity of all human designed complex systems is a direct function of the fact that multilple humans need to be able to discuss the system intelligently. The designers themselves were only capable of performing the design because of modularity.

not a dupe per se; this is the PLOS (peer reviewed) paper whose draft appeared on arXiv earlier this summer.

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