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Comment by gbjw | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools)

[1] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

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This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.

I don't care how often I get down voted for making the above comment in response to posts about this article. I am a neuroscientist and I will defend my field from overrated, simplistic criticisms that happen to appeal to the HN crowd's sensibilities.

Do you have any suggestions for what the average layperson could read to get a better understanding of contemporary neuroscience? Any articles or books you'd recommend?

That is a bit difficult because the field is very broad, and I don't tend to read popular science books. Mostly, I'd look up recent review articles on Google Scholar...

"rhythms in the brain" is highly recommended

Mostly agreed. In my eyes, the takeaway from this piece is not that neuroscience is futile and that we should give up, but rather that we now should redouble efforts on analysis methods to make sense of the large, complex datasets that we are on the cusp of generating.

I'd have preferred to see follow up experiments conducted on the microcircuit. If the test bed was made into a platform to ease set-up and experimentation by other researchers, maybe the paper would be built upon. Specifically, I'd like to see a series of behavioral neuroscience papers that looked at specific responses to user behavior, differences in task demand, etc, then coupled with inferences from knowledge about "neurons" i.e. transistor, registers, etc, that one would gather from the "harder" neurosciences.

That's a bit silly because neuroscience tools are built got biological brains. electrical engineering tools are used on microprocessors, as they should.

OP and TFA meant "Would a similar method of observing a complex, connected system of systems work on a less complex example like a microchip if we had just up and found one?"

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