Individual neurons are important. Except for Utah arrays, neuralink, and other interfaces that read individual neurons, brain scans are really fuzzy proxies that glob together the signal from millions of neurons. It's like overlaying all the text of hundreds of pages onto a single page - you might learn some valid things about pages, ink, margins, and get a good understanding about the structure of a book, but you'll never be able to read the text and know what the story is.
It's the difference between spies doing traffic analysis on messages or actually decrypting them.
Perfect analogy
not really. there's a long ways to go from single cell imaging to decoding, and even further to understanding the network. for instance, the drosophila visual system has been studied to death for 40 years, in exquisite detail. we have nanometer resolution structural imaging, a 34431 x 39743 x 41407, 400TB image that cost on the order of $100M to produce and took dozens of man years. thousands of man years devoted to probing the function of individual neurons. for a single circuit in a single organism. and we still don't have the whole picture.
Wait You have my interest now. I might be misunderstanding this. Are you saying that a single image from the exact resolution of drosophila vision is 400TB of detail?
this headline ends differently in zebrafish nature