They're pointing a zapper at different "areas" of someone's head and seeing what happens. That's what counts for brain science today. We have a long way to go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claustrum
I find this more interesting than 'rebar through the eye' style stuff like the Phantoms in the Brain book by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran
It's more interesting since they mention consciousness, though I don't know what they're really talking about.
I think stuff like 'rebar through the eye' has revealed interesting 'machine learning'-type defects, like funny ways your vision can be messed up and see at a very low fps, unable to perceive most quick motion.
But machine learning is popular and stuff because it works, unlike strong AI and consciousness, which are pretty difficult to get any handle on.
As a software analogy, think about a very large and complex, undocumented code-base in a bizarre language you've never come across. Your only experimental tool is to pick a line of code, delete/modify it, and then see what happens. As you learn more, you can do refine your experiments but basically, you're still just 'poking it with a stick'.
We call that a "debugger" around here. You are expected to know the jargon before applying for patents.
What is/are the appropriate scales to study brain function at? Quarks? Molecules? Brain regions? Which ones? All the above? None? We need to know the answer in advance before pronouncing a method "crude", or conversely, "too precise", by some criteria.
We don't know the answer to the scale question but poking "areas" to build up a fuzzy picture of regional function at first approximation is getting us there.
Would the knowledge gained from knock-out/stimulation experiments be more fine-grained if the investigators already had a fine-grained understanding of what they were studying and thus, the cleanest way to study it? Yes.
But breakthroughs are not made where investigators know what they're doing. Breakthroughs are made where nobody knows what they're doing--often crudely, frequently accidentally. The history of scientific advance is messy. Significance of results doesn't map neatly to sophistication of methods/tools.
I wholly agree that neuroscience has a long way to go. But to me that doesn't diminish the achievements of neuroscientists pushing us there, using whatever ethical opportunities available to them.
But obviously it's a lot more than that, and so is electric brain stimulation.
Fundamental physics is done by smashing particles together and seeing what happens. We've gotten tremendously far with this approach. Do you have a better idea?
Not necessarily. In the 1950s and 1960s when we started exploring higher energy levels, we didn't really have a model or theory that predicted all the particles we ended up seeing. That came after.