Oh sure there is some blobology to it still...but the nature of the function attributed is becoming more precise.--not a memory blob, a blob associated with sig

Oh sure there is some blobology to it still...but the nature of the function attributed is becoming more precise.--not a memory blob, a blob associated with signal orthoganalization. But that is just the functional neuroimaging in humans in which we are working downwards, while neuroscientists using methods that influence activity at the neural level, or even the dendritic level, work upwards. Each informs the other. For example, the computational models of pattern separation and completion are derived by observations of the structure of connections between neurons, which led to hypotheses about what kinds of operation it could support, which led to tests of that hypothesis in rats, and eventually in humans. But at the heart of it, I don't think we have to be completely reductionistic to gain understanding. We don't have to fully understand in every detail how dendrites operate to understand that a collection of neurons can support a particular data transformation.