4 ms·

This seems like trying to understand how a car engine works by listening to the pitch of the sound it makes. Sure you can deduce somethings, but you aren't real

• agumonkey 11y ago
  This is how I feel about neuroscience. Like sending signals through a processor to store heat maps. Some abstraction is missing.
  • jonex 11y ago
    Hmm, interesting thought, how much would we learn about a computer by a combination of stress testing and heat-mapping? I'd say, quite much. I'm sure there would be no problem to figure out at least a few layers of memory, the existence of a separate GPU, the fact that it has a limited capability of concurrent computation and that most computation occurs at a very minor part of the CPU etc. Then, if we also figured out that the CPU is based on a lot of small transistors that'd probably give some insight as well. But this would obviously not be nearly enough to build our own computer with capabilities similar to a modern computer. That'd require a lot more detailed knowledge and advanced equipment I'd say neuroscience is somewhere at the beginning of the mapping process, certainly not nearly enough to construct our own brain, but still very informative on the subject of how the brain functions.
    • agumonkey 11y ago
      But it would allow confusion, describing CPUs as qualitatively different because of quantitative variations (register count, size, bus width) even though they're essentially the same (integrate, differentiate).
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
• Houshalter 11y ago
  According to the article it's more like studying a computer and realizing it has clock cycles, where all the circuits are synchronized by a global clock. It's a very interesting finding.