In a very revealing paper: “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?”, Jonas and Kording tested a battery of neuroscientific methods to see if they were useful in helping to understand the workings of a basic microprocessor. This paper has already stirred quite a response, including from Numenta, the Spike, Arstechnica, the Atlantic, and lots of chatter on Twitter.
This is a fascinating paper. To a large degree, the answer to the title question as addressed by their methods (connectomics, lesion studies, tuning properties, LFPs, Granger causality, and dimensionality reduction), is simply ‘no’, but perhaps even more importantly, the paper brings focus to the question of what it means to ‘understand’ something that processes information, like a brain or a microprocessor. Continue reading “Understanding ‘Understanding’: Comments on “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?””