Honestly, some of the best brain science ever was by accidental injuries removing some portion of the brain and scientists getting to study the difference. So being able to pick and choose now is ground breaking. It's the equivalent of genetics when we started being able to selectively turn off or insert genes (along with a fluorescent market to know it took).

Poking "areas" of a massive organ with a stick vs direct manipulation of DNA at the molecular level.

Those things can be just as crude as each other. Genes (and proteins) can interact in very complex ways so don't be fooled into thinking that 'direct manipulation' of specific parts means you have any idea what's going 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'.

> and a stick

We call that a "debugger" around here. You are expected to know the jargon before applying for patents.

Oddly, my boss calls it a 'motivator' - with a nail in the end it's an 'incentive package'

Toggling big switches vs smaller switches. Same idea, different scale, different "stick".

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.

You can make anything sound daft by expressing it a certain way. The entire history of physics, all the way from cavemen to the LHC, is just a story of smashing rocks together in creative ways and watching what happens.

But obviously it's a lot more than that, and so is electric brain stimulation.

This seems pretty interesting if you read the description of the brain region.

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.

So?

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?

Before smashing particles together, physicists use mathematical models to predict exactly what they will see given different assumptions, usually with incredibly high degrees of accuracy. There are no such models of higher-level cognitive processes in neuroscience. They are very different.

>Before smashing particles together, physicists use mathematical models to predict exactly what they will see given different assumptions, usually with incredibly high degrees of accuracy.

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.

I often think about exactly both these points. We are so far behind in terms of research compared to particle physics because we don't have the ability to destructively smash consciousness apart just to see what falls out over and over again. "Zapping" very low number of brains is going to be slow going, and unfortunately is not far from the best we have to work with.

I find that talking a problem to death usually solves things.

We absolutely have a long way to go, I wonder if we'll "solve" many of the open problems in brain science, medicine and consciousness in the next 100 years. The human brain is outrageously complicated, and much of it's workings are hidden to us, in essentially a featureless grey goo.

Well...until brain electrical signal is decrypted, they'll keep on zapping until something interesting happens. Remember when electro-shock therapy was used for nearly everything in medical practices?