what i don't like about this sort of thing is: the only guaranteed way to succeed in the (apparent, revealed) objectives of the paper is not try very hard.<p>The obvious problem here is the clear mismatch between the behaviors and their research objectives and methods.<p>If they wanted to understand transistors, they'd do what cellular neuroscientists do, and isolate and manipulate individual transistors inputs and measure the outputs.<p>If they wanted to understand how clusters of transistors, whose activities are tightly coupled (as you'd expect them to be in a logic gate), then you'd isolate those, and manipulate the inputs and measure the outputs.<p>If you wanted to understand higher levels of organization, using a lesion approach, you need to decide how much to lesion. In the brain, function is localized in clusters of related activity, and there is usually a lot of redundancy. Single neuron lesions are not usually enough to have noticeable effects. But even then, a lesion approach is more interesting when you couple it with real experiments. Consider this paper by Sheth et al. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11239" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11239</a>, which had subjects perform a cognitive control task before a surgical lesion to the dorsal anterior cingulate, coupled with single unit recordings, and then had them perform the same task after the lesion. The experiment yielded pre-lesion behavioral and neural evidence of a signal related to predicted demand for control, and post-lesion, the behavioral signal was abolished.<p>Of course, the Sheth paper would not have been possible without the iterative improvements in understanding made by prior work, including Botvinick's neural models of conflict monitoring and control. That is, its iterative; and this cpu paper was never intended to be iterative.