onus isn't on me to justify the existence of an entire field to you. the claim that neuroscience has not made great strides in the last 30 years is an extraordinary one, and that's all on you. but it especially doesn't help your case that if you had googled "fly connectome " you would have seen that the first result is a complete connectome of a larvae and the third result is the tour de force from Janelia that produced an adult connectome. With names and verified connections. there is even a wikipedia article for the drosophila connectome!
> I remember sauntering to the occasional neuroscience talk during my ut southwestern PhD and occasionally hearing some professor brag about how the majority of one of their PhD’s jobs was to segmenting a single neuron in the thousand EM images or something. Surely that’s a sign this field needs revision?
and if you had gone on to actually read the hemibrain connectome you would have gained some appreciation for the gargantuan achievement that it was. it took hundreds of person years to generate ground truth segmenting neurons by hand, to develop the ML techniques required to automatically segment the rest (extremely difficult problem) and to then validate the automatic segmentations. not to mention the insane effort it was to acquire a half petabyte EM image of a single fly at sub-synaptic resolution in the first place.
I gotta hand it to you though, the position of naivety you've delivered your middlebrow dismissal from is truly impressive in magnitude.
From where I stand I can’t see anyone giving a clear explanation of anything our brain does or does not do in a disease. The only novel treatment that has come out seems to have been stick a rod into the brain and zap it and it just magically cures a lot of diseases we still don’t understand even a bit.
This is not even starting to discuss what little we have learned about how brains algorithms work. I’m still waiting to understand why pyramidal neurons were somehow groundbreaking. We found some neuron that fires when you walk to a place, why wouldn’t we find one?