There is no research that can explain how we are doing what we are doing right here.
There is no research that comes close to explaining human capabilities. None that understand what any activity in the brain is specifically doing. Only where it is.
First, those of us in the field are keenly aware of shortcomings in intra and intercellular communication research. We are trained to take steps to insure our EEG, for instance, isn't comparable to that of linked worms or gourds filled with jello. A relatively simple multicellular multiple probe study, even in the sixties and seventies had so many controls and conditions that successful data collection often took five or six iterations to get useable information from just one subject or sacrificial mammal, bird, fish, or even reptile.
As for sacrificial we have come to know nervous systems, their relations among gnera, and their evolution through quite a bit of of what you attempt to denigrate. In my view if research didn't include corporate research animal studies would be considered necessary by most everyone. I think it was I who brought up the example of cellular recording being akin to the task faced by Martians trying to understand humans when they dropped a microphone fifty feet above ground at the junction of seventh and broadway in NYC.
I'm encouraged that with physics we have come to understand that matter and energy as we know it composes only about 5% of all matter and energy in the universe and still we can plot orbits, plan planet missions, construct experiments based on visual observations of things we may never touch directly.
If we took your pessimism and dismissive attitude to those circumstances we'd surely just close up shop and end out exploration of our world. Sure we can't say that this neuron did that when Joe received photons at his retina. Still we knew as early as the 1950s that what Joe saw depended on the quantum catch of photo receptors in the retina. We know that the brain makes many maps of most every visual event and process and that particular ones in particular areas in the visual cortex are responsible for generating perceptions of objects, their movement and interactions, and their importance to our dealing with them. We even have fairly specific ideas now about where decisions relation to action are made in frontal cortex.
That isn't much when compared to what we don't yet understand, but, I'll put it in the ballpark with what physicists know of their topics matter and energy. We are even generating molecules, as I write, that can impact specific behavioral syndromes with some precision compared with the storing we used to use to teat these so afflicted.
I'm very happy with where we are at this time relative to other sciences and I sense we are getting more and more support as the result of our status.
We won't 'know' exactly the biological engineering needed to execute behavior. Yet we can model and train with fair certainty how humans react to a broad range of time critical events in emergency situations because of what we know about human behavior. We know so much that we are getting scared that we aren't controlling why we choose because of such as AI, data mining, trend following and predicting. Now it is time for the social sciences to get a move on so we can keep a lid on our ability to deal with data and social commerce and remain a society or system of cultures.
