Hi Reddit! We are Eric Jonas (a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Konrad Kording (Professor at Northwestern and RIC). Our research focuses on trying to understand how the neurons in the brain compute and give rise to behavior. A lot of what we do is come up with mathematical techniques to understand neural data and work on new methods to acquire this data. We recently published a paper titled “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” that tried to address if the analysis methods we frequently use in neuroscience are likely to provide the level of “understanding” we seek. One of the biggest challenges facing neuroscience is that we don’t actually know ahead of time how neural systems work, so validating analysis techniques can be a catch-22. We attempted to use these techniques on a microprocessor – a system we understand really well – to see if we could make sense of how it works. This ended up being quite difficult, and we suggest ways that we might move forward as a community to make sure our analysis methods really do what we hope they will. Our study has also been written up in the popular press. Read the articles in Arstechnica and The Economist) to learn more. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Follow Eric on Twitter @stochastician Konrad at @kordinglab.