Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? Here we revisit a 2017 paper claiming that modern neuroscience approaches wouldn’t even allow us to understand the simplest “brain” (a microprocessor) and we re-evaluate that critique in the context of some exciting new research.