A video game chip started a scientific reckoning. It all began when some “microchip archaeologists” photographed the chip—the MOS 6502 microprocessor that lived inside Atari—and built a digital model of its interconnections. Then some neuroscientists put it to the test. One by one, they knocked out the transistors in their map, trying to get at what the circuit was for. It’s similar to what neuroscientists do when they lesion a part of the brain, or silence single neurons. Their project was simple: Could they use the arsenal of neuroscience methods to get at the function of a simple circuit?

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