You can't see the point of elucidating the nuances of the way the brain encodes the information around us? Surely even if you see no value in basic science of this nature in and of itself (in my opinion a mistake) there are myriad application-based reasons to understand how the brain works, including both medical progress and the brain's influence on artificial intelligence designs.
To clarify, I did my PhD in an immunology department in a top US grad school, and I attended the talks by the actual authors of some of these seminal works in the neuroscience department next door. My question was not an indictment on all basic neuroscience but a request for clarification on how this particular mode of questioning (pointing out that there are grid cells or time and place cells) is productive in us figuring out our brains.
