[raincom]

The method you suggested--"identify specialized brain areas first, and then dissect that particular mouse’s brain"--was popular in old days. Lesion study as it was called. It did not shed any light on higher cognitive processes. Same thing with brain injuries, etc: yes, any damage or lesion is local, but does it settle the issue about distribution vs localization.

Imagine that your popular program starts misbehaving. Then, you remember that your laptop fell from 20 feet high. You see that one of the memory modules is not functioning properly. Sure, you can come up with a test case of this bug. What is the relationship between the behavior and the bad memory module: is it many-to-many, one-to-one, many-to-one, or one-to-many? If it one-to-one, yes, it is localization; otherwise, it is some kind of distribution.

Imagine lobotomy of old days. This was a result of how brain injuries impaired cognitive processes; then some guys thought that 'creating injuries' (or lobotomy) can fix problems on patients with problems.