Research is fun, if you've got enough money.
Ah yeah that would also be a big part of the equation!
I was watching Dara O Brian's Science Club last night, and episode of the brain. Some clever scientist type people put a detector on the surface of a woman's brain and used it to detect neurons firing when she spoke/thought of speaking. They were very on/off signals like binary.
Actually it was someone who was paralysed imagining moving their hand that had the neuron detector. The other person saying ooohhh and aaahhhh had a different sensor to measure rain waves or something.
I think it's important not to make assumptions about what's actually being discovered in this kind of experiment.
It's a little like trying to work out what 'going to work' is and coming up with the observation that we see a shadow being moved from point a to point b every time. Interesting, true, and you don't get one without the other (dark days aside), but I could go off on all sorts of wasted investigations if I assumed that it was a useful observation in answering the question.