A Church made of Wood and Planks...

I thought I would post this up really quickly before I lose all sense of my intelligence from 4chan and Bikko.

Earlier in one of my Biology classes (Actually of the General Education required Bio class, so technically it doesn't really count as a "bio" class according to my major but it still seems interesting and difficult enough to classify as decent Bio class for this year, I think) one of our teachers made a very interesting analogy. He said that we cannot determine "Holism", that is, using small parts of a problem to conclude a "larger picture" problem, and used the concept of a church to emphasize his point. He states that the church is made of wood and planks; if one just determined that there were wood and planks in the church, they would be missing out on a lot of information, such as the people worshipping there, the type of community, etc... basically, missing the essential function of the church. What I think he was trying to do is tell us that Neurobiology and neurons are like the wood and planks, and while useful in analyzing singularly, not useful in analyzing the whole brain, and therefore psychology comes into play. I think he did this to emphasize that psychology is just as important in Neuroscience as biology is.
I think though that the analogy needs a little adjusting. Rather than saying the wood and planks are the neurons, I believe the wood and planks are in fact, just atoms within the neuron; if we are keeping the brain as the church itself, then what are the neurons? The neurons are structures that the wood and planks form into, not necessarily the whole church, but parts of it. For example, if one finds a Cross, a couple of wooden benches, and then a glass window with a picture of Mary instead of the whole church, they can come to some conclusions as to what goes on in this "church". They can probably easily conclude that the benches are used for sitting; if they are not familiar with religion, then the cross and portrait of Mary would be more tough, but they can easily make a logical and reasonable conclusion based on what they have, for example, perhaps they think it is some artwork or exhibit? Granted, this is still a very wrong answer, but still closer than analyzing wood and planks. I'm not saying that being close enough is just as good as being right; far from it, being close enough is really still frustratingly lacking. But nevertheless, the analogy should properly be portrayed as, "If you found a cross, a picture of Mary, and a couple of benches, but you had no idea what the cross and Mary mean, how would you interpret it? ...This is the way us humans interpret the function of Neurons relative to the entire brain. It makes sense to them, but not to us."

I hope this makes some sense.