This is an interesting point but didn't they say in the paper that the activity was highly synchronous?
Well an oscillator is also highly synchronous, but it doesn't compute! I think it is interesting to follow the weird progression of totally materialist ideas.
1) Neurons compute using a statistical process that has been explored using artificial neural nets. These things can be (and usually are) simulated on a computer. Maybe relatively free thinkers, such as Evan, will acknowledge that creatures without neurons may think too - perhaps by some kind of molecular computation. I think that neural net calculations probably really happen in the brain to pre-process data - e.g. vision. We have no conscious awareness of these physical processes, any more than we are aware of the bending of light inside the lens of our eyes!
2) It is at least possible to imagine such a computation conferring a biological advantage on the organism, but it isn't possible to understand actual qualia - so the Hard Problem gets pushed to one-side. This is where I think materialist neurology goes off the rails. Because experience is obviously subjective, it is easy (but not intellectually honest) to push this problem away.
3) Now we have the idea - probably false IMHO - that the neurons (and by extension, any other computation) can generate consciousness.
4) Next materialists kind of forget that the neurons are supposed to be computing in some sense to generate consciousness, and start to attribute qualia to neurons that are firing in extremis. As I already pointed out, this really can't make sense. Even if an NDE is seen as a 'mistaken calculation' of some sort, a lot of stuff must be going on correctly - not least the process of remembering the experience, and remember assaults on the brain typically produce amnesia!
5) The fact that parts of the brain seem to light up preferentially with particular mental tasks, is interesting, but not so very interesting. It really doesn't tell us much about what is going on - just how it is spatially distributed. This may be very useful diagnostically, but the geometric layout of the chips inside your computer is of no real interest to you even if you write software. I think neurologists fool themselves into thinking that fMRI data, and the like, is one day going to explain consciousness.
I think qualia are absolutely vital to thought. Even solving an equation involves qualia - sometimes quite vivid ones - I don't think it makes sense to say, in effect that we will be able to produce conscious minds that do everything we do except for the qualia - and then presumably solve the qualia problem later!
Modern computers give us real insight into the difference between computation and thought. Even people who develop chess playing software, or software that does algebra recognise the vast difference between the way such software operates - relying on brute force and clever insights of the software designers - and the way the mind works.
The trouble is, those who really don't want to contemplate that consciousness is something else, always find enough wriggle room to stay true to their beliefs - even if it involves making wild assumptions such as that neurons that are firing randomly can still 'compute' something!
David