Example of neurons usefully communicating without synapses found in flies [LINK]
Or, yet another obstacle to WBE.
OK, apparently ephaptic coupling is old news, but this seems to be the first example where we can say just what it does and that it is doing something useful.
PDF.
Would this really make WBE emulation much harder? We already know som neurons synapse with several thousand others, so adding a few hundred adjacent neurons doesn’t seem that much more difficult.