A lot of theories about how the brain works are, essentially, if we were trying to write a program to mimic what an animal does, this is what we would do. Smoothing data is something people do all of the time in statistics and image processing. Then they go hunting for some metric that makes their theory plausible.
I find it interesting, but at the same time I find it weird that people invest so much time guessing at how something might work. A lot of modern science feels way closer to the parable of the elephant and the blind man than anything else.