I think this is analogous to analogizing things from the macroscopic everyday human world onto the microscopic. Like: calling some proteins "chaperones" or calling a stand of RNA a "messenger."
These guys may be taking it too far and trying to analogize structures/functions within single cells to jobs that whole cells do?
Or are they saying that whenever there is some significant electric effect in a cell that it is all so similar that they can call it "neuron-like" as if neurons were the archetypal cells housing pronounced electric effects? Or are they saying that cilia act in the same manner as neurons, maybe in the way they "fire" a signal?
Anyway, however they do it, analogies are always misleading to some degree.
{shrug} whatcha gonna do?