A trivial modification would be something like (X,Y) -> (Y,X), just re-ordering cables. A non-trivial modification would be something like (X,Y) -> (X XOR Y, X AND Y). Both of these 'channels' have 2 bits of capacity, but intuitively only the second one is actually doing any information processing/computing.
I haven't found a satisfactory way to formalize my intuition about what is 'non-trivial' and to quantify how much 'processing' is being done by a general system, in such a way that one could meaningfully compare a brain and a CPU, for example. I think it's a great research question.
Axons are connected to the neuron and exchange a lot of chemicals between them. For example, the mitochondria in axons go back and fort to the neuron IIRC. It's not very googlable but neurons have a memory of how likely they are to trigger an action potential, based on past stimuluses/timings. No one knows where this memory is encoded. And is there one action potential per axon? If so then it would be more logical for this memory (and computation which leads to mutation to the memory) to be stored in the axon (if).