Building a better brain

The human brain weighs three pounds and is made up of more than 100 billion nerve cells that allow us to remember birthdays, recognize and evade danger, compose symphonies, build bridges, and design super-smart machines to take over the tasks we find too difficult, too dirty, or too boring. But even though scientists admit that there's still a lot they don't know about how the brain works, Catherine Schuman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) thinks that machine brains might work better if they were designed to be more like human brains. Rather than looking to the seventy year history of neural networks constructed on Von Neumann architecture, researchers like Schuman instead take inspiration from current discoveries in neuroscience to build a very different kind of artificial intelligence. These neuromorphic computers are designed to be massively parallel, constructed from many simple computational elements connected to mimic the neurons and synapses in the human brain. Most recently, Schuman has been intrigued by the astrocytic glial cells that insulate neural pathways and allow signals to travel fasters along certain routes.