How to build an artificial brain

Chris Eliasmith, the director of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, Canada, is trying to build a brain. Eliasmith's artificial model, Spaun, currently has just 2.5 million neurons to the human brain's 100 billion. But unlike more computationally demanding simulations, which have run for only a few simulated seconds, it's actually capable of doing something with them. "There's been an attitude of scale for scale's sake," Eliasmith explains. "But for us, the focus was discovering how neurones can be organised to produce behaviours, such as solving simple intelligence tasks."