Computers Based on the Human Brain

During Lloyd Watts’ growing up years in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had an interest for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and playing out the melodies on the family piano. But he thought that wouldn't it be great to have a machine that could "listen" to songs and immediately record them into musical notation?

Watts never built this gadget, but his decades-long journey to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain.

Microchips designed by Audience, the company Watts started, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to highly improve the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing nearby someone using the technology won't be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. "We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain," announces Watts.

The 47-year-old neuroscientist is on the front edge of what some believe will be a fundamental change in the way certain types of computers are designed. Today's computers are really swift abacuses. They are quite good at math but can't process complex streams of information in real time, as humans do.

New advances to computers

Now, thanks to advances in our understanding of biology, scientists think they can model a new generation of computers on how the brain actually works—the microscopic chemical interactions and electrical impulses that translate sensations into knowledge and knowledge into decisions and actions.

Scientists warned that the changes won't come quickly. "The nervous system is very sophisticated, but I applaud what they're doing. Eventually we'll figure it out," says Carver Mead, a microelectronics pioneer and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

In one of the most ambitious efforts along this track, IBM planned to announce on Nov. 20 a $4.9 million grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for research into creating intelligent computers. The money funds the first phase of a multiyear effort to engineer computing systems that simulate the brain's activities while rivaling its compact size.