How are “Brain Engineering” and “Neural Networks” related?
The field of neural networks began as psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers had been constructing computer models of human behavior, and noted a number of key facts: i) Tasks that were easiest for humans were hardest for computers (e.g., perception, language, planning), and tasks that were easiest for computers (e.g., “expert” systems, medical diagnosis, game playing) were hardest for humans. ii) Difficult tasks such as recognizing a complex image (e.g., a face) could be accomplished by people in less than half a second; but brain cells (neurons) could only respond about every 10 milliseconds (one hundredth of a second), leaving time for only about 50-100 steps to accomplish recognition. No one yet knows of a computer program that could carry out such a complex task in just 100 steps. Therefore, the fact that millions of neurons operate together, in parallel with each other, may somehow be a key. iii) Parallel computers were becoming possible to build, and all computers
