Kwabena Boahen is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and head of the neuroscience lab that developed the computer chip. Credit: Emily Nathan

Unlike most neuroscience labs, Kwabena Boahen's lab at ­Stanford University is spotless--no scattered pipettes or jumbled arrays of chemical bottles. Instead, a lone circuit board, housing a very special chip, sits on a bare lab bench. The transistors in a typical computer chip are arranged for maximal processing speed; but this microprocessor features clusters of tiny transistors designed to mimic the electrical properties of neurons. The transistors are arranged to behave like cells in the retina, the cochlea, or even the hippocampus, a spot deep in the brain that sorts and stores information.

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