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.

Boahen is part of a small but growing community of scientists and engineers using a process they call "neuromorphing" to build complicated electronic circuits meant to model the behavior of neural circuits. Their work takes advantage of anatomical diagrams of different parts of the brain generated through years of painstaking animal studies by neuroscientists around the world. The hope is that hardwired models of the brain will yield insights difficult to glean through existing experimental techniques. "Brains do things in technically and conceptually novel ways which we should be able to explore," says ­Rodney ­Douglas, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, in Zurich. "They can solve rather effortlessly issues which we cannot yet resolve with the largest and most modern digital machines. One of the ways to explore this is to develop hardware that goes in the same direction."