Kwabena Adu Boahen is an Associate Professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania... (wikipedia)
From the engineering point of view (the brain) looks sloppy and gooey and slapped together.
If we are able to figure out how these neurons organize themselves, it's going to provide a solution we need down the road to build more powerful computers.
We'll be able to interact with these computers the way we interact with each other, they would recognize speech.
When I tried to figure out how computers worked, I was disgusted. I thought it was totally brute force. I felt there had to be a more elegant way to do this.
How much computation can you squeeze from a given amount of energy.
The brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have.