THE GUARDIAN: Bionic neurons could enable implants to restore failing brain circuits

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“If you wanted to model a whole mouse brain using the approach in this paper you might end up designing 100 million individual, but very precise, neurons on silicon, which is clearly unfeasible within a reasonable time and budget,” said Stephen Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester.

“Because the approach is detailed and laboriously painstaking, it can really only be applied in practice to smallish neural units, such as the respiratory neurons described above, but there are quite a few critical small neural control circuits that are vital to keeping us alive,” he added.