The company which built the first ever internet nodes back in the 1960s – and which gave the world the "@" symbol in email, among other things – has been hired by the US intelligence community to work on technology which could mimic "the brain's ability to make sense of large amounts of haphazard, partial information"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/14/iarpa_brain_bbn_deal/
Like its military counterpart, IARPA focuses on high-risk research: that is, on research which is unlikely to deliver anything (and if it does, as in the case of the internet, what it delivers may be something quite other than what was expected). Thus there's no great likelihood that we'll see brain-like computers able to interpret information as well as a human can in a few years as a result of yesterday's deal.
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