One of the stumbling blocks with regards to creating a true conscious machine is that the way silicon chips are designed makes them perform inherently different than neurons.  Researchers at IBM are working on designing a system from the ground up that would emulate how the human brain is put together.  Not just try to make silicon “think”  but to first reverse engineer the architecture, then institute the method of thought.

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

read the whole thing: Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind