We've talked a lot about making a computer that works like the mammalian brain.

The U.S. government is now betting $28 million dollars that all these projects are wrong.

A series of three grants snagged by Harvard University from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) last week has funded a "moonshot" project to throw out all of the previous attempts at understanding the brain and start fresh. (IARPA is the sibling organization to the better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. But while DARPA focuses on military projects, IARPA focuses on intelligence agency research.)

The 5-year project will try to build a virtual model of part of a rat brain, as the brain learns. From this, the lab hopes to be able to identify the way organic neurons work together to learn, so they can replicate it artificially. Ultimately, the hope is to replicate the human brain itself.