The Memory Bottleneck

Conventional computers keep processing and memory apart. Data travels back and forth between the CPU and RAM, and that traffic, often called the von Neumann bottleneck, costs time and energy. The brain works differently. Its synapses both store information and take part in processing it, and billions of them work in parallel.

Neuromorphic chips borrow that idea. They place memory next to compute, and many use spiking neurons that draw power only when there is something to signal. The goal is not to replicate a brain, but to borrow the parts of its architecture that make it efficient.

Vision, Layer by Layer

Convolutional neural networks were loosely inspired by the visual cortex. Early layers respond to simple features such as edges and lines, and later layers combine them into shapes and whole objects. Vision transformers reach similar results through a different mechanism, attention, which is a reminder that biology is a source of ideas, not a blueprint.