Researchers have competed fiercely for years to build computational models of the brain with an ever-larger number of simulated neurons, but scientists from the University of Waterloo have taken a different approach: they have built a model to explain how brain activity generates complex behavior.In a paper published today in Science, Chris Eliasmith and his colleagues describe “Spaun,” a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain they hope will help bridge the brain-behavior gap. Spaun, short for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, can recognize numbers, generate answers to simple numerical questions, and write them down using a physically modeled arm.   [Read More]