Fig. 1.

(A) Multiscale levels of investigation in analysis of the central nervous system (adapted from ref. 4) and corresponding neuromorphic synthesis of highly efficient silicon cognitive microsystems. Boltzmann statistics of ionic and electronic channel transport provide isomorphic physical foundations. (B) Conceptual scaling of machine complexity with task complexity for a digital rule-based cognitive agent performing symbolic deep search, and a neuromorphic cognitive agent performing analog collective computation acquired through deep learning, targeting human cognitive performance. The shaded region indicates the desirable regime of high task complexity and lower machine complexity where the neuromorphic cognitive agent is expected to outperform symbolic digital alternatives.