Abstract A computation is an operation that can be performed by a physical machine.
Nervous tissue solves ill-posed problems in real time.
The principles underlying neural computation, however, remain for now a mystery. I believe that there are fundamental principles of computation that we can learn by studying neurobiology. My goal is to investigate the organizational and adaptive principles on which neural systems operate, and to build silicon integrated circuits that compute using these principles. I have developed, in a standard CMOS process, a family of single-transistor devices that I call synapse transistors. Like neural synapses, synapse transistors provide nonvolatile analog memory, compute the product of this stored memory and the applied input, allow bidirectional memory updates, and simultaneously perform an analog computation and determine locally their own memory updates.