"The human brain is an incredibly impressive information processor, even though it "works" quite a bit slower than an ordinary computer. Many researchers in artificial intelligence look to the organization of the brain as a model for building intelligent machines. Think of a sort of "analogy" between the complex webs of interconnected neurons in a brain and the densely interconnected units making up an artificial neural network (ANN), where each unit--just like a biological neuron--is capable of taking in a number of inputs and producing an output."