A new paper, Neural Architectures for Robot Intelligence (PDF format), proposes that studying the limitations and possibilities of current real-world robot learning and control systems can provide insights useful to researchers trying to understand the architecture of the human brain. Despite the frequent assumption that the human brain achieves its information processing powers primarily through massively parallel processing, current computer hardware can't produce results comparable to eqivalent portions of brain tissue. These researchers believe we're still missing something fundamental about the architecture of the brain's perception-action system.