A new paper by Rodrick Wallace of the New York State Psychiatric Institute suggests that multiple-core chip technology may lend itself to implementations of recent mathematical models of the massively parallel, high level mental processes in animals. The author notes that multi-core computers present a programming problem that is becoming a nightmare as the number of cores increases, with the potential to have machines with thoursands or tens of thousands of cores. He proposes that one feasible solution to the problem is to adopt the parallel computation model that developed and was optimized by millions of years of evolution. One side effect of doing this is that it may make machine cognition more feasible. To get all the details, see Wallace's paper, Biologically inspired distributed machine cognition: a new formal approach to hyperparallel computataion" (PDF format).