Not a new idea to model the brain using computers, but here’s an ongoing project, The Blue Brain Project and described below in a Discovery Channel Video.
Note while the Discovery guy talks about how many neurons are in the brain, he doesn’t mention the number of connections that each neuron has with other neurons. (a lot of these)
The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons (or nerve cells) and many more neuroglia (or glial cells) which serve to support and protect the neurons.
Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, equivalent by some estimates to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor.
Estimates of the human brain’s memory capacity vary wildly from 1 to 1,000 terabytes (for comparison, the 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represents about 10 terabytes of data).