@peter
You are absolutely correct, and my resulting conclusion is that perhaps we are limiting ourselves too much by staying in 2 dimensions. Perhaps the only way to now move forward is to go into the 3rd, possibly using holography, don't know, I'm not a semiconductor expert - that goes back to 1987 when I finished my engineering degree...

Interesting though, as one starts to compare the brain architecture to computer architecture. The benefit of the brain is that it's like building the rules engine plus an ability to self-learn and change the rules, in real time, in hardware as opposed to our normal software implementation where the memory is separate from the processing unit. It's like comparing graphics processors to X86 CPUs trying to do graphics via software - there's just no performance comparison.

I still however can't stop marveling at the brain. If you start to look at supercomputers, compare the size and capability to the size and capability of the brain. Consider energy consumption and the heat problem referred to above. The only way to get a similar result in a computer is to also go massively parallel. The problem with heat is that if you serialise the processing, you have to increase the speed with which you can do 1 thing at a time in order to improve performance - and that's when you have to start increasing power, thus generating heat. With massively parallel you can slow down the individual processors in order to cut power, and still get a huge amount of processing done in a short space of time.