Man: clock rate of 2KHz; million million processors, can solve sophisticated problems in less than 400 cycles (under ideal conditions ;), can do complex imaging, audio processing etc with available sensory intelligence
Machine: clock rate in the range of Teraflops (super computers); few processors; can have very wide sensory intelligence but cannot do complex processing; and "problem solving" capabilities are not really worth mentioning
Suppose I want my application to run 40 to 200 queries on a db, all concurrently, to take a simple decision, brain like parallel processing schemes/devices seems useful. The recent 64 bit processors seem to come with capacities for very large RAM, etc, and I am just curious if brain emulators are possible now. "Supercomputers" seem to be more focused on increasing clock speeds, but it may be worthwhile to also focus on increasing the number of threads/processors we could use to the range of million millions trading off with clock rate.
I am not sure about technical feasibility etc., but this is one of the "unsolved" areas of cs, that may be of interest to researchers :)
Ref: http://www.electricminds.org/ussclueless/essays/futurecs.htm