Have we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure.
I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work on top of von neuman architectures.
This comes under the category of neuromorphic engineering. It is an excellent question, of which I am trying to find an answer for months now!
I bet there is more, just buried under varied publications, and I am sure that they created a DSL for their specialized brain based chip.
The most obvious and battle tested way to program a NeuroSynaptic hardware is to create models of the brain (any application) in an algorithm and burning it with an HDL into an fpga or an fpaa. For computation of numerical entities, a small controller running a customized embedded software is used.
By replicating the biological structure, they might shed some light on the logic. Right now we're making almost zero traction, a serious effort to copy it might at least make it clear what we're trying to understand.
At the very least, if they have a cortex in software, it would create a ethical (?) way to experiment with the logic by enabling/disabling pieces and seeing what happens.
Its true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions.
Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work on top of von neuman architectures.