SAN FRANCISCO - IBM researchers Thursday unveiled an experimental computer chip that emulates the way the human brain processes information.

IBM said in a statement that researchers have created the basic design of the first neurosynaptic computing chip that recreates the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in a biological system, such as the brain.

Using digital silicon circuits inspired by neurobiology, the cognitive chips contain no biological elements. The first two prototype chips are currently undergoing testing.

The two chips, called "core," have successfully demonstrated simple applications like navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.

"This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century," Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said in a statement.

The cognitive computing architecture is expected to be a more power-efficient architecture that has no set programming, integrates memory with processor and mimics the brain's event-driven, distributed and parallel processing.