The human brain contains billions of such processing elements. As the computer organizes computation with many serial steps, similarly the brain can deploy many processing elements cooperatively and in parallel to carry out its activities. Thus, the use of brain style computational system offers not only a hope that we can characterize how brains actually carry out certain information processing tasks but also offers solution to computational problems that seem difficult to solve in more traditional computational framework.

The connectionist systems are capable of exploiting and mimicking brain-style computation like artificial intelligence. Connectionism operates both as a system and a process. The connectionist systems are very important because they provide good solutions to a number of difficult computational problems that seem to arise often in models of cognition. Connectionist model can solve best-mach-search, rapid-pattern-matching, implementing content-addressable memory-storage systems and this model allow many more to its environment. Connectionism as a processing mechanism is carried out by a number of processing elements. These elements, called nodes or units, have a dynamics, which is roughly an analogue to simple neurons. Each node receives input from some number of the nodes and responds to that input according to a simple activation function, and in turn excites or inhibits other nodes to which it is connected.³

The above analogy will be very clear, if we go through the connectionist system.