Humans may have the ability to destroy the world, fly to the moon and build an information superhighway, but for some reason we still can't figure out how a mouse thinks. It's ironic, we know, but at least we're getting there.

If all mice only had half a brain, they'd still be too complex for the most powerful supercomputers around the world, say researchers at the IBM Labs in the University of Nevada. That's because half a mouse brain carries eight million neurons (brain cells) and each neuron has 8,000 synapses that trigger responses in living organisms.

Scientists attempted to simulate how a mouse thinks with the help of a supercomputer called the BlueGene L. The machine has 4,096 processors running on 256MB of memory each. All of these components try to anticipate all the possible responses that half a mouse brain will take, and does so successfully in the process.

There's just one hitch: The supercomputer is lagging behind half a mouse brain on a one to ten ratio.  The mouse can literally run circles on the CPU with ease. The scientists say that the rodent's mental activity simulation simply factors in "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."

The IBM Lab team plans to give their hardware more oomph as better gear becomes available. they say that this will make it a lot easier for them to actually simulate rodent thinking patterns in real time.