Remember though that the brain seems to be a rather modular structure.
While the total area is quite big, we could probably get a lot of mileage out of much smaller subsystems taking care of only, say, visual pattern recognition, or speech analysis, in much smaller dies.
Someone should read Catherine Malibou and Francisco Varela :-)
Neuroscience is already bored with not only subsystems, the holistic nature of the brain, but also the notion of the brain as the body's sole processor of cognition.
