Neurons
There is actually quite a lot of material available on the WEB. There are also *commercial* companies doing what you plan, not just research institutions. For reading material references see for example:
T. D. Albright, T. M. Jessell, E. R. Kandel, and M. I. Posne. Neural Science:A Century of Progress and
the Mysteries that Remain. Cell, 100:S1–S55, 2000. URL http://www.vcl.salk.edu/Publications/PDF/Albright_Jessell_Kandel_Posner_Cell_Neuron_2000.pdf
G. Tononi and G. Edelman. Consciousness and complexity. Science, 282:1846–1851, 1998. URL http://ntp.neuroscience.wisc.edu/faculty/fac-art/tononi282.pdf.
G. Tononi, G. Edelman, and O. Sporns. Complexity and coherency: integrating information in the brain.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2:474–484, 1998. URL http://leitl.org/docs/public_html/striz/striz.org/docs/tononi-complexity.pdf .
F. Crick and C. Koch. Towards a neurobiological theory of cosciousness. The Seminars in Neurosciences,
2:263–275, 1990. URL
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/F/D/_/scbcfd.pdf
F. Crick, C. Koch, G. Kreiman, and I. Fried. Consciousness and neuroscience. Neurosurgery, 55:273–282,
2004. URL http://www.klab.caltech.edu/refweb/paper/490.pdf
D. J. Chalmers. Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, chapter What
is a Neural Correlate of Consciousness? MIT Press, 2002a. URL
http://consc.net/papers/ncc2.html.
I hope these help. More references, to notions such as quantum mechanics of neurons or network approach may be found in the Thinking about Thinking chapter of my e-book which can be found at
http://countryofblindfolded.blogspot.com/
