Neural models, in the sense of being disciplines that try to build representations of the internal workings of the brain, originated pretty distantly in the computer science timescale. They even date back to the time when the origins of modern computing were being invented, the mid-1940s.
At that time, the fields of neuroscience and computer science began to collaborate by researching ways of emulating the way the brain processes information, starting from its constituent unit—the neuron.
The first mathematical method for representing the learning function of the human brain can be assigned to McCulloch and Pitts, in their 1943 paper A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity:
This simple model was a basic but realistic model of a learning algorithm. You will be surprised by what happens if we use a linear...
