Understanding the brain

I think that in order to acheive strong ai, we must first do more research on the brain, understand how it works, how thoughts are generated. Once we know how these things work, it may be possible to create a self-aware machine, capible of thought. The brain may just be programs running independent of eachother, but at the same time together. Like seperate computers alltogether, but connected sharing information. There are probley thousands if not millions of little programs running inside our brains. Tell me what you think