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This is what everybody has been working on for the past ten years.

Numenta is probably the most direct / well-known example of what you're asking. They get mixed reactions from the community (some fair, some not). DeepMind occasionally publishes crossover papers from neuroscience (e.g. grid cells; metalearning). Lots of other groups are looking at neuroscience for applications to ML too like University of Washington and Columbia.

"Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures" and they have some overlap with the AGI (AI at human level and beyond) folks as well.

http://www.bicasociety.org/

Neural networks has greatly been influenced by insights into the human mind. Hence, also why it's called "neural".

So yeah there are research groups actively into this :D Usually, researchers at universities.