The brain doesn't "solve" tasks. That's cart before horse thinking. Our whole concept of "vision" only exists because eyes and visual cortices exist. I know it seems like a philosophical nitpick, but saying that the visual cortex is good at vision is like saying that water is good at being wet or being surprised that your soup is perfectly fitting the shape of your bowl.
Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.
I know, I was approaching it from your angle, the current state of ML, and explaining it from that context. You support ML but then refer to humans as 'just apes' in a derogatory fashion. I was just pointing out that in fact these dumb apes solved all your ML problems a very long time ago.
Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.