Or (4) the brain uses specialized electrochemical processes to perform computations that are not well addressed by traditional computing paradigms, which are designed to outperform the brain in areas in which it is naturally weak.
My GPU can compute things efficiently that my CPU can't, and vice-versa. Historically, analog computers have been able to compute things efficiently that digital computes could not, and vice-versa.
Why should a digital computer be particularly adept at computing that which a dense electrochemical network can?