SVNs - Support Vector Machines?

The latest flavor of machine learning involves like basically deep artificial neural networks. They're very loosely inspired by the human brain. So they take in information or kind of like it's almost like an electrical pulse from a previous neuron, like some number coming in from a previous layer. And then they apply some kind of nonlinear activation and then they output it to other neurons that take it in and perform their own transformations. The fact that you can do something meaningful doesn't make sense to me. It's crazy, right?