A neuromorphic architecture for a spiking neural network comprising a plurality of spiking neurons, each with a plurality of synapses and corresponding synaptic weights, the architecture further comprising a synaptic competition mechanism in connection with a spike-based learning mechanism based on spikes perceived behind a synapse, in which architecture synapses of different neurons connected to the same input compete for that input and based on the result of that competition, each neuron of the neural network develops an individual perception of the presented input spikes, the perception used by the learning mechanism to adjust the synaptic weights.