The optimization performance of transiently chaotic neural network (TCNN) is affected by various factors such as chaotic characteristic, model parameters, and annealing function, and its capacity of global optimization is limited. It is demonstrated that the non-monotonic activation function can generate richer chaotic characteristic than the monotonic activation function in the TCNN model. Besides, the activation function involving neurobiological mechanism can not only reflect the rich brain activity in brain waves, but also enhance the non-linear dynamic characteristic, which may further improve the global optimization ability. Hence, a novel chaotic neuron model is proposed with the non-monotonic activation function based on the neurobiological mechanisms from the electroencephalogram. The electroencephalogram consists of five brain waves (i.e., , , , , and waves) which are defined by the quality and intensity of brain waves with different frequency bands ranging from 0.5 Hz to 100 Hz. The brain wave with a higher frequency and a lower amplitude represents a more active brain. Researches demonstrate that the five brain waves can be simplified into sinusoidal waves with different frequencies. Hence, a frequency conversion sinusoidal (FCS) function which has the consistent frequency range and features with brain waves is designed based on the above neurobiological mechanisms. Then a novel chaotic neuron model with non-monotonic activation function which is composed of the FCS function and sigmoid function, is proposed for richer chaotic dynamic characteristic. The reversed bifurcation and the Lyapunov exponent of the chaotic neuron are given and the dynamic system is analyzed, indicating that the proposed FCS neuron model owns richer chaotic dynamic characteristic than transiently chaotic neuron model due to its special non-monotonic activation function. Based on the neuron model, a novel transiently-chaotic neural networkfrequency conversion sinusoidal chaotic neural network (FCSCNN) is constructed and the basis of model parameter selection is provided as well. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, the FCSCNN is applied to nonlinear function optimization and 10-city, 30-city, 75-city traveling salesman problem. The experimental results show that 1) the FCSCNN has a good performance under the condition of moderate a, smaller cA(0) and 2(0); 2) on the basis of the appropriate model parameters, the FCSCNN has better global optimization ability and optimization accuracy than Hopfield neural network, TCNN, improved-TCNN due to its richer chaotic characteristic in complicated combinational optimization problem, especially in middle and large scale problem.