Ad Aertsen - Böcker

Modern theories of brain function are increasingly concerned with dynamics. The task of organizing perception and behaviour in a meaningful interaction with the external world prompts the brain to recruit its various resources in a properly coordinated manner. Vis-a-vis the complexity and multitude of the dynamics involved, a careful orchestration of the various processing components, distributed over space and time, is essential. Hence, it should come as no surprise that a number of recent developments in both experimental and theoretical brain science have emphasized the aspect of spatio-temporal coordination.

This collection of papers intends to capture these various developments in the brain sciences. It brings together new insights and concepts from various branches of experimental and theoretical neuroscience, partly in the form of review chapters, partly in short, focussed contributions, or critical essays. Further it sets out to explore the problems of the processing of the temporal dimension of sensory input and of the generation of space-time patterns in the motor output, as well as the intervening storage and transformation of temporal patterns in nerve nets.

The publication is divided into four major sections: the first considers spatio-temporal aspects of brain function in the context of processing of sensory input and perception and the third, spatio-temporal aspects of brain function at the output end: planning and control of movement. The second section is dedicated to the intervening level of neuronal activity in the working brain and the various dynamics observed at different levels of resolution in space and time. The fourth part combines contributions that transcend this scheme.

It is hoped the book achieves its goal which is to raise an interest in theoretical models that actively seek confrontation with experimental data from the functioning brain, and by a didactic effort aimed at experimentalists to present their data in a format that makes them more amenable to theory.

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots.

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots. Professor Gerstein was many years ahead of the field, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity.  In doing so, he pioneered Computational Neuroscience, many years before the term itself was born.  The overarching goal of George Gerstein’s research was to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain. The editors of this book have compiled a selection of George Gerstein’s many seminal contributions to neuroscience--be they experimental, theoretical or computational--into a single, comprehensive volume .The aim is to provide readers with a fresh introduction of these various concepts in the original literature.  The volume is organized  in a series of chapters by subject, ordered in time, each one containing one or more of George Gerstein’s papers.

There is a tradition of theoretical brain science which started in the forties (Wiener, McCulloch, Turing, Craik, Hebb). This was continued by a small number of people without interruption up to the present. It has definitely provided main guiding lines for brain science, the devel­ opment of which has been spectacular in the last decades. However, within the bulk of experimental neuroscience, the theoreticians some­ times had a difficult stand, since it was felt that the times were not ripe yet and the methods not yet available for a development of a true theoretical speciality in this field. Thus theory remained in the hands of a fairly small club which recruited its members from theoretical physicists, mathematicians and some experimentalists with amateurish theoretical leanings. The boom of approaches which go by the name of 'computational neuroscience', 'neuronal networks', 'associative mem­ ory', 'spinglass theory', 'parallel processing' etc. should not blind one for the fact that the group of people professionally interested in real­ istic models of brain function up to the present date remains rather small and suffers from a lack of professional organization. It was against this background that we decided to organize a meet­ ing on Theoretical Brain Science. The meeting was held April 18 - 20, 1990 and took place at Schloss Ringberg, West-Germany, a facility sponsored by the Max-Planck-Society.