English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Conference Paper

Report of the First Meeting on Brain Theory: held at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Miramare, (Trieste) Italy, October 1–4, 1984

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons83825

Braitenberg,  V
Former Department Structure and Function of Natural Nerve-Net, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons225707

Palm,  G
Former Department Structure and Function of Natural Nerve-Net, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Society;

Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Braitenberg, V., & Palm, G. (1986). Report of the First Meeting on Brain Theory: held at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Miramare, (Trieste) Italy, October 1–4, 1984. In G. Palm, & A. Aertsen (Eds.), Brain Theory: Proceedings of the First Trieste Meeting on Brain Theory, October 1–4, 1984 (pp. 1-3). Berlin, Germany: Springer.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0006-4C50-B
Abstract
The meeting was, in the opinion expressed by all participants, a very successful one. Each of the presentations elicited strong responses in the majority of the participants leading to an unusually vivacious and detailed discussion in which not only common ideas emerged in unexpected ways but also weak or obscure points of the individual theories where freely discussed and clarified. It soon became obvious that we had created a forum which provided an opportunity to discuss ideas which were often confined to a strange limbus of awe and contempt in previous discussions with experimental neuroscientists. A consequence of this realization was probably the absence of the aggressively competitive spirit that can easily emerge in similar groups. We attributed this in part to the fact that no representative of the staunch type of experimentalist was present at the meeting. Thus we could make uninhibited use of mathematical formalism and propose ideas that are not directly related to experimental research presently en vogue, but may well provide the framework for future experimentation. This is to be expected since at our meeting it became apparent that the goal of finding a common theoretical framework is well within reach. Especially in the discussion of the historical papers, for which the last day of the meeting was reserved, it became clear that the quite different views on the brain that are naturally held by scientists from different backgrounds can possibly be transformed into each other on the level of their mathematical representations.