, Volume 108, Issue 5, pp 517-525
Date: 07 Nov 2014

Structural aspects of biological cybernetics: Valentino Braitenberg, neuroanatomy, and brain function

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Introduction

The best way of introducing Valentino Braitenberg is by quoting one of his distinctive arguments [99, p. 31]:

The referencing in this Foreword is twofold. For the Foreword itself, the Harvard style referring to authors by year is used whereas for the publications of Braitenberg himself recourse has been taken to the Vancouver style, which uses angular brackets such as [1]. Both lists appear at the end in the order as just described.

“When a new science emerges every couple of centuries, those who are privileged enough to witness it from its very beginnings to its full development during the span of their own lifetime can indeed count themselves lucky. My colleagues and I, who became fully fledged after World War II, had precisely this privilege. The science to which I refer still has no proper name, but its existence can be testified to by the matter-of-course way in which physicists, biologists, and logicians discuss issues that do not fall into any of the categories of phys ...