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 t
hat 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.
One Anatomical Connectivity.- Randomness and Constraints in the Cortical Neuropil.- An Example for Specific Connections in the Visual Cortex.- A Probabilistic Approach to the Analysis of Propagation Delays in Large Cortical Axonal Trees.- Two Cortical Activity at Different Levels of Resolution in Space and Time.- The Biological Role of Neocortex.- Coding and Computation in the Cortex: Single-Neuron Activity and Cooperative Phenomena.- Novel Strategies to Unravel Mechanisms of Cortical Function: From Macro- to Micro-Electrophysiological Recordings.- Neuronal Population Coding and the Elephant.- Is Spike Frequency the Critical Factor in Recognising the Visual Stimulus .- Independence.- Single Cells versus Neuronal Assemblies.- Neurons as Computational Elements.- Some Quantitative Remarks about the Retina, the Primary Visual Cortex, and Visual Perception in Humans.- Cells in the Visual Cortex are not just Local Receptive-Field Filters.- Dynamics of Activity in Biology-Oriented Neural
Network Models: Stability at Low Firing Rates.- A Theoretical Approach to the Late Components of the Event-Related Brain Potential.- Cortical Information Processing as Viewed from the Mass-Action Domain of Evoked Potentials.- Current Source Density Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Fluorescence Maps in Organotypical Slice Cultures.- The Contribution of the Striatum to Cortical Function.- Reconstruction and Characterisation of Neuronal Dynamics: How Attractive is Chaos .- Three Visual Cortex.- Horizontal Intracortical Contributions to Functional Specificity in Cat Visual Cortex.- Excitatory, Inhibitory and Neuromodulatory Influences in Central Visual Function.- Microcircuitry of Cat Visual Cortex.- Principles of Global Visual Processing of Local Features can be Investigated with Parallel Single-Cell- and Group-Recordings from the Visual Cortex.- Imaging the Functional Architecture of Cat Area 18 in vivo.- Blobs or Slabs-is that the Question .- How Ideas Survive Evidence to the Contrary:
A Comment on Data Display and Modelling.- Cortical Maps.- Four Outlook.- Views of a Theoretical Physicist.- Manifesto of Brain Science.
