Today, neuroscience gives us great dual hopes, one to radically solve medical problems of the brain such as Arzheimer's disease, and the other to give an answer to the long-standing question of how the brain works to yield our mind. Medical achievements will be obtained based on accumulated knowledge of molecular and cellular events of the brain, but the understanding of the brain mechansims of mental activities requires theories and models. This handbook summerizes the success of neuroscience in developing such theories and models, and further provides a basis for future achievements toward the goal. It will help not only theorists, but also experimentalists to grasp the great potentially of theories and models in future neuroscience.
Masao Ito, Director-General, Frontier Research Program, The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research
No existing work comes close to covering the same range of topics in such an authoritative way. The editor has gone far beyond the usual collection of articles in providing roadmaps and cross-references for each topic. Judging from the articles that I have read and from the list of authors, the Handbook will become an invaluable resource to a wide range of researchers.
Professor Jerry A. Feldman, International Computer Science Institute and University of California
It's been a half century since such pioneers as Warren McCulloch and Donald Hebb, and, particularly in the last decade, brain theory has been in flower, intertwining with both neurophysiology and artificial neural networks. Boiling it down and concentrating it, as this handbook does so successfully,is likely to set the stage for something even more interesting.
William H. Calvin, University of Washington neurophysiologist, author of The Ascent of Mind and co-author of Conversations with Neil's Brain
At long last neural computation, as a wide interdisciplinary field, has found its universal, intellectual home. Under one roof we have all that we wanted to know from the biological to the matehmatical, from experiment to theory, from applications to abstract models, from robots to philosophy.
Daniel Amit, Professor at the University of Rome and the university of Jerusalem; author of Modeling Brain Fuction
The awesome product of an awesome task, this book will take us into the 21st Century with a wide and enlightened overview of computational neuroscience—and a healthy respect for the constraints that the real brain imposes on our models. Arbib has done what urgently needed to be done and what probably no one else could do.
Joaquin M. Fuster, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, University of California
This revised Handbook of Brain Theory provides useful new data and and updates key concepts in neuroscience. It will be an indispensable guide for exploring the essentials of brain science.
Masao Ito, RIKEN Brain Science Institute
