This volume looks at the associative mechanisms of the brain, particularly of the cortico-limbic and diencephalic systems, and also at the macromolecular effects on them, by integrating the contributions of various disciplines converging on one subject and from different points of view. It addresses the question of how so many different activity levels — the biochemical, physiological, and psychological ones — interact in integrative processes. The topics treated include brain reverberating systems and associative phenomena; long-term potentiation, learning, and memory; gene activity and brain activity; and gene expression and information processing during sleep.

This volume looks at the associative mechanisms of the brain, particularly of the cortico-limbic and diencephalic systems, and also at the macromolecular effects on them, by integrating the contributions of various disciplines converging on one subject and from different points of view. It addresses the question of how so many different activity levels — the biochemical, physiological, and psychological ones — interact in integrative processes. The topics treated include brain reverberating systems and associative phenomena; long-term potentiation, learning, and memory; gene activity and brain activity; and gene expression and information processing during sleep.

Deals primarily with the role of emotions in the mechanisms of memory. A compilation of the lectures given at a course conducted at the International School of Biocybernetics.

Visual cognition is an important area of biocybernetics. It ranges from the filtering processes of early vision to the structural and functional organization of the visual centres, as well as, in higher animals, to the neuronal plasticity, the decision-making rules, the effect of noise, the role of attention, the ambiguity of patterns, and the time dimension. All these factors contribute to the cognitive interpretation of visual sensation that takes place in visual perception. A side field is machine vision, in which the signal processing known from animal vision is applied to the mobile robots responding to light stimulation.

Perception is the first step in the whole of the cognitive processes (attention, learning, memory, categorization, imagery, intuition, inference, comprehension, thought, judgement, expression) which culminate in the reasoning activity and to which emotions make a contribution. The production of perception representations is correlated with the perception events. Such perception representations occur by means of the contribution of two kinds of factors: sensory signals which reproduce the spatio-temporal characteristics of the receptor modifications, and interpretation of the intrinsic ambiguity of such signals by means of unconscious inferences. Various interactions intervene between bottom-up signals from peripheral receptors and top-down signals from higher centres.

The light sense is conceivably the key sense in both the animal and the plant kingdom. Vision research, undoubtedly a fast-growing field, is providing impressive results — thanks to modern theoretical and methodological advances. The approach of biophysics and neuroscience seems to be of great benefit and, for this reason, the present book gives an outline of recent acquisitions and updated advanced methods concerning this approach. Visual mechanisms and processes are analysed at several (molecular, cellular, integrative, computational and cognitive) levels by different methodologies (from molecular biology to computation) applied to different living models (from protists to humans, via invertebrates and lower vertebrates).

For a few decades, the puzzle of consciousness, which for centuries was analysed by philosophers, has been finding a wide interest in the scientific field, where previously it was not entitled to be a member. It has become one of the most-debated problems in the cognitive sciences. The anatomical bases, neurophysiological correlates and elementary mechanisms underlying complex processes arising with consciousness have been compared with the psychological (perceptive, cognitive, volitive, emotional) aspects of conscious expressions, in normal and pathological conditions. Various theories, which attempt to fit systematically and coherently neural and psychological data, have been debated, proving the emergence of the phenomenon of consciousness.