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.

The purpose of this book is to describe the memory system of the brain, taking into account all the levels of neural organization: molecule, cell, small network, and anatomical circuit. This synthetic approach is necessary for determining the real mechanisms among the potential ones, that is the neural bases of learning and memory in intact organisms functioning under normal conditions. For this purpose, data from molecular, cellular and behavioral neurobiology, neuropsychology, animal and human psychology, and neural modellization are comprehensively reviewed by leading specialists and brought together in an original synthesis.

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.

This book is a comprehensive overview of the main current concepts in brain cognitive activities at the global, collective (or network) level, with a focus on transitions between normal neurophysiology and brain pathological states. It provides a unique approach of linking molecular and cellular aspects of normal and pathological brain functioning with their corresponding network, collective and dynamical manifestations that are subsequently extended to behavioural manifestations of healthy and diseased brains. This book introduces a high-level perspective, searching for simplification amongst the structural and functional complexity of nervous systems by consideration of the distributed interactions that underlie the collective behaviour of the system. The authors hope that this approach could promote a global comprehensive understanding of high-level laws behind the elementary biological processes in the neuroscientific community, while, perhaps, introducing elements of biological complexities to the mathematical/computational readership. The title of the book refers to the main point of the monograph: that there is a smooth continuum between distinct brain activities resulting in different behaviours, and that, due to the plastic nature of the brain, the behaviour can also alter the brain function, thus rendering artificial the boundaries between the brain and its behaviour.

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).