For more than 30 years, the visual cortex has been the source of new theories and ideas about how the brain processes information. The visual cortex is easily accessible through a variety of recording and imagining techniques and allows mapping of high level behavior relatively directly to neural mechanisms. Understanding the computations in the visual cortex is therefore an important step toward a general theory of computational brain theory.

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.

The study of neural networks is enjoying a great renaissance, both in computational neuroscience, the development of information processing models of living brains, and in neural computing, the use of neurally inspired concepts in the construction of "intelligent" machines. Thus the title of this volume has two interpretations: It presents models and data on the dynamic interactions occurring in the brain, and it exhibits the dynamic interactions between research in computational neuroscience and in neural computing, as scientists seek to find common principles to guide the understanding of the living brain and the design of artificial neural networks. This collection of contributions presents the current state of research, future trends and open problems in an exciting field of today's science.

This book provides an overview of self-organizing map formation, including recent developments. Self-organizing maps form a branch of unsupervised learning, which is the study of what can be determined about the statistical properties of input data without explicit feedback from a teacher. The articles are drawn from the journal Neural Computation.The book consists of five sections. The first section looks at attempts to model the organization of cortical maps and at the theory and applications of the related artificial neural network algorithms. The second section analyzes topographic maps and their formation via objective functions. The third section discusses cortical maps of stimulus features. The fourth section discusses self-organizing maps for unsupervised data analysis. The fifth section discusses extensions of self-organizing maps, including two surprising applications of mapping algorithms to standard computer science problems: combinatorial optimization and sorting. Contributors J. J. Atick, H. G. Barrow, H. U. Bauer, C. M. Bishop, H. J. Bray, J. Bruske, J. M. L. Budd, M. Budinich, V. Cherkassky, J. Cowan, R. Durbin, E. Erwin, G. J. Goodhill, T. Graepel, D. Grier, S. Kaski, T. Kohonen, H. Lappalainen, Z. Li, J. Lin, R. Linsker, S. P. Luttrell, D. J. C. MacKay, K. D. Miller, G. Mitchison, F. Mulier, K. Obermayer, C. Piepenbrock, H. Ritter, K. Schulten, T. J. Sejnowski, S. Smirnakis, G. Sommer, M. Svensen, R. Szeliski, A. Utsugi, C. K. I. Williams, L. Wiskott, L. Xu, A. Yuille, J. Zhang

For more than 30 years, the visual cortex has been the source of new theories and ideas about how the brain processes information. The visual cortex is easily accessible through a variety of recording and imagining techniques and allows mapping of high level behavior relatively directly to neural mechanisms. Understanding the computations in the visual cortex is therefore an important step toward a general theory of computational brain theory.

This volume is devoted to mathematical models of the cortex. Computational models of individual neurons and ensembles of neurons are increasingly used in research on cortical organization and function. This is, in part, because of the now ubiquitous presence of powerful and affordable computers. The volume begins with a short history of models of cortical neurons and circuitry that introduces the principal modeling styles. An attempt has been made throughout the volume to make it accessible to readers with minimal mathematical backgrounds.

The 6th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Assisted Intervention,MICCAI2003,washeldinMontr ́ eal,Qu ́ ebec,CanadaattheF- rmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel during November 15–18, 2003. This was the ?rst time the conference had been held in Canada. The proposal to host MICCAI 2003 originated from discussions within the Ontario Consortium for Ima- guided Therapy and Surgery, a multi-institutional research consortium that was supported by the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Ministry of E- erprise, Opportunity and Innovation. The objective of the conference was to o?er clinicians and scientists a - rum within which to exchange ideas in this exciting and rapidly growing ?eld. MICCAI 2003 encompassed the state of the art in computer-assisted interv- tions, medical robotics, and medical-image processing, attracting experts from numerous multidisciplinary professions that included clinicians and surgeons, computer scientists, medical physicists, and mechanical, electrical and biome- cal engineers. The quality and quantity of submitted papers were most impressive. For MICCAI 2003 we received a record 499 full submissions and 100 short c- munications. All full submissions, of 8 pages each, were reviewed by up to 5 reviewers, and the 2-page contributions were assessed by a small subcomm- tee of the Scienti?c Review Committee. All reviews were then considered by the MICCAI 2003 Program Committee, resulting in the acceptance of 206 full papers and 25 short communications. The normal mode of presentation at MICCAI 2003 was as a poster; in addition, 49 papers were chosen for oral presentation.

The number of scientists and laboratories involved with brain mapping is increasing exponentially; and the second edition of this comprehensive reference has also grown much larger than the first (published in 1996), including, for example, five chapters on structural and functional MRI where the fi

The Self-Organizing Map, or Kohonen Map, is one of the most widely used neural network algorithms, with thousands of applications covered in the literature. It was one of the strong underlying factors in the popularity of neural networks starting in the early 80's. Currently this method has been included in a large number of commercial and public domain software packages. In this book, top experts on the SOM method take a look at the state of the art and the future of this computing paradigm.The 30 chapters of this book cover the current status of SOM theory, such as connections of SOM to clustering, classification, probabilistic models, and energy functions. Many applications of the SOM are given, with data mining and exploratory data analysis the central topic, applied to large databases of financial data, medical data, free-form text documents, digital images, speech, and process measurements. Biological models related to the SOM are also discussed.