Report of the First Meeting on Brain Theory

Abstract

The meeting was, in the opinion expressed by all participants, a very successful one. Each of the presentations elicited strong responses in the majority of the participants leading to an unusually vivacious and detailed discussion in which not only common ideas emerged in unexpected ways but also weak or obscure points of the individual theories where freely discussed and clarified. It soon became obvious that we had created a forum which provided an opportunity to discuss ideas which were often confined to a strange limbus of awe and contempt in previous discussions with experimental neuroscientists. A consequence of this realization was probably the absence of the aggressively competitive spirit that can easily emerge in similar groups. We attributed this in part to the fact that no representative of the staunch type of experimentalist was present at the meeting. Thus we could make uninhibited use of mathematical formalism and propose ideas that are not directly related to experimental research presently en vogue, but may well provide the framework for future experimentation. This is to be expected since at our meeting it became apparent that the goal of finding a common theoretical framework is well within reach. Especially in the discussion of the historical papers, for which the last day of the meeting was reserved, it became clear that the quite different views on the brain that are naturally held by scientists from different backgrounds can possibly be transformed into each other on the level of their mathematical representations.