Valentino Braitenberg: Brain

Valentino Braitenberg was Italian-Austrian neuroscientist. Explore interesting quotes on brain.
Valentino Braitenberg: 24   quotes 0   likes

“The brain is encased in the head, the part of the body which in most walking, flying or swimming animals is the leading end of the moving body (with few exceptions: starfish, cuttlefish, humans, penguins when they are not swimming). The obvious risks which this localization entails are apparently compensated by the advantage of direct short connections with the sense organs localized in or on top of the head (olfaction, taste, vision, audition, vestibular sense), which together with the brain could be seen as something like the cockpit of the animal, or the pilot if one prefers.”

Valentino Braitenberg

Valentino Braitenberg (2007) " Brain http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Brain". Scholarpedia, 2(11):2918.

Sense , Animals , Parting , Flying

“Imagine the inside of St. Peter’s in Rome filled with a huge quantity of fibers around a millimeter in diameter that crisscross the building in every direction creating a firm mat – then you have an idea of what the brain looks like when magnified a thousand times.”

Valentino Braitenberg

Braitenberg, quoted in: Elke Maier (2012) " Spying on God http://www.mpg.de/6348834/S005_Flashback_086-087.pdf" in Max Planck Research, March 2012

Imagination , Idea , Time

“[The final chapter of the book] sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior will then seem less gratuitous than it may have seemed up to this poin. t”

Valentino Braitenberg

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 95 as cited in: Michael R. W. Dawson (2008) Minds and Machines: Connectionism and Psychological Modeling. p. 88

Books , Behavior , Animals

“This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is a part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only miniscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.”

Valentino Braitenberg

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 1

World , Exercises , Universe , Science