Preface to the Second Edition

Like the first edition, which it replaces, this volume is inspired by two great questions: “How does the brain work?” and “How can we build intelligent machines?” As in the first edition, the heart of the book is a set of close to 300 articles in Part III which cover the whole spectrum of Brain Theory and Neural Networks. To help readers orient themselves with respect to this cornucopia, I have written Part I to provide the elementary background on the modeling of both brains and biological and artificial neural networks, and Part II to provide a series of road maps to help readers interested in a particular topic steer through the Part III articles on that topic. More on the motivation and structure of the book can be found in the Preface to the First Edition, which is reproduced after this. I also recommend reading the section “How to Use This Book”—one reader of the first edition who did not do so failed to realize that the articles in Part III were in alphabetical order, or that the Contributors list lets one locate each article written by a given author.

The reader new to the study of Brain Theory and Neural Networks will find it wise to read Part I for orientation before jumping into Part III, whereas more experienced readers will find most of Part I familiar. Many readers will simply turn to articles in Part III of particular interest at a given time. However, to help readers who seek a more systematic view of a particular subfield of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, Part II provides 22 Road Maps, each providing an essay linking most of the articles on a given topic. (I say “most” because the threshold is subjective for deciding when a particular article has more than a minor mention of the topic in a Road Map.) The Road Maps are organized into 8 groups in Part II as follows:

Grounding Models of Neurons and Networks

Grounding Models of Neurons

Grounding Models of Networks

Brain, Behavior, and Cognition

Neuroethology and Evolution

Mammalian Brain Regions

Cognitive Neuroscience

Psychology, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence

Psychology

Linguistics and Speech Processing

Artificial Intelligence

Biological Neurons and Networks

Biological Neurons and Synapses

Neural Plasticity

Neural Coding

Biological Networks

Dynamics and Learning in Artificial Networks

Dynamic Systems

Learning in Artificial Networks

Computability and Complexity

Sensory Systems

Vision

Other Sensory Systems

Motor Systems

Robotics and Control Theory

Motor Pattern Generators

Mammalian Motor Control

Applications, Implementations, and Analysis

Applications

Implementation and Analysis

The authors of the articles in Part III come from a broad spectrum of disciplines—such as biomedical engineering, cognitive science, computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, mathematics, physics, neurology, neuroscience, and psychology—and have worked hard to make their articles accessible to readers across the spectrum. The utility of each article is enhanced by cross-references to other articles within the body of the article, and lists at the end of the article referring the reader to road maps, background material, and related reading.

To get some idea of how radically the new edition differs from the old, note that the new edition has 285 articles in Part III, as against the 266 articles of the first edition. Of the articles that appeared in the first edition, only 9 are reprinted unchanged. Some 135 have been updated (or even completely rewritten) by their original authors, and more than 30 have been written anew by new authors. In addition, there are over 100 articles on new topics. The primary shift of emphasis from the first edition has been to drastically reduce the number of articles on applications of artificial neural networks (from astronomy to steelmaking) and to greatly increase the coverage of models of fundamental neurobiology and neural network approaches to language, and to add the new papers which are now listed in the Road Maps on Cognitive Neuroscience, Neural Coding, and Other Sensory Systems (i.e., other than Vision, for which coverage has also been increased). Certainly, a number of the articles in the first edition remain worthy of reading in themselves, but the aim has been to make the new edition a self-contained introduction to brain theory and neural networks in all its current breadth and richness.

The new edition not only appears in print but also has its own web site.

Acknowledgments

My foremost acknowledgment is again to Prue Arbib, who served as Editorial Assistant during the long and arduous process of eliciting and assembling the many, many contributions to Part III. I thank the members of the Editorial Advisory Board, who helped update the list of articles from the first edition and focus the search for authors, and I thank these authors not only for their contributions to Part III but also for suggesting further topics and authors for the Handbook, in an ever-widening circle as work advanced on this new edition. I also owe a great debt to the hundreds of reviewers who so constructively contributed to the final polishing of the articles that now appear in Part III. Finally, I thank the staff of P. M. Gordon Associates and of The MIT Press for once again meeting the high standards of copy editing and book production that contributed so much to the success of the first edition.

Michael A. Arbib

Los Angeles and La Jolla

October 2002