Biological Cybernetics

[J. Leo van Hemmen]

Dear Friends:

In the July issue 81/1 (1999) of ``Biological Cybernetics'', its
Editors-in-Chief Gert Hauske and I have published an Editorial.
As we think it could make for interesting reading for most of you
we have appended the text.

Enjoy reading,

Leo van Hemmen.

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The time has come for _Biological Cybernetics_ to face some
changes and widen its scope.  First, Leo van Hemmen has joined Gert
Hauske as Coeditor-in-Chief.  The latter welcomes him as a colleague
and friend with extensive experience in theoretical biophysics,
international reputation, and a passion for temporal coding, in
particular, within the visual and auditory system.  The former
realizes that, in managing the Journal as well as Gert Hauske does, he
is called to live up to a very high standard.  In setting a new course
for the Journal and working in a cybernetic vein, we intend to focus
on sensory modalities, especially hearing and seeing, their cortical
processing, and emanating activities such as those in the motor
cortex, including gesture and locomotion.  Learning and memory
constitute the second key domain of the Journal, strongly dependent as
they are on sensory modalities.  Also the analysis of underlying
techniques deserves our attention.  Papers on artificial neural nets
whose motivation stems from biology are as welcome as they were before
[1].  In this way the editors will continue the liberal, innovative,
and rich traditions set forth for the Journal since its conception.

It was Norbert Wiener [2,3] who defined the notion of cybernetics:
``We have decided to call the entire field of control and
communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the
name _Cybernetics_, which we form from the Greek
$\kappa\upsilon\beta\epsilon\rho\nu\eta\tau\eta\varsigma$ or
_steersman_.'' He then noted that J.C. Maxwell's 1868 paper on
governors, a word that is a Latin corruption of its Greek root, was
the first significant paper on mechanisms of feedback.  While control
is a key notion for all of biology, the importance of feedback
connections relative to feedforward regulation has been appreciated
most profoundly through recent studies of the brain.

Communication or transmission of information is another key idea that
is indispensable in understanding neuronal processing.  Here Wiener
was also ahead of our time, save for the fact that he imagined machine
and animal to perform information processing in the same way -- as is
suggested by the above interlude ``whether in the machine or in the
animal'' and is set out elsewhere [2,3].  Today we know much more than
one could have then [4], that the differences between neuronal and
machine computation, and between the underlying mechanisms of learning
and memory, are huge.

With hindsight it is easy to see why the original cybernetic movement
stalled in the mid sixties.  It was a never explicitly formulated
hypothesis that a simple block diagram could account for the exquisite
functions of animal brains [2-4], and that a clever person
could write an algorithm for each procedure emerging from a block
diagram.  Life is not that simple and would-be programmers were called
upon to digest megabytes of data, which apparently they could not.
Our brain is simply not made for that.

Biological cybernetics as conceived by our founding Editor-in-Chief
Werner Reichardt is different.  His insertion of the adjective
_biological_ before `cybernetics' focused attention on natural as
opposed to artificial networks. The underlying idea, as advocated by
Wiener, is that a merger of biology, mathematics, and physics is
needed to clarify the fascinating problems posed by animal brains
functioning as `neuronal machines' in natural environments.  This
means that computational neuroscience necessarily must be an integral
part of the Journal.  Biologists are increasingly aware of the power
theoretical neuroscience has for making predictions that can be
verified by experiment, and to suggest entirely new directions for
experimental investigation.  Accordingly, _Biological
Cybernetics_ will aim at bringing to biologists a better understanding
of the reciprocity between theory and experiment, which has so long
been the successful formula for the physical sciences.  At the same
time, however, the Journal will remain deeply rooted in biological
experimentation and its power for setting boundaries on overly zealous
speculation.

What, then, should be questioned or analyzed?  Though biological
cybernetics can, and did, give insight into such attractive practical
problems as heart arrhythmias, a richer approach should focus on all
aspects of information processing, notably in biological neural
networks.  The Journal's traditional preferences slanted towards the
visual system, perhaps to the expense of a broader analysis of
neuronal information processing as a whole.  Since the auditory system
is so intimately connected with the visual cortex, and a fascinating
structure by itself, we think that focusing on both may be
particularly fruitful.  Through such comparisons our editorial
objective is to stimulate an inquiring assessment of sensory
information processing at large and to illuminate the `hows' and
`whys' that give rise to similarity and difference in various systems.
Putting things in a proper perspective, we are aiming at all aspects
of communication and control in biological information processing.
To accommodate this broadened frontier for the Journal, the Editorial
Board will be appropriately extended.

Most importantly, we hope that you, the reader and prospective author,
will join us in this new adventure.


Gert Hauske
J. Leo van Hemmen.


[1] Braitenberg V (1984) Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic
Psychology.  MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

[2] Wiener N (1948) Cybernetics, or control and communication in
the animal and the machine.  Wiley, New York, and Hermann, Paris.
See in particular p. 19.

[3] Wiener N (1948) Cybernetics. Sci. Amer. 179:14-18

[4] Rosenblith W and Wiesner J (1966) From philosophy to mathematics
to biology.  Bull.  Amer.  Math.  Soc.  72:33-38.  This is a critical
appreciation of Wiener's role in biology by two of his contemporaries.

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Prof. Dr. J. Leo van Hemmen
Physik Department
TU M"unchen
D-85747 Garching bei M"unchen
Germany

Phone: +49(89)289.12362 (office) and .12380 (secretary)
Fax: +49(89)289.14656
e-mail: Leo.van.Hemmen at ph.tum.de