1. Principles of Neural Information Processing

To analyse the working of the brain it is our intention here to develop a framework that encompasses its most important aspects in functional terms. This intention seems solvable only if one chooses a task that makes use of all parts of the brain, and keeps the level of the description and dimensionality of this task manageable. As a result, although the description should include the numerous details that we know, not every single one needs quantifying. Our view is that the organization of behavior is the task per se that has to be solved by brains. We have therefore chosen this task as the framework for explaining how the brain works, knowing that it has gaps which—so we hope—may be filled by realistic hypotheses. Our emphasis is on the development of principles and strategies. Since, in brains, their partial self-organization, the lifelong adaptation and their use of various methods of processing incoming information are all interconnected, we have chosen not only neurobiology and evolution theory as a basis for the elaboration of such a framework, but also systems and signal theory. The latter provides a well-tested system of concepts, and opens the way to physical laws and limits.