Valentino Braitenberg: Difference between revisions

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Valentino Braitenberg (sometimes referred to as Valentin; born 18. June 1926 in Bolzano, Italy; died 9. September 2011 in Tübingen, Germany) was an Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist. He was former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany.

Braitenberg was most famous for the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, in which he described how hypothetical analog vehicles (a combination of sensors, actuators and their interconnections), though simple in design, can exhibit behaviors akin to aggression, love, foresight and optimism. These have come to be known as Braitenberg vehicles.

Life

Valentino Braitenberg grew up in the province of South Tyrol. His life needs to be seen in the context of the province's history. Seven years before Braitenberg's birth, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919) was signed, giving Italy control of the province and surrounding regions. This formalised the occupation of the area by Italy following World War I. Prior to that South Tyrol had been part of the Austrian Empire; the majority of the inhabitants were German-speaking. In 1921, five years before Braitenberg's birth, Italy ceded administrative control of the region to local governance and there were democratic elections that resulted in a resounding victory for the Deutscher Verband (German Association), which won close to 90% of the votes and thus sent four deputies to Rome. This changed in October 1922 when the new Fascist government of Italy under Benito Mussolini began a program of Italianization of South Tyrol, including dismissal of German officials, prevention of German immigration, encouragement of Italian immigration, and introduction of Italian as the official language.

Braitenberg's father was Senator de:Carl von Braitenberg, a member of the South Tyrolean nobility. Braitenberg's full name could have been Valentin von Braitenberg, but his first name was able be entered into the Italian birth registry only in its Italianate form "Valentino".

(This paragraph is adapted from Italianization of South Tyrol.) Under the 1939 South Tyrol Option Agreement, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini determined the status of the German people living in the province. They could emigrate to Germany or the Greater German Reich's territory in the Crimea, or stay in Italy and accept their complete Italianization. As a consequence of this, the society of South Tyrol was deeply riven. Those who wanted to stay, the so-called Dableiber, were condemned as traitors while those who left (Optanten) were defamed as Nazis. Because of the outbreak of World War II, this agreement was never fully implemented. Illegal Katakombenschulen ("Catacomb schools") were set up to teach children the German language.

In 1939, when Braitenberg was 13, his family opted to stay in South Tyrol. Braitenberg attended grammar school in Bolzano, but also attended a catacomb school. In addition, he trained as a violinist at the it:Conservatorio Claudio Monteverdi in Bolzano.

In the last year of World War II (1945), when South Tyrol was occupied by Germany, Braitenberg, then 19, was imprisoned in a Strafkompanie, a penal work division in a Nazi concentration camp, as a result of his making statements of resistance. His work was getting rid of unexploded bombs in Innsbruck.

After the war Braitenberg studied at Innsbruck, first in physics and later in medicine, and was a violinist in the Tyrolean State Orchestra. He received his doctoral and specialist training for Neurology and Psychiatry in Rome. After years of research in Germany and in the USA, he earned a higher doctorate, Habilitation, in cybernetics and information theory. He became Professor of Cybernetics at the Physics Institute of the University of Naples. From 1968 until his retirement in 1994 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Tübingen and Freiburg. From 1998 to 2001 he was president of the Laboratorio di Scienze Cognitive at the University of Trento in Rovereto.

Braitenberg received an honorary doctorate from the University of Salzburg.

Braitenberg was married to Elisabeth Hanna. They had three children, Zeno, who became a television presenter de:Zeno Braitenberg, Margareta, who became a doctor, and Carla, who became an earth scientist.

Works

According to Maier (2012), Braitenberg's interest in understanding the brain began in 1948, when he looked for the first time at some human brain tissue under a microscope. She said that although the connections seemed unbelievably complex, Braitenberg eventually realised that computers could serve as a useful model for understanding the brain. She said that he made seminal contributions to understanding the neuroanatomy of the cerebellum, the writing of the eye of the fly, and the organisation of the human cerebrum. Braitenberg called his thousands of hours peering down the microscope at brain tissue, "Spying on God".

Braitenberg published 186 scientific works during his lifetime, not including reprints, translations into different languages, and different editions of some of his works. According to Neurotree, an academic genealogy, Braitenberg supervised to completion nine PhD students. According to a search of Web of Knowledge in September 2014, Braitenburg's scientific papers received 1631 citations and he has an h-index of 17. According to a search of Google Scholar in September 2014, Braitenburg's book, Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology, received at least 2622 citations.

Books published by Braitenberg include:

• Information – der Geist in der Natur. Mit einem Geleitwort von Niels Birbaumer. Schattauer Verlag 2011 ISBN 978-3-7945-2768-7
• Das Bild der Welt im Kopf. Eine Naturgeschichte des Geistes. LIT Verlag 2004 ISBN 3-8258-7181-9
• Vehikel. Experimente mit künstlichen Wesen, LIT Verlag Münster 2004 ISBN 3-8258-7160-6
• Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. MIT Press Cambridge 1984 ISBN 978-0-262-52112-3 (en)
• Ill oder Der Engel und die Philosophen. Roman. Haffmans Zürich 1999 ISBN 3-251-00424-7
• Information Processing in the Cortex. Experiments and Theory (mit Ad Aertsen), Springer-Verlag 1992 ISBN 3-540-55391-6
• Gescheit sein (und andere unwissenschaftliche Essays). Haffmans Zürich 1987 ISBN 3-251-00112-4

Honours and namesakes

Awards named after Braitenberg

• Valentino Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience—A biannual award by The Bernstein Association for Computational Neuroscience,

Literature

• Hosp, Inga; Schüz, Almut; Braitenberg, Zeno, eds. (2011). Tentakel des Geistes. Begegnungen mit Valentin Braitenberg. Arunda 81. Bolzano: Edition Raetia. ISBN 978-88-7283-403-9.

See also

• Braitenberg Vehicles
• Connectionism
• Embodied cognitive science

External links

• Short memories of Valentino
• A software Braitenberg vehicle simulator