Neural Assemblies

Prof Dr Günther PalmProfessor Palm began his studies of mathematics at the University of Hamburg and graduated at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen with a PhD thesis on “Entropie und Generatoren in dynamischen Verbänden“ supervised by Prof. Dr. Rainer Nagel in 1975. He then worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, on topics of quantitative neuroanatomy, information theory, nonlinear systems theory, associative memory and brain theory from 1975 to 1988. During that time he spent one year (1983/1984) in Berlin as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg. In 1988 he became professor for theoretical brain research at the University of Düsseldorf. Since 1991 he is director of the Institute of Neural Information Processing at Ulm University. He retired in 2016 and is working part-time on neural data analysis at the Forschungszentrum Jülich since 2017.Professor Palm's research focus is oninformation theory, neural networks, associative memory, and specifically on Hebbian cell assemblies. By 2015, he has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, 60 invited contributions, and (co-)edited 8 books. He is author of the monographs “Neural Assemblies. An Alternative Approach to Artificial Intelligence” (1982), and “Novelty, Information and Surprise” (2012).

• Part 1:  Basic Facts and Ideas for a Brain.- Chapter 1: The brain is an organ for information processing.- Chapter 2: The organization and improvement of behavior.-Chapter 3: A neuronal realization of the survival algorithm.- Chapter4: On the structure and function of cortical areas.- Part 2:  Thinking in Cell Assemblies.- Chapter 5: Cognitive mental processes realized by cell assemblies in the cortex.- Chapter 6: A Model of Language Understanding by Interacting Cortical Areas.- Chapter 7: Can we accept a mechanistic description of our mental processes?.- Part 3:  Further Developments until Today.- Chapter 8: Developments in Computer Science and Technical Applications.- Chapter 9: New Results from Brain Research and Neuroscience.- Chapter 10: Development of Brain Theory.- Chapter 11: Do we need Cognitive Neuroscience?.