Psychology Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Other fields of psychology: AI · Computer · Consulting · Consumer · Engineering · Environmental · Forensic · Military · Sport · Transpersonal · Index


This article deals with a sub-discipline of biocybernetics.

Definition[]

Neurocybernetics is the science of communication and automatic control systems in MUTUAL relation to machines and living organisms. The underlying mathematical descriptions are control theory (extended for complex systems), mean field theory for neural networks and neural field theory. Exemplary applications of walking and human arm control and further reading can be found here.

Etymology[]

Neurocybernetics is a compound word of 'neuro',- the fundamental biological way to convey information within an organism by means of specially differentiated cells (neurons), and cybernetics - the science of communication and automatic control systems in relation to both machines and living beings.

Therefore neuro/biocybernetics can essentially be understood as the culmination of both major sciences, that is neurology and cybernetics. As the complexity of neurology is overall still in a very early stage of abstracting it into a generalizable theory, whilst on the contrary the complexity of cybernetical systems do not even come close to biological systems, even of the most primitve kind (e.g. protozoa), neuro/biocybernetics is still very much in the initial phase with much basic research going on, and hardly any commercial application.

Generally speaking, it is the science that covers the integration of machines into a living organism via a Neural interface (aka neurolink or neural interface). The best example for applied neurocybernetics are the applications of neuroprosthetics, which still are at a very early stage.

The practical applications, once the science has progressed enough to be applicable in humans, are countless but one especially remarkable would be [ neuroprosthetics that integrate seemlessly into the human organisms, by replicating and all layers of sensorial information from and to the surrogate organ . The demands of such a converter would be to preprocess the information and translate it via a synaptic bridge into information that is well adapted to the nervous system of the individual organism.

Introduction[]

The capacity of computers to cope with massive amounts of information and interface with each other with very low latencies is continually increasing. The current efforts in the striving to advance human-computer interface technologies resulted in devices such as [VR] gloves, various kind of motion trackers as well as 3-D sound and graphic based systems. Those devices are capable of enhancing our ability to interact, along with novel approaches to user-interface-design, with vast amount of information in as natural way as possible, so that we don't get overstrained. The next emerging paradigm of human-machine interaction are directly sensing bio-electric signals (from eye, muscle, the brain or any other nervous source) as inputs and rendering information in ways that take advantage of psycho-physiologic signal processing of the human nervous system (perceptual psychophysics).

After that the next step would be to optimize the technology to the physiology, that is a biologically responsive interactive interface.

The research[]

The ultimate goal of NC research is the technological implementation of major principles of information processing in biological organisms by probing cellular and network mechanisms of brain functions. To unravel the biological design principles,computer aided analyses of neuronal structure and signal transmission based on modern information theories and engineering methods are employed.

An offshoot of neurocybernetics is the field of Neurodynamics, also called Neural Field Theory, which uses differential equations to describe activity patterns in bulk neural matter. Research for neurodynamics involves the interdisciplinary areas of Statistics and nonlinear physics and sensory neurobiology. On the physics side, topics of interest include information measures, oscillators, stochastic resonance, unstable periodic orbits, and pattern formation in ensembles of agents.

Other[]

Psycho-cybernetics is a self-help book written by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz and doesn't have anything to do with neuro cybernetics in the broader sense or any other science.

See also[]

References[]

  • Rashevsky, N. (1938) Mathematical Biophysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
  • Beurle, R.L. (1956) Properties of a Mass of Cells Capable of Regenerating Pulses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 240, 55-94.
  • Wilson&Cowan (1973) A Mathematical Theory of the Functional Dynamics of Cortical and Thalamic Nervous Tissue. Kyberkinetik: 13, 55-80.
  • Amari (1977) Dynamics of Pattern Formation in Lateral-Inhibition Type Neural Fields. Biological Cyberkinetics: 27, 77-87.

External links[]

Edit General subfields and scientists in Cybernetics
K1 Polycontexturality, Second-order cybernetics
K2 Catastrophe theory, Connectionism, Control theory, Decision theory, Information theory, Semiotics, Synergetics, Sociosynergetics, Systems theory
K3 Biological cybernetics, Biomedical cybernetics, Biorobotics, Computational neuroscience, Homeostasis, Medical cybernetics, Neuro cybernetics, Sociocybernetics
Cyberneticians William Ross Ashby, Claude Bernard, Valentin Braitenberg, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, George S. Chandy, Joseph J. DiStefano III, Heinz von Foerster, Charles François, Jay Forrester, Buckminster Fuller, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Francis Heylighen, Erich von Holst, Stuart Kauffman, Sergei P. Kurdyumov, Niklas Luhmann, Warren McCulloch, Humberto Maturana, Horst Mittelstaedt, Talcott Parsons, Walter Pitts, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Robert Trappl, Valentin Turchin, Francisco Varela, Frederic Vester, John N. Warfield, Kevin Warwick, Norbert Wiener

de:Biokybernetik lt:Biokibernetika mk:Биокибернетика

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
Advertisement