Library Person

Valentino Braitenberg

Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist; founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) trained as a psychiatrist and neurologist before Eduardo Caianiello invited him to set up a biocybernetics research group at the University of Naples in 1958. From 1968 until his 1994 retirement he was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, leading its department on the structure and function of natural nerve-nets. His 1984 book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology built simple sensorimotor thought-experiments into a foundational case for lifelike behavior emerging from minimal coupled parts.

Works in the Library