Neural mechanisms of information processing in the brain

Numerous researchers have recently become interested in the information processing in the brain. This is because the brain seems to process information in a mechanism which is completely different from that of the computer. The parallel information processing, learning and self-organizing ability, as well as the memory mechanism of the brain, present interesting principles of information processing which will be very helpful in the design of future computers. To arrive at a clear understanding of those principles, various attempts have been made to describe the underlying principles in a mathematical and systematic way, in parallel to the examination of the behavior of the neural network model. This paper outlines those efforts from the viewpoint of pattern dynamics of the neural field and the visual information processing, learning function in the input-output characteristics and the control of movement, self-organization of information recognition mechanism, the associative model, and its stochastic realization. However, this paper aims not only at a review of the present status, but also at pointing out the present problems such as the bottleneck, indicating the problems posed and the direction of the new possible researches.