What can the beauty of brain structures tell us about how brains work—and ultimately about how thoughts become possible?
Co-edited by Henry Evrard, Willi Ribi, and Almut Schüz, The World in the Brain invites readers on a visual and intellectual journey through the extraordinary architecture of the brain: its beauty and complexity in mammals and humans, and its remarkable order in insects. Inspired by these images, Valentin Braitenberg wrote texts that look beyond anatomy, asking what these structures mean and what their organization makes possible.
“The network contains possible thoughts even before they are thought.”
Braitenberg (1926–2011) was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, where he was succeeded by Nikos Logothetis, later co-founder of ICPBR.
Marking the centenary of Braitenberg’s birth, Henry Evrard (Dynamic Embodied Brain Lab, ICPBR) and two of Braitenberg’s former colleagues completed the work he had left unfinished — bringing this unique encounter between brain structure, function, and thought to a new generation of readers.
