The 'Evo-Devo' approach to the study of the brain's structure, pivots around the notion of competition. Evolution theory since Darwin has built upon the principal idea of regularities and variations of body part shapes, that compete over function in changing environments, and are either kept or discarded as a consequence of success. Terence Deacon (University of California, Berkeley) connects this idea to both the evolution, and the development of the brain, and argues that the way brain development during an animal's life has evolved over ages has resulted in the specific forms and function of brain parts on one hand, and on the other in the relative similarity of formal and functional brain organization amongst different species. He introduces the notion of an essential competition of neuron connections in the final stages of brain development, one that is staged by genes that code for different functional brain areas. With Paul Verschure he discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of such a notion, and illustrates it with his research on parkinson patients that involved the transplantation of embryonic pig brain tissue into the affected human brain areas. In the final part, he introduces his current research ideas on evolution and the origins of life, from a perspective beyond self-replicating mechanisms that use DNA and RNA, and even away from molecular replication we can find on earth.

About the lecturerTerence Deacon is Professor in Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of California Berkley, USA. His interests combine human evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. His research extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology, to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language. Many of these interests are explored in his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain.

Somehow, when we turn our head we know that the world stands still, and it is us who turn our visual perception of it. But what brain structures are precisely involved in such complex understanding? Brain anatomist Björn Merker discusses his studies of the multi-modal sensori-motor system, and the possible brain structures and mappings that facilitate control over it. He introduces his idea of a multiple, convergent funnel structure, and discusses with Paul Verschure the notion of some functional 'bubble' that produces a best estimate for both sensory and motor sides, within the time window of an eye's saccade.About the lecturerBjörn Merker lives in Sweden and has published several papers and books both autonomously, and affiliated to academic institutes like the Royal University College of Music. Stockholm, and the Institute for Biomusicology at Mid Sweden University, Östersund. He is known in the field as a strong advocate of a neural architecture producing consciousness in other areas than the thalamo-cortical one (the forebrain). Besides the neural substrate of consciousness, his interest are in the biological basis of music in humans and other primates, large scale neuronal theories of brain function, and countercurrent modeling of cortical memory.

Increasingly complex brains lead to more complex behavior, in which it becomes impossible to assess its functionality by looking at local parts alone. Leah Kubitzer (University of California, Davis, USA) has focused in her research on brain structure complexity, on how it can develop from simpler architectures, how modular structures emerge, and can be compared between species. Manipulation during brain development stages has offered her and her team the opportunity to study the influence on the behavior of animals by changing the number of anatomical parts, the size of cortical fields and connectivity between them. With Tony Prescott and Paul Verschure she discusses her findings, and current developments in a science that in her view desperately needs a larger framework to operate in.About the lecturerLeah Krubitzer heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Neurobiology in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Krubitzer is also a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at UC Davis. She takes a broad interest in the function, connectivity, development, and evolution of complex nervous systems, like the primate somatosensory system, and the evolution of complex brains in mammals.

A brain that produces consciousness most probably is a complex brain. But how can you quantify the assessment of such a statement, how can you measure complexity in structure and activity? Marcello Massimini (University of Milan, Italy) assesses the brain as a structure that is integrated, and at the same time differentiated. Together with Paul Verschure he discusses the possibilities and limitations of measurement techniques like TMS, EEG, and fMRI, as well as the meaningfulness of the data these techniques can produce. He presents a pragmatical approach, a rough appraisal of a brain's dynamical state, rather than an assessment of from what kind of activity consciousness does emerge.About the lecturerMarcello Massimini is professor in neurophysiology at the University of Milan. He has performed in vivo intracellular recordings to study the mechanisms of sleep slow oscillations (Mircea Steriade's lab, Laval University, Canada) and has accumulated a vast experience in human basic and clinical electrophysiology (evoked potentials, polysomnography and hd-EEG during wakefulness and sleep). During the last two years Dr. Massimini has been testing the first commercially available TMS/EEG system (Nexstim. Ltd.) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with Prof. Giulio Tononi.

With respect to perception, Merav Ahissar (Hebrew University, Israel) wishes to distinguish between the  hierarchical direction of signal processing, and the hierarchical direction of explicit perception. In her view, the way we recognize features, items, objects, persons in our environments could be prone to more top down processing than perhaps classically thought. With Paul Verschure she discusses her ideas of a two-way system, in which the processing of a quick, bottom-up estimate of environmental features and global scheme recognition combines with the activation of scheme specific 'pointers', that offer and induce detailed information stemming from earlier encounters with the world, or training. With respect to how we learn to recognize our environments and its meaningful elements, it is yet unclear how to disambiguate between the strengthening of bottom-up feature recognitions, and top-down pointer generation. With Paul Verschure, Merav Ahissar discusses how to assess such questions experimentally, in both the visual and auditory domain of perception. A recurrent challenge lies in the distinction between recognition at lower, and higher levels: where and how do the top-down and bottom-up directions meet in the recognition processing of seen scenes, objects and persons, as well as of heard tones, words, and semantic meaning.

About the lecturerMehrav Ahissar is Professor at the Department of Psychology of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the perceptual basis of cognitive abilities, auditory perceptual learning, and the perceptual basis of reading and learning disabilities.

Place cells, head direction cells, and grid cells have been found and studied in the hippocampus during the past decades. John Kubie (SUNY Downstate Medical Center, USA) is one of the early group of scientists who focused specifically on this brain area, and gives a brief history of the work he and others did on place cells. In Kubie's view, these cells hold information about certain places in an environment, as well as probably a sense of which environment an animal finds itself in, and what actions are appropriate given it. Together with Paul Verschure he discusses the build up of allocentric and egocentric models, navigation and path integration, and the role of sensory information in it.About the lecturerAssociate Professor at the Department of Cell Biology of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, NY. USA. The Analysis of Hippocampal Place Cells is the principal focus of his investigation. A central question is how populations of cells contribute to an animal's perception of space.

Several theories of how the brain can produce consciousness have been proposed, amongst which the Global Workspace theory. Melanie Boly (Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research) approaches the evaluation of such theories from a clinical perspective: what can we actually measure and compare between patients that are in different states of consciousness? What differs, or correlates in terms of behavioral capabilities as well as brain functionality, between person in a vegetative state, in a coma, a minimally conscious state, or someone that is fully awake? The research of her team moved from looking from a global perspective on brain behavior and the connectivity involved with consciousness, towards a particular interest in the differences that occur in frontal and parietal brain areas. With Paul Verschure she discusses the need to aim multiple different approaches for the measurement of consciousness, like techniques combining clinical observation and physiology, towards similar theoretical paradigms. Especially for the appropriate diagnosis of a patient's state such questions are highly relevant, because it defines a meaningful terminology for indices, tags, and the associated levels of particular functionality.About the lecturerMelanie Boly is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research and Neurologist in training at the University Hospital CHU Sart Tilman under Prof. Gustave Moonen. Her current research is on the assessment of cerebral responses to pain in individual non-communicative patients, and their relationships with the patients' behavioural responses as evaluated using standardized clinical scales.

To study the modeling of action and behavior of organisms like humans, and of their brains, it is important to include the question why certain actions are undertaken. Some of what we do is driven by habits, other actions are driven by goals. Matthew Botvinick (University of Princeton, USA) discusses his view on the relations between causation, enabling action elements, rewards, danger, optimal policies, and the evolutionary notion of 'good enough'. An important recurrent issue, is that of implementation. What brain architectures facilitate state representations, functional relationships, and predictions about the world around an organism?About the lecturerHe is leading Professor at the Botvinick Lab, Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Departement of Psychology. His research interest focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of higher-level visual functions, perceptual learning, and recovery of visual function following focal brain lesions or after treatment of ophthalmologic disease.

Neuroimaging has developed as a powerful tool to visualize data that describes what happens in the living brain. Allard Roebrock (University of Maastricht, NL) discusses how these achievements could be taken beyond the mere pointing towards presumed functional areas, and taken towards causal, and computational inferences. As these tools become increasingly more complex and specialist, how can scientists, and other users in our community make effective use of them?About the lecturerAllard Roebrock is assistant professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. His research focuses on functional and anatomical connectivity.

Adrian Owen (University of Cambridge, Medical Research Council, UK) and his colleagues have shown that with some people in vegetative states, or that have locked-in syndrome, can be communi-cated, using brain wave techniques. What could this achievement mean for our notion of consciousness, and the way we deal with it in society?About the lecturerAdrian Owen is Associate Lecturer at University of Cambridge and assistant director at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the Medical Research Council. His research combines functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET, EEG), with neuropsychological studies in brain-injured patients and healthy volunteers, and revolves around three interrelated themes: attention, memory and control.

When you have the capability to hold something in your mind without input from the world, then you are free from immediacy, and free to develop a flexible response. This fundamental role of memory circuitry forms the core interest of Xiao-Jing Wang's research. With Paul Verschure he discusses how memory systems differ between sensory, motor, and cortical processing areas that are involved with decision making. Coming from a background in physics, Xiao-Jing Wang (Yale University School of Medicine, USA) has assessed neural structure modeling using attractor network dynamics, in order to describe mathematically a system that can be in a number of different persistent states. Besides fast switches, also slow transients can be found in circuitries that integrate information in decision making over time. Experimental paradigms are discussed to test Wang's model with respect to recurrent neuro-circuitry, coherence of stimuli, and reward dependent plasticity, as well as the connection to what is observed at the behavioral level.

About the lecturerHe is a professor at the Department of Neurobiology and Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine. His interests are in dynamics, computation and memory in cortical neural circuits, with an emphasis on working memory, decision making and the role of prefrontal cortex in cognition.

The current study of the brain faces a paradox: neuroscience produces an enormous amount of data, but there is surprisingly little integrated framework to fit the dispersed, and heterogeneous data collections together. Inspired by the human genome project, a group of scientists, amongst whom Partha Mitra (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA), have started working on a framework to resolve some of this paradox, and integrate the large amounts of sometimes over-specialized data at a lower but shared resolution, over a more global scale at the level of mesocircuitry. Originally a theoretical physicist, Mitra finds himself turning to modesty in the face of neuro-anatomatical practice, and discusses with Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott the challenges such an ambitious project faces. One of the recommendations he makes, is to take the knowledge coming from (re)building neurocircuitry as emerging from engineering practices much more seriously, with respect to what it can reveal about the functional and evolutionary history of brain areas. Another recommendation is to accept a plurality of theories to apply to explain particular single phenomena, which is a view that deviates from ones characterizing his background in physics.

About the lecturerPartha Mitra is currently the principal investigator at the Mitra Lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY. The interests of the lab fall into three main areas: Neuroinformatics, Theoretical Engineering and Quantitative Behavior & Electrophysiology.

The connectome, as developed by Olaf Sporns and his colleagues (University of Indiana, USA), offers a description of the human brain from the perspective of a dynamic, multilayered network. It tries to map the anatomy as well as the structural organization of the brain's dynamic nature, and does so by incorporating views from physics and economy, like expressed in e.g. Graph Theory. The dynamic network approach has also brought new terms and concepts, that address the brain as an architecture of interconnected modules, and hubs, besides that of neurons. With Paul Verschure Olaf Sporns discusses the limitations of the techniques applied to build and quantify such a network model, as well as the fundamental limitations of abstract modeling itself with respect to real brains, in a real world. For the future, Olav Sporns sees the mapping of 'the' brain challenged by multiple individual factors, like the apparent anatomical differences between people given similar behavior, and the enormous changes in connectivity that appear to occur during youth and adolescence.

About the lecturerOlaf Sporns is Professor and Associate Department Chair at Indiana University. His focus is in the area of computational cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, functional integration and binding in the cortex, neural models of perception and action, network structure and dynamics, applications of information theory to the brain, and embodied cognitive science using robotics.

The current definition of what consciousness is, is unsatisfactory according to Victor Lamme. He proposes to put aside the emphasis on the descriptions from introspection and psychology, and build a new definition from a neuroscientific perspective. This approach could offer a more thorough way to assess the 'grey zone' between the polar states of being completely conscious, and being completely unconscious, like during coma. The approach also offers a method to disambiguate the role of attention in tasks associated with more or less conscious states. With Paul Veschure Lamme discusses his views with respect to his research on change blindness and subconscious recognition, and role of the feed-forward recurrent connectivity architectures, which make him a critic of global workspace proposals. Lamme thinks that it is fundamentally impossible to know what exactly someone else is conscious of at a certain moment. He expects that the contribution of experimentation will show that the neural argument of recurrence will prove an essential prerequisite for consciousness phenomena.

About the lecturerVictor Lamme is professor at the University of Amsterdam. He studies visual consciousness to understand how we process visual information. This is –sometimes– accompanied by a sensation: we see. What brain mechanisms make that happen?

The architecture of the cerebellum has attracted several scientists due to its apparent simplicity. Nonetheless, what function the cerebellum performs, and how is still a subject of discussion. Sam Wang (Princeton University, USA) proposes two effects that result from simple and complex spike firing by the cerebellar neurons: an overall reset with respect to an event in realtime, and a long term plasticity learning signal. With Paul Verschure he discusses these functions, their neural architecture, and the difficulty to experimentally separate the two according to their spiking behavior. Originally a physicist, Wang finds himself much more interested in neuroanatomy than he ever thought, and sees for the future a convergence of neuro-imaging techniques together with anatomical approaches to describe and image the whole neural circuits.

About the lecturerSam Wang is professor at Princeton University, USA. HIs research work focuses on three areas: dendritic integration in neural circuits, brain architecture and evolution, and the cerebellum, with an emphasis on multi-photon optical methods.