Valentino Braitenberg

Valentino Braitenberg (or Valentin von Braitenberg; 18 June 1926 – 9 September 2011) was an Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist. He was former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. His book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology became famous in Robotics and among Psychologists, in which he described how hypothetical analog vehicles (a combination of sensors, actuators and their interconnections), though simple in design, can exhibit behaviors akin to aggression, love, foresight, and optimism. These have come to be known as Braitenberg vehicles. His pioneering scientific work was concerned with the relation between structures and functions of the brain. Valentino Braitenberg grew up in the province of South Tyrol. Braitenberg's father was Senator de, a member of the South Tyrolean nobility. Since the age of 6, Braitenberg grew up bilingual in the two languages Italian and German. German was spoken at home and all schooling was Italian, conform to the historic context. The humanistic Lyceum-Gymnasium (High school) in Bolzano gave him an excellent classic education including Italian literature. The German literary education was based on the classical writers he found in the extensive home library. In addition, he trained as a violinist at the it in Bolzano and became a talented violinist and violist. Braitenberg studied Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Innsbruck and University of Rome between 1945 and 1954. He accompanied his studies with chamber music performances with his viola and violin, where he developed a repertoire of violin-piano duos with a colleague. He completed his medical training with an internship at the psychiatric clinic in Rome, where he decided to prefer a scientific career dedicated to the understanding of brain functions. He spent a few years at Yale University in New Haven (USA) when he was invited by Prof. Eduardo Caianiello in 1958 to set up a biocybernetics research group at the Physics Institute of the University of Naples Federico II, the “Laboratorio di Cibernetica”, as part of the National Research Council in Italy (CNR).