Review: Vehicles by Valentino Braitenberg

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, x + 152 pp., $16.23, ISBN 0-262-52112-1

I first heard about Vehicles from the recommended reading list of Dr. Brian Wandell, Principal Investigator of the VISTA Lab at Stanford University in Menlo Park, CA. It is an excellent read that creatively challenged the way I approach studying the brain, and I highly recommend it.

The simple premise of Vehicles is beautifully encapsulated in the first chapter entitled "Let the Problem of the Mind Dissolve in Your Mind" and that is exactly what author Valentino Braitenberg helps the reader do. The first eighty-five pages are devoted to building a very abstract model of a mind, and the subsequent fifty pages take this model apart and examine how it relates directly to what we know about the biology of the brain.

The model consists of fourteen "vehicles" possessing increasingly more complex hardware. Through an incredibly intuitive and believable progression, Braitenberg works upward from a simple sensor attached to a motor to tiny animated machines with very human-like behavior. Although their internal workings are simple to understand, the final vehicles perform surprisingly complex actions indicating memory, foresight, and free will.

This part of the book is manageable even for someone with no background in science, yet is thought-provoking enough to inspire the imagination of even the most seasoned neurobiologist. It is, in a word, beautiful.

Following this seductive creation of a human-like mind out of simple circuits are fifty pages of biological notes. The biological explanations are a bit dense and technical and often inconclusive.

One of the recurring themes in this section is the lack of sufficient information to determine the validity of the Vehicles model. While direct biological evidence for the simpler circuits is easy to find, the more advanced circuitry is still largely hypothetical given our current understanding of the brain.

While this is definitely a disappointing ending, it is still possible to appreciate the primary message of the book: synthesis is vastly easier than analysis. For all our difficulty in figuring out the inner workings of the brain, the human mind may turn out to be simpler than we imagine.