I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school- including von Hayek and von Haberler - returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, "would not have been possible without the contribution of these men." They nodded - briefly - until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s.
- James K. Galbraith
topic: Country, Father, War, Hayek, Kenneth
Hayek made a quite fruitful suggestion, made contemporaneously by the psychologist Donald Hebb, that whatever kind of encounter the sensory system has with the world, a corresponding event between a particular cell in the brain and some other cell carrying the information from the outside word must result in reinforcement of the connection between those cells. These day, this is known as a Hebbian synapse, but von Hayek quite independently came upon the idea. I think the essence of his analysis still remains with us.
- Gerald Edelman
source: "Through a Computer Darkly: Group Selection and Higher Brain Function". Gerald Edelman, "Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", Volume 36, No. 1 (p. 25), www.jstor.org. October 1982.
topic: Thinking, Cells, Essence, Hayek, Reinforcement
The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but .. a Viennes economist: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A man of exceptionally broad knowledge and profound insight into the operation of complex systems, Hayek applied such insight with remarkable success to economics (Nobel Prize, 1974), sociology, political science, jurisprudence, evolutionary theory, psychology, and brain science (Hayek, 1952).
- Joaquin Fuster
source: "Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate". Book by Joaquin M. Fuster, 1995.
topic: Memories, Men, Profound, Hayek, Jurisprudence