Proceedings : Springer : 9783540402107 : 3540402101 : 22 May 2003 : The global purpose of IWANN conferences has been to provide a broad and - terdisciplinary forum for the interplay between neuroscience and computation. Our dream has been, and still is: (1) ?nd ways to understand the physiol- ical, symbolic and cognitive nature of the nervous system (NS) with the help of computational and engineering tools; and (2) ?nd rich and insightful sources of inspiration in biology, to develop new materials, mechanisms and probl- solving methods (PSM) of value in engineering and computation. As all of us knowwell, this dreamstarted with the AncientGreeks, reappearedin the fo- dational stage of neurocybernetics and bionics, and is now broadly accepted in the scienti?c community under di?erent labels such as computational neu- science(CN) andarti?cialneuralnets (ANN), orgenetic algorithmsandhybrid neuro-fuzzy systems. We have also to recognize that there is a considerable lack of credibility assoc