Quo Vadis neurocomputing? Neural computation at the edge to new perspectives

Neural computation has grown up from its infancy to a well respected paradigm of information processing, with established theoretic foundations, challenging research fields and numerous applications within science and industry. The development from its early stages to the actual scientific field is marked by a sequence of five distinct episodes with individual characteristics. Today we are encountering a further change of orientation within the self-conception of neuroinformatics crucial for the survival of the entire scientific field. Neural computation is found at the crossroads between vanishing by being merged into classical information processing paradigms and the beginning of a promising second start up of the entire field. Within this paper a variety of possible future developments are balanced and combined into a set of six major trends forming a perspective for the next decade of neural computation. In the beginning of neurocomputing just four basic principles from biology have been adopted, and lead the entire field of neural computation to the success of today. Now is the time to remember the overwhelming reservoir of paradigms within biological information processing still covered, waiting to be revealed and exploited.