The three-volume set LNCS 6675, 6676 and 6677 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2011, held in Guilin, China, in May/June 2011. The total of 215 papers presented in all three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 651 submissions. The contributions are structured in topical sections on computational neuroscience and cognitive science; neurodynamics and complex systems; stability and convergence analysis; neural network models; supervised learning and unsupervised learning; kernel methods and support vector machines; mixture models and clustering; visual perception and pattern recognition; motion, tracking and object recognition; natural scene analysis and speech recognition; neuromorphic hardware, fuzzy neural networks and robotics; multi-agent systems and adaptive dynamic programming; reinforcement learning and decision making; action and motor control; adaptive and hybrid intelligent systems; neuroinformatics and bioinformatics; information retrieval; data mining and knowledge discovery; and natural language processing.