This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems, BICS 2016, held in Beijing, China, in November 2016. The 32 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. They discuss the emerging areas and challenges, present the state of the art of brain-inspired cognitive systems research and applications in diverse fields by covering many topics in brain inspired cognitive systems related research including biologically inspired systems, cognitive neuroscience, models consciousness, and neural computation.