Athletes and musicians demonstrate the levels to which humans can ascend in the timing of behavior. But even common actions, such as opening a door or bringing a cup to one's lips, reveal how we organize our behavior temporally. When there is damage to the nervous system and the ability to time behavior breaks down, we become aware of how many things must go right for timing not to go terribly wrong.
Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings. It offers a broad introduction to the sources and ranges of application of the "holistic" or "organismic" research program that has since become a standard part of biological thought.
Drawing on his considerable experience as a neuroscientist and clinical neurologist, Ira Black systematically disentangles the labyrinth of brain and mind in a new concept of mind that relates environment, brain genes, molecular symbols, behavior and mentation. He describes the unity of brain, mind, and experience with singular clarity, showing how mental function, brain function, and biologic information are now comprehensible in molecular terms.
This introduction to the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system (STNS) describes some of the best-understood neural networks in the animal kingdom at cellular, network, behavioral, comparative, and evolutionary levels of analysis.
Pattern Recognition by Self-Organizing Neural Networks presents the most recent advances in an area of research that is becoming vitally important in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and neural networks in general. The 19 articles take up developments in competitive learning and computational maps, adaptive resonance theory, and specialized architectures and biological connections.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) made prolific and lasting contributions to understanding "the life of the infinitely small." Widely thought of as the founder of neuroscience, Cajal made remarkable explorations into the organization and function of the nervous system. His work is still referred to more than that of any other scientist in the field.
These contributions by well-known linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists explore the new concepts and themes that extend and revise previously held ideas about the biology of cognition. They present outstanding and timely research on the biological mechanisms underlying and correlating with linguistic and developmental processes.
