layout: strict-home-rr title: “NCN: Neutralizing Botulinum Toxin Type A Antibodies:Clinical Observations in Patients with Cervical Dystonia - Rollnik”

Logo: NCN Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology
About
Articles Approved
Articles Received
Editorial Board
Submission Guidelines
Subscribe
Subscriber Rights
AACN Homepage
Contact
<- Back to Articles Approved

BOOKS RECEIVED


The New Cognitive Neurosciences, second edition

Michael S. Gazzaniga , Editor-in-Chief

Unlike an encyclopedia or similar reference work, this book contains long, re-search-based articles that look ahead to future developments in the field. The book's organization reflects the way researchers tend to group themselves. Thus the different sections function as stand-alones, almost like mini-textbooks. The second edition reflects the many advances that have taken place - particularly in imaging and recording techniques - over the past few years. The majority of the chapters are new, and those from the first edition have been completely rewritten and updated. The book contains a sixteen-page full-color insert of the latest in brain imagery.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the publisher's notes.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England. 2000


The Hot Brain

By Carl V. Gisolfi and Francisco Mora

From the first unicellular life on Earth, living things have had the capacity to sense heat and cold and to avoid extreme temperatures. With the development of a bigger brain and a con-stant body temperature, mammals were able to change their habitats. The interplay between behavior, body temperature, and ambient temperature may have played a crucial role in human evolution. In this book Carl Gisolfi and Francisco Mora tell the evolutionary story of the brain and thermoregulation, with an emphasis on modern humans. The book first traces the story of the brain throughout evolution and shows how the control of body temperature as a survival mechanism was achieved. It then goes on to discuss the mechanisms of our environmental independence, why a body temperature of 370°C (only five degrees from death) is essential for humans, and how this narrow temperature range is defended. It describes how we cope with environmental extremes, the function of fevers, and why thermoregulation is best understood through a combination of physiological and cognitive approaches. It also addresses such questions as “Can we cool the brain?” and “Is the elevation in brain temperature (a hot brain) the reason we stop exercising?”

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the publisher's notes.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2000


Social Sensibility and Neural Function

By Jay Schulkin

We are social animals, with mechanisms evolved to discern the beliefs and desires of others. This social reasoning is linked to the concept of intentionality, the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others. In this book Jay Schulkin explores social reason from philosophical, psychological, and cognitive neuroscientific perspectives. He argues for a pragmatist approach, in which the role of experience - that is, interaction with others - is central to any consid-eration of action in the social world. Unlike some philosophers of mind, Jay Schulkin considers social reason to be a real feature of the information pro-cessing system in the brain, in addition to a useful cognitive tool in predicting behavior. Throughout the book, he incorporates neurobiological evidence for a domain-specific systrem for social cognition. Topics covered include the centrality of intentional attribution to social cognition, the rise of cognitive science in the twentieth century, the functional argument for the role of experience, intentional understanding in nonhuman primates, theory of mind and natural kinds in children, autism as a disorder of theory of mind, and the integration of emotions into theory of mind.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the publisher's notes.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2000


Computational Vision

By Hanspeter A. Mallot

Our knowledge of the world surrounding us is mediated by our senses. In visual perception, we sense the light emanating from objects in the environment and infer from this light a wealth of information about the environment. We are able to "see" depth and shape of objects, the color of surfaces, the segmentation of the scene into distinct objects, or the mood of a partner in a conversation. All this is based on images, i.e., two-dimensional distributions of intensities, which as such do not at all contain depth, shape, or moods. The fact that we are able to see all this is among the most amazing and fascinating abilities of our brain.

In this book, the performance of the perceptual apparatus is discussed on the level of information processing. Contributions from psychophysics and computational neuroscience are given equal weight as theories and algorithms developed for machine vision and photogrametry. Indeed, this combination is the very idea of computational vision. In the tradition of Bela Julesz and David Marr, most of the book is devoted to early vision, i.e., stages of visual processing that do not require top-down inferences from "higher" stages. However, in biological organisms as well as in robots, vision has to serve a purpose. Aspects of behavior-oriented vision covered in the book include eye-movement and visual navigation.

The book is based on courses given by the author since 1987 at the universities of Mainz, Bochum, and Tilbingen. He has tried to keep it readable for students of psychology and the neurosciences as well as for students with a physics or computer vision back-ground. The mathematical material is selected such as to give a survey of the various techniques employed in computational vision. Most of the ideas are introduced si-multaneously as "prose" text, by formal equations and in figures. As an additional refresher of college mathematics, a glossary of mathematical terms has been compiled.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the author's preface.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2000


Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

By Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides

This book is not an introduction to object-oriented technology or design. Many books already do a good job of that. This book assumes you are reasonably proficient in at least one object-oriented programming language, and you should have some experience in object-oriented design as well. You definitely shouldn't have to rush to the nearest dictionary the moment we mention "types" and "polymorphism," or "interface" as opposed to "implementation" inheritance.

On the other hand, this isn't an advanced technical treatise either. It's a book of design patterns that describes simple and elegant solutions to specific problems in object-oriented software design. Design patterns capture solutions that have developed and evolved over time. Hence they aren't the designs people tend to generate initially. They reflect untold redesign and recoding as developers have struggled for greater reuse and flexibility in their software. Design patterns capture these solutions in a succinct and easily applied form.

The design patterns require neither unusual language features nor amazing program-ming tricks with which to astound your friends and managers. All can be implemented in standard object-oriented languages, though they might take a little more work than ad hoc solutions. But the extra effort invariably pays dividends in increased flexibility and reusability.

Once you understand the design patterns and have had an "Aha!" (and not just a "Huh?") experience with them, you won't ever think about object-oriented design in the same way. You'll have insights that can make your own designs more flexible, modular, reusable, and understandable - which is why you're interested in object-oriented technology in the first place, right?

A word of warning and encouragement: Don't worry if you don't understand this book completely on the first reading. We didn't understand it all on the first writing! Remember that this isn't a book to read once and put on a shelf. We hope you'll find yourself referring to it again and again for design insights and for inspiration.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the authors' preface.)

Addison-Wesley Longman, Inc.
Reading, Massachusetts 1995


Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Modeling of the Hippocampus and Learning

By Mark A. Gluck and Catherine E. Myers

This book is in two parts. Part I (chapters 1 through 5) provides a tutorial introduction to selected topics in neuroscience, the psychology of learning and memory, and the theory of neural network models - all at the level of an advanced undergraduate textbook. Some of this will be too elementary for many readers and therefore can be skipped, while other chapters will provide background material essential for understanding the second half of the book. Together, these early chapters are designed to level the playing field so that the book is accessible to anyone in the behav-ioral and neural sciences.

Part II, the core of the book, presents the authors' current understanding of how the hippocampus cooperates with these other brain structures to support learn-ing and memory in both animals and humans. In trying to answer the ques-tion, "What does the hippocampus do?" researchers have been forced to look beyond the hippocampus to seek a better understanding of the hippocam-pus's many partners in learning and memory, including the entorhinal cortex, the basal forebrain, the cerebellum, and the primary sensory and motor cortices.

The emphasis throughout this book is on the function of brain structures as they give rise to behavior, rather than the molecular or neuronal details. Reflecting this functional approach to brain modeling, many of the models described have their roots in psychological theories and research. Appreciating these psychological roots is of more than just his-torical curiosity; rather, understanding how modern neural networks relate to well-studied models of learning in psychology provides us with an invaluable aid in understanding current efforts to develop models of the brain mechanisms of learning and memory.

In addition to covering their own theories and models in part II of the book, the authors review several related computational models, along with other qualita-tive and experimental studies of the neurobiology of learning and memory. In covering a range of models from a variety of researchers, they have tried to convey how it is possible for different models to capture different aspects of anatomy and physiology and different kinds of behaviors. In many cases, these models complement each other, the assumptions of one model being derived from the implications of another.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the authors' preface.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2001


Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience

By Randall C. O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata

This book represents an evolution from the earlier explorations represented by the "PDP books" (Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition by Rumelhart, McClelland, and the PDP Research Group, 1986, and the companion Handbook, Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing, by McClelland and Rumelhart, 1988). O'Reilly and Munakatt have built on a set of computational principles that arose from the effort to constrain the parallel distributed pro-cessing framework for modeling cognitive processes (MeClelland, 1993), and have instantiated them within an integrated computational framework incorporating additional principles associated with O'Reilly's Leabra algorithm. They have taken the computational and psy-chological abstraction characteristic of the PDP work, while moving many of the properties of the framework closer to aspects of the underlying neural implementa-tion. They have employed a powerful set of software tools, including a sophisticated graphical user interface and a full-featured scripting language to create an im-pressive, state-of-the art simulation tool. They have ex-ploited the combined use of expository text and hands-on simulation exercises to illustrate the basic properties of processing, representation, and learning in networks, and they have used their integrated framework to implement close analogs of a number of the examples that were developed in the earlier PDP work to illustrate key aspects of the emergent behavior or neural networks. They have gone on to show how these models can be ap-plied in a number of domains of cognitive neuroscience to offer alternatives to traditional approaches to a num-ber of central issues. Overall this book represents an impressive effort to construct a framework for the fur-ther exploration of the principles and their implications for cognitive neuroscience.

It is important, however, to be aware that the compu-tational exploration of issues in cognitive neuroscience is still very much in its infancy. There is a great deal that remains to be discovered about learning, processing, and representation in the brain, and about how cognition emerges from the underlying neural mechanisms. As with the earlier, PDP books, an important part of the legacy of this book is likely to be its influence on the next wave of researchers who will take the next steps in these explorations.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from a foreward written by James L. McClelland, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2000


Advances in Synaptic Plasticity

Edited by Michel Baudry, Joel L. Davis and Richard F. Thompson

Many neurons exhibit plasticity; that is, they can change structurally or funtionally, often in a lasting way. Plasticity is evident in such diverse phenomena as learning and memory, brain development, drug tolerance, sprouting of axon terminals after a brain lesion, and various cellular forms of activity-dependent synaptic plasticity such as long-term potentiation and long-term depression. This book is a follow-up to the editors' Synaptic Plasticity (MIT Press, 1993) and resulted from the Second International Symposium on Synaptic Plasticity and thus reports on the most recent trends in the field. The levels of analysis range from molecular to cellular and network, the unifying theme being the nature of the relationships between synaptic plasticity and information processing and storage. The book covers most of the important issues and approaches currently under investigation in many laboratories.

(Preceding adapted by the Editor of Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology from the publisher's notes and the editors' preface.)

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2000


Copyright © 1996-2000. The MIT Press . All rights reserved. ISSN 1526-8748