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
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
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