Customer Reviews

Findings and Current Opinion in Cognitive Neuroscience

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This book was published in 1998, but much of the current opinion it presents dates from the early 1990s. This was a seminal period, but it has taken us some time since to see what was really important at the time. For example, the remarkable paper whose title begins with the stopping phrase, "The highly irregular firing of cortical cells ..." is referenced deep in the middle of this book, on page 191. The phrase is a lift from the title of the 1993 paper by Softky and Koch, in which the textbook "integrate and fire" model was judged to be incorrect. We can now, seven years later, guess that their specific finding of highly irregular spike trains was probably one of those famous threads that, once pulled, unravels the suit.

Also in the early 90s, studies of the quick decisions made by fast flying bats and bugs showed that these animals suddenly swerve away from an obstruction based on the information contained, somehow, in a single nerve impulse. From both lines of research, it would seem the classical assumption by Adrian in 1926, that the nerve always encodes information as a function of the interval between spikes, has gone straight up the chimney. Much of what we thought we knew about the nerve and the synapse, as machines, was grounded on Adrian's assumption. And so now what?

There is a lot of re-thinking in progress, but you will only begin to get a glimmer of the controversy it in this thick book. It is, however, a strong book on subject of recognizing the several different types of memory, and includes a fascinating essay about memory in birds. But for currency, start somewhere else: e.g., Spikes, by Rieke et al, which is now in paperback.