Neural Organization: BBS call for Multiple Review

Below is the abstract of the Precis of a book that will shortly be circulated for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS): *** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS policies and address change at the bottom of this message) *** PRECIS FOR Structure, Function, and Dynamics: An Integrated Approach to Neural Organization :BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW by Michael Arbib, Peter Erdi and John Szentagothai This book has been accepted for a muliple book review to be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. (All prior BBS referees, editors, authors, and commentators are also equivalent to Associates.) To be considered as a reviewer for this article, to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to, BEFORE August 13, 1999: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences ECS: New Zepler Building University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/ If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a reviewer. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. Please also specify 1) If you need the book 2) whether you can make it by the deadline of October 15, 1999. Please note that it is the book, not the Precis, that is to be reviewed. It would be helpful if you indicated in your reply whether you already have the book or would require a copy. _____________________________________________________________ PRECIS OF: Structure, Function, and Dynamics: An Integrated Approach to Neural Organization BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW Michael Arbib Director, USC Brain Project, University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520 USA. Arbib(a)pollux.usc.edu Peter Erdi Head, Dept. Biophysics KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences H-1525 Budapest, P.O. Box 49, Hungary. erdi(a)rmki.kfki.hu ABSTRACT: "Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics" (Arbib, Erdi, and Szentagothai, 1997, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; henceforth Organization) shows how theory and experiment can supplement each other in an integrated, evolving account of structure, function, and dynamics. New data lead to new models; new models suggest the design of new experiments. Much of modern neuroscience seems excessively reductionist, focusing on the study of ever smaller microsystems with little appreciation of their contribution to the behaving organism. We welcome these new data but are concerned to restore some equilibrium between systems, cellular, and molecular neuroscience. After a brief tribute to our late colleague John Szentagothai, we trace the threads of Structure, Function and Dynamics as they weave through the book, thus providing a broad general framework for the integration of computational and empirical neuroscience. Part II of Organization presents a structural analysis of various brain regions - olfactory bulb and cortex, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia - as prelude to our account of the dynamics of the neural circuits and function of each region. To exemplify this approach, this prcis analyzes the hippocampus in anatomical, dynamical, and functional terms. We conclude by pointing the way to the use of our methodology in the development of Cognitive Neuroscience. KEYWORDS: neural organization, dynamics, Szentgothai, computational neuroscience, neural modeling, modular architectonics, neural plasticity, hippocampus, rhythmogenesis, cognitive maps, memory. ____________________________________________________________ To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.arbib.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ *** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) There have been some very important developments in the area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently. Please see: Science: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html Nature: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html American Scientist: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone. --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically. Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive. Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the public BBS Archive: ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- (4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit papers to: Email: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/ INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).