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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Neurosciences
'Motor Cognition' describes the field of motor cognition - one to which the author's contribution has been seminal. The book examines how the motor actions we perform and watch others perform play a pivotal role in the construction of the 'self' - our ability to acknowledge and recognise our own identity.
Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Transcendence conveys the manner by which selflessness serves as a neuropsychological and religious foundation for spiritually transcendent experiences. The book combines neurological case studies and neuroscience research with religious accounts of transcendence experiences from the perspective of both the neurosciences and the history of religions. Chapters cover the subjective experience of transcendence, an historical summary of different philosophical and religious perspectives, a review of the neuroscience research that describes the manner by which the brain processes and creates a self, and more. The book presents a model that bridges the divide between neuroscience and religion, presenting a resource that will be critical reading for advanced students and researchers in both fields.
This book offers a state-of-the-art report on recent discoveries concerning the basic and clinical, neuroscientific and psychiatric findings in depression research. Depressive disorder is a severe and recurrent brain disorder that can manifest in depressive mood, somatic symptoms and cognitive impairment. The underlying mechanisms of depressive disorder and its clinical practice are subjects of long-standing interests. This book is a biologically plausible and multilevel theory which describes neural, physiological, molecular and genomic mechanisms that drive depression pathogenesis, as well as navigates the clinical practice and management for depressive disorder. It mainly describes advances made over the past 20 years on the neural, molecular, neuroimaging, physiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology and internet-based measurement and management of depressive disorder. It will help postgraduate students and academic researchers to get either basic or clinical picture of depressive disorder. Also, it may benefit pharmaceutical companies for developing novel drugs to treat this disease.
It has become evident over the last years that abnormalities in RNA processing play a fundamental part in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases. Cellular viability depends on proper regulation of RNA metabolism and subsequent protein synthesis, which requires the interplay of many processes including transcription, pre---mRNA splicing, mRNA editing as well as mRNA stability, transport and translation. Dysfunction in any of these processes, often caused by mutations in the coding and non--- coding RNAs, can be very destructive to the cellular environment and consequently impair neural viability. The result of this RNA toxicity can lead to a toxic gain of function or a loss of function, depending on the nature of the mutation. For example, in repeat expansion disorders, such as the newly discovered hexanucleotide repeat expansion in theC9orf72 gene found in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a toxic gain of function leads to the formation of RNA foci and the sequestration of RNA binding proteins (RBPs). This in return leads to a loss of function of those RBPs, which is hypothesized to play a significant part in the disease progression of ALS and FTD. Other toxicities arising from repeat expansions are the formation of RNA foci, bi---directional transcription and production of repeat associated non---ATG (RAN) translation products. This book will touch upon most of these disease mechanisms triggered by aberrant RNA metabolism and will therefore provide a broad perspective of the role of RNA processing and its dysfunction in a variety of neurodegenerative disorders, including ALS, FTD, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, spinal muscular atrophy, myotonic dystrophy and ataxias. The proposed authors are leading scientists in the field and are expected to not only discuss their own work, but to be inclusive of historic as well as late breaking discoveries. The compiled chapters will therefore provide a unique collection of novel studies and hypotheses aimed to describe the consequences of altered RNA processing events and its newest molecular players and pathways.
Handbook of the Behavioral Neurobiology of Serotonin, Second Edition, builds on the success of the first edition by continuing to provide a detailed and comprehensive overview of the many facets of behavioral serotonin research. The text expands on the two key topics, behavioral control (sensory processing, ultrasonic vocalization, and melatonin and sleep control) and psychiatric disorders, including its role on psychostimulant abuse and addiction. The new edition includes two new sections on the serotonin systems interactions and the involvement of serotonin in neurological disorders and associated treatment. Serotonin is a major neurotransmitters in the serotonergic system which one of the best studied and understood transmitter systems. Both are critically involved in the organization of all behaviors and in the regulation of emotion and mood.
Sex matters! Are there differences between the sexes when it comes to brain function and the behaviours that result? This volume attempts to answer this fundamental question. If the answer is 'yes' then this should impact upon our approach to treating mental illness in humans, and to modelling it in animals, as we look for aetiological and pharmacological solutions.
Evidence-Informed Approaches for Managing Dementia Transitions provides evidence-informed approaches and future directions for supporting a higher quality of life for people living with dementia. Through a person-centered lens, this book equips care providers to better help people living with dementia align their expectations and hopes with the trajectories they can expect in their journey. It highlights the various transitions that those with dementia will experience and describes best practices for optimal adjustment to each. Topics covered include problem identification, driving cessation, loss of financial autonomy, acute hospital admission, moving to assisted living residences and long term care homes, and palliative and end of life care. This is a must have reference for researchers, clinicians, and mental health professionals (psychologists, counsellors, social workers, mental health nurses) as well as policy makers and other health and social care providers working with individuals with dementia.
This detailed book examines the main methods to study mammalian monoamine oxidases (MAOs), ranging from cell biology to computational chemistry. Beginning with techniques on how to obtain pure samples of MAO A and MAO B, the volume continues by covering assays and techniques used to measure MAO enzymatic activity and perform inhibition studies, methods to address cellular localization and function of MAOs, either in cell lines or in animal models, as well as computational methods applied to rational drug design approaches that are used to develop new MAO inhibitors. Written for the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step and readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and practical, Monoamine Oxidase: Methods and Protocols serves as a vital resource for scientists who are interested in studying MAOs and other similar amine oxidase enzymes.
The motor actions that can be witnessed as a virtuoso musician performs can be so fast, so accomplished, so precise, as to seem somehow superhuman. The musician has to produce the movements, monitor those they have already made and the subsequent result, co-ordinate their hands, fingers, eyes, and perhaps throat and diaphragm. These achievements are of course the product of hundreds, even thousands of hours of practice-playing scales, studies, time and time again. But those hours of practice by no means guarantee that great musicianship will result. This technical prowess has to be combined with a range of other, perhaps, less tangible qualities. This book explores the secrets of musical virtuosity. It presents a comprehensive account of music and motor cognition, examining the neural basis of music making - our understanding of which is just starting to be enhanced by brain imaging. It considers the effect on our brains of prolonged music making. It explores the motor processes across a range of instruments (vocal, string, wind, percussion) and within different performance situations. It also considers what happens when things start to go wrong - why motor problems occur in so many professional musicians in later life, and the possible therapies for such problems. Music is a topic of considerable interest within the brain sciences. With contributions from leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and neurologists, this book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of music and the brain.
This book summarizes early pioneering achievements in the field of human neural stem cell (hNSC) research and combines them with the latest advances in stem cell technology, including reprogramming and gene editing. The powerful potential of hNSC to generate and repair the developing and adult CNS has been confirmed by numerous experimental in vitro and in vivo studies. The book presents methods for hNSC derivation and discusses the mechanisms underlying NSC in vitro fate decisions and their in vivo therapeutic mode of action. The long-standing dogma that the human central nervous system (CNS) lacks the ability to regenerate was refuted at the end of the 20th century, when evidence of the presence of neurogenic zones in the adult human brain was found. These neurogenic zones are home to human neural stem cells (hNSCs), which are capable of self-renewing and differentiating into neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. NSCs isolated from human CNS have a number of clinical advantages, especially the innate potential to differentiate into functional neural cells. Nevertheless, their full clinical exploitation has been hindered by limited access to the tissue and low expansion potential. The search for an alternative to CNS sources of autologous, therapeutically competent hNSCs was the driving force for the many studies proving the in vitro plasticity of different somatic stem cells to generate NSCs and their functional progeny. Now the era of induced pluripotent stem cells has opened entirely new opportunities to achieve research and therapeutic goals with the aid of hNSCs.
From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributesto our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.
This volume discusses the latest experimental and clinical approaches to study seizures and epilepsy. Chapters in this book cover detailed protocols for ex vivo and in vitro experimental models and widely-used in vivo (acute and chronic seizure) models in epilepsy research. Chapters also cover techniques to screen the effective leads for the treatment of refractory seizures of pharmacoresistant epilepsy and invertebrate, non-mammalian models. In the Neuromethods series style, chapters include the kind of detail and key advice from the specialists needed to get successful results in your laboratory. Cutting-edge and practical, Experimental and Translational Methods to Screen Drugs Effective Against Seizures and Epilepsy is a valuable resource for researchers, in both industry and academia, interested in learning about this important and developing field.
Broca's region has been in the news ever since scientists realized
that particular cognitive functions could be localized to parts of
the cerebral cortex. Its discoverer, Paul Broca, was one of the
first researchers to argue for a direct connection between a
concrete behavior--in this case, the use of language--and a
specific cortical region. Today, Broca's region is perhaps the most
famous part of the human brain, and for over a century, has
persisted as the focus of intense research and numerous debates.
The name has even penetrated mainstream culture through popular
science and the theater. Broca's region is famous for a good
reason: As language is one of the most distinctive human traits,
the cognitive mechanisms that support it and the tissues in which
these mechanisms are housed are also quite complex, and so have the
potential to reveal a lot not only about how words, phrases,
sentences, and grammatical rules are instantiated in neural tissue,
but also, and more broadly, about how brain function relates to
behavior. Paul Broca's discoveries were an important, driving force
behind the more general effort to relate complex behavior to
particular parts of the cerebral cortex, which, significantly,
produced the first brain maps.
This book presents interdisciplinary research that pursues the mutual enrichment of neuroscience and robotics. Building on experimental work, and on the wealth of literature regarding the two cortical pathways of visual processing - the dorsal and ventral streams - we define and implement, computationally and on a real robot, a functional model of the brain areas involved in vision-based grasping actions. Grasping in robotics is largely an unsolved problem, and we show how the bio-inspired approach is successful in dealing with some fundamental issues of the task. Our robotic system can safely perform grasping actions on different unmodeled objects, denoting especially reliable visual and visuomotor skills. The computational model and the robotic experiments help in validating theories on the mechanisms employed by the brain areas more directly involved in grasping actions. This book offers new insights and research hypotheses regarding such mechanisms, especially for what concerns the interaction between the dorsal and ventral streams. Moreover, it helps in establishing a common research framework for neuroscientists and roboticists regarding research on brain functions.
This unique volume is a comprehensive, well-illustrated study of the organization of the white matter pathways of the brain. Schmahmann and Pandya have analyzed and synthesized the corticocortical and corticosubcortical connections of the major areas of the cerebral cortex of the rhesus monkey. The result is a detailed understanding of the constituents of the cerebral white matter and the organization of the fiber tracts. The findings from the 36 cases studied are presented on a single template brain, facilitating comparison of the locations of the different fiber pathways. The summary diagrams provide a comprehensive atlas of the cerebral white matter. The text is enriched by close attention to functional aspects of the anatomical observations. The clinical relevance of the pathways is addressed throughout the text and a chapter is devoted to human white matter diseases. The introductory account gives a detailed historical background. Translations of seminal original observations by early investigators are presented, and when these are considered in the light of the authors' new observations, many longstanding conflicts and debates are resolved. This scholarly book is an important addition to systems and cognitive neuroscience that will be of lasting value to neurobiologists, anatomists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and to their students and trainees.
When we try to remember whether we left a window open or closed, do we actually see the window in our mind? If we do, does this mental image play a role in how we think? For almost a century, scientists have debated whether mental images play a functional role in cognition. In The Case for Mental Imagery, Stephen Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis present a complete and unified argument that mental images do depict information, and that these depictions do play a functional role in human cognition. They outline a specific theory of how depictive representations are used in information processing, and show how these representations arise from neural processes. To support this theory, they seamlessly weave together conceptual analyses and the many varied empirical findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In doing so, they present the conceptual grounds for positing this type of internal representation and summarize and refute arguments to the contrary. Their argument also serves as a historical review of the imagery debate from its earliest inception to its most recent phases, and provides ample evidence that significant progress has been made in our understanding of mental imagery. In illustrating how scientists think about one of the most difficult problems in psychology and neuroscience, this book goes beyond the debate to explore the nature of cognition and to draw out implications for the study of consciousness. Student and professional researchers in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience will find The Case for Mental Imagery to be an invaluable resource for understanding not only the imagery debate, but also and more broadly, thenature of thought, and how theory and research shape the evolution of scientific debates.
Mathematical Modelling in Motor Neuroscience: State of the Art and Translation to the Clinic, Gaze Orienting Mechanisms and Disease, Volume 249, the latest release in the Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on a variety of topics, including Sequential Bayesian updating, Maps and Sensorimotor Transformations for Eye-Head Gaze Shifts: Role of the Midbrain Superior Colliculus, Modeling Gaze Position-Dependent Opsoclonus, Eye Position-Dependent Opsoclonus in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Saccades in Parkinson's disease -- hypometric, slow, and maladaptive, Brainstem Neural Circuits for Fixation and Generation of Saccadic Eye Movements, and much more.
Evolution of the Human Brain: From Matter to Mind, Volume 250 in the Progress in Brain Research, series documents the latest developments and insights about the origin and evolution of the human brain and mind. Specific sections in this new release include Evolution and development of the human cerebral cortex, Functional connectivity of the human cerebral cortex, Lateralization of the human cerebral cortex, Life history strategies and the human cerebral cortex, Evolution of the modern human brain, On the nature and evolution of the human mind, Origin and evolution of human cognition, Origin and evolution of human consciousness, and more.
This volume presents a wide array of animal models that are used in the study of the individual and environmental factors involved in the development of addiction, the consequences of chronic drug exposure, and recently developed behavioral and biological procedures for the treatment of addictive disorders. The chapters in this book are organized into three sections that cover the aforementioned aspects in relation to different drugs of abuse and pathological gambling. The first section of the book focuses on the individual variables that affect vulnerability to addiction to nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, psychostimulants, and gambling. Section Two looks at the environmental variables that contribute to the vulnerability to addiction. Section Three explores the consequences of chronic drug consumption and new approaches to the treatment of addiction. In the Neuromethods series style, chapters include the kind of detail and key advice from the specialists needed to get successful results in your laboratory. Cutting-edge and comprehensive, Methods for Preclinical Research in Addiction is a valuable resource that helps researchers and scientists understand the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie the influence of individual and environmental variables on the risk for addiction, and assists them in developing new behavioral and pharmacological strategies to prevent and treat addictive disorders.
New developments in the basic and clinical neurosciences have lead to important advances in our understanding of the events that occur between conception and birth that can influence schizophrenia. At the other end of the life span, some of the most exciting developments in years have recently been coming out of comprehensive studies of post-mortem studies of patients with schizophrenia. In the clinical domain, studies of first episode patients with schizophrenia are proliferating, at the same time as many research groups are performing comprehensive studies of patients with schizophrenia who are in the eighth decade of life or even older. Thus, many of the exciting new developments in research on schizophrenia are at the ends of the life span, suggesting that a wide-ranging treatment of schizophrenia in this framework will be very well accepted. This volume is unique in adopting a lifespan approach to understanding schizophrenia. There are many aspects of schizophrenia that require research attention from a lifespan perspective. For example, there may be aspects of the behavior or biological functioning that are present before the illness that change an individual's risk for developing the illness. There may be environmental events that can cause schizophrenia in the absence of other predisposing factors. There may be genetic influences on the development of schizophrenia that are modified by environmental events, either psychological or physiological. Factors such as an individual's gender or intelligence may also influence schizophrenia, either in terms of changing the risk for development or changing aspects of the illness' presentation, such as onset age or overall functional outcome. With contributions from leading scientists in this field, and results from the frontiers of schizophrenia research, this volume is a major new addition to the psychiatry literature.
New developments in the basic and clinical neurosciences have lead to important advances in our understanding of the events that occur between conception and birth that can influence schizophrenia. At the other end of the life span, some of the most exciting developments in years have recently been coming out of comprehensive studies of post-mortem studies of patients with schizophrenia. In the clinical domain, studies of first episode patients with schizophrenia are proliferating, at the same time as many research groups are performing comprehensive studies of patients with schizophrenia who are in the eighth decade of life or even older. Thus, many of the exciting new developments in research on schizophrenia are at the ends of the life span, suggesting that a wide-ranging treatment of schizophrenia in this framework will be very well accepted. This volume is unique in adopting a lifespan approach to understanding schizophrenia. There are many aspects of schizophrenia that require research attention from a lifespan perspective. For example, there may be aspects of the behavior or biological functioning that are present before the illness that change an individual's risk for developing the illness. There may be environmental events that can cause schizophrenia in the absence of other predisposing factors. There may be genetic influences on the development of schizophrenia that are modified by environmental events, either psychological or physiological. Factors such as an individual's gender or intelligence may also influence schizophrenia, either in terms of changing the risk for development or changing aspects of the illness' presentation, such as onset age or overall functional outcome. With contributions from leading scientists in this field, and results from the frontiers of schizophrenia research, this volume is a major new addition to the psychiatry literature.
This volume connects current ideas and concepts about sleep functions and circadian rhythms with the search for novel target-selective sleep-wake therapeutics. To do so, it provides a timely, state-of-the-art overview of sleep-wake mechanisms in health and disease, ongoing developments in drug discovery, and their prospects for the clinical treatment of sleep-disordered patients. It particularly focuses on the concept that sleep and wakefulness mutually affect each other, and the future therapeutic interventions with either sleep- or wake-promoting agents that are expected to not only improve the quality of sleep but also the waking behavior, cognition, mood and other sleep-associated physiological functions. The chapter 'Sleep Physiology, Circadian Rhythms, Waking Performance and the Development of Sleep-Wake Therapeutics' available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
This book focuses on a central question in the field of complex systems: Given a fluctuating (in time or space), uni- or multi-variant sequentially measured set of experimental data (even noisy data), how should one analyse non-parametrically the data, assess underlying trends, uncover characteristics of the fluctuations (including diffusion and jump contributions), and construct a stochastic evolution equation? Here, the term "non-parametrically" exemplifies that all the functions and parameters of the constructed stochastic evolution equation can be determined directly from the measured data. The book provides an overview of methods that have been developed for the analysis of fluctuating time series and of spatially disordered structures. Thanks to its feasibility and simplicity, it has been successfully applied to fluctuating time series and spatially disordered structures of complex systems studied in scientific fields such as physics, astrophysics, meteorology, earth science, engineering, finance, medicine and the neurosciences, and has led to a number of important results. The book also includes the numerical and analytical approaches to the analyses of complex time series that are most common in the physical and natural sciences. Further, it is self-contained and readily accessible to students, scientists, and researchers who are familiar with traditional methods of mathematics, such as ordinary, and partial differential equations. The codes for analysing continuous time series are available in an R package developed by the research group Turbulence, Wind energy and Stochastic (TWiSt) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Joachim Peinke. This package makes it possible to extract the (stochastic) evolution equation underlying a set of data or measurements.
Recent advances in neuroscience have allowed researchers from various disciplines - developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and developmental psychopathology - to shed light on the neural systems involved in social engagement behaviours in both children and adults. The Development of Social Engagement presents the latest on the topic from each of these intersecting research areas. Developmental psychologists have long been interested in the constellation of behaviours that constitutes early social engagement in infants and young children. Renewed interest in this topic has been sparked by research applying new and innovative techniques to long-standing questions about the development of face processing, joint attention, language, and early social cognition. These developments have been mirrored by the growth of comparative work concerning the neurobiological correlates and determinants of social engagement behaviours across a range of non-human species. The chapters in this volume bring together work on all of these topics, including questions related to social systems, play, maternal behaviour, and evolutionary concerns. The volume also covers the recent application of rigorous biologically focused research paradigms to the study of atypical social engagement in children, both in terms of disorders such as autism and Williams Syndrome, and in terms of the effects of adverse early rearing environments (e.g., institutionalism). This book presents some of the latest research on social-engagement processes across a variety of disciplines that cover a range of life stages and species. It will provide both student and professional researchers with a taste of current research directions in this rapidly expanding field.
The human body has long inspired artists, philosophers, musicians,
and writers. Researchers in the psychological sciences, however,
have only relatively recently begun to acknowledge the role the
body plays in perception and cognition. With the general notion of
cognition recently broadening to include its embodied nature,
researchers' accounts of perception have increasingly come to
include the body's special status as a window on the world and to
accommodate the specific perceptual requirements for identifying,
interpreting, and interacting with other bodies. |
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