With an ever increasing population of aging people in the western world, it is more crucial than ever that we try to understand how and why cognitive competence breaks down with advancing age. Why do some people follow normal patterns of cognitive change, while others follow a path of progressive decline, becoming stricken with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alheimer's. What can be done to prevent cognitive decline-or to avoid neurodegenerative diseases? The answers, if they come, will not emerge from research within one discipline, but from work being done across a range of scientific and medical specialities.
This volume brings together leading experts from a range of fields studying cognitive aging, including neuroscience, pharmacology, health, genetics, sensory biology, and epidemiology. Unlike other books in this area, this book is more about "new frontiers" than past research and accomplishments. Recently cognitive aging research has taken several new directions, linking with, and benefiting from, rapid technological and theoretical advances in these neighboring disciplines. This book provides unique interdisciplinary coverage of the topic. With each chapter including commentaries from other specialists in related fields, the book provides integrative study of the topic. For those within the fields of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and geriatrics, this volume will make an important contribution in furthering our understanding of a problem that affects all of us.

The Shepherd is based on the biblical story of David who, although he lived over three thousand years ago, his songs (psalms) are still sung and his insights into the relationship between the God he passionately believed in and his creation, were written long before our responsibility for each other and for the world around us became recognised as essential for our continued existence. Nothing in this book is contrary to the main facts of that account, but I have attempted to fill in much that was left out and make connections not obvious in the original in an attempt to paint a fuller account of one of the most extraordinary men of all time with all his strengths and weaknesses. Both hero and the king against whom all who followed him were measured, he was also a man who, although he ruled justly when he finally succeeded Saul his predecessor, who hunted him for years before dying fighting the Philistine invaders, was capable of violence, destroying his enemies with cunning as well as courage and even resorting to murder to get what he wanted. So, both saint and sinner, I hope this may help to see him more clearly.