"The Biological and Social Determinants of Child Development" stimulates cross-disciplinary communication and research collaboration in the field of child development. While the papers in this issue seem diverse in terms of topic and discipline, there are a number of common themes:
*critical period for brain development and the importance of specific environmental input during this period;
*importance of early brain development and enriched environments is supported in articles describing findings from human studies;
*potential for brain plasticity following specialized retraining is found in a compelling paper demonstrating different profiles of brain activation for normal readers vs. those who have dyslexia and younger children at high risk for development of reading disabilities; and
*critical period, brain plasticity, and parallel changes in developing behavior and brain structure and functioning.
As a number of papers in this issue describe potential interventions, one is relevant because it describes the numerous factors that make results of such studies have the potential to generalize to larger populations. Putting the described papers in a broad perspective, the last article argues that we cannot understand the health status of a society without understanding the health-determining influences across the life course.

The World In Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience represents a bold assault on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness and the human mind. Rather than examining the brain and nervous system to see what they tell us about the mind, this book begins with an examination of conscious experience to see what it can tell us about the brain. Through this analysis, the first and most obvious observation is that consciousness appears as a volumetric spatial void, containing colored objects and surfaces. This reveals that the representation in the brain takes the form of an explicit volumetric spatial model of external reality. Therefore, the world we see around us is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an internal representation. In fact, the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations clearly demonstrate the capacity of the brain to construct complete virtual worlds even in the absence of sensory input. Perception is somewhat like a guided hallucination, based on sensory stimulation. This insight allows us to examine the world of visual experience not as scientists exploring the external world, but as perceptual scientists examining a rich and complex internal representation. This unique approach to investigating mental function has implications in a wide variety of related fields, including the nature of language and abstract thought, and motor control and behavior. It also has implications to the world of music, art, and dance, showing how the patterns of regularity and periodicity in space and time--apparent in those aesthetic domains--reflect the periodic basis set of the underlying harmonic resonance representation in the brain.

"The World In Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience" represents a bold assault on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness and the human mind.
Rather than examining the brain and nervous system to see what they tell us about the mind, this book begins with an examination of conscious experience to see what it can tell us about the brain.
Through this analysis, the first and most obvious observation is that consciousness appears as a volumetric spatial void, containing colored objects and surfaces. This reveals that the representation in the brain takes the form of an explicit volumetric spatial model of external reality. Therefore, the world we see around us is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an internal representation. In fact, the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations clearly demonstrate the capacity of the brain to construct complete virtual worlds even in the absence of sensory input. Perception is somewhat like a guided hallucination, based on sensory stimulation.
This insight allows us to examine the world of visual experience not as scientists exploring the external world, but as perceptual scientists examining a rich and complex internal representation. This unique approach to investigating mental function has implications in a wide variety of related fields, including the nature of language and abstract thought, and motor control and behavior. It also has implications to the world of music, art, and dance, showing how the patterns of regularity and periodicity in space and time--apparent in those aesthetic domains--reflect the periodic basis set of the underlying harmonic resonance representation in the brain.