This booklet, together with the following two, -which are well under way and will succeed it at intervals of, we hope, no more than six months, sets the stage for a new editorial enterprise in the field of brain science. The accent is on the functional aspects of brains rather than on their develop ment, hence the title of the series. The central question being how neural activity is related to behavior, there will be, naturally, a wide scatter of sub jects, and Heiligenberg's monograph on electric fish may be considered typ ical of the expected standard deviation from the mean. Deviations in other directions may go as far as the sensory neuron, or brain theory, or aphasia, or farther. The next contributions planned for the series are: Precht, Neuronal Operations in the Vestibular System, and Movshon, Genes and Environment in the Development of the Visual Cortex. Our aim is to ap proach the central area by means of something like an evolving handbook of brain science. The individual monographs should describe promising and successful approaches, even in areas where the last word is far from being said. Besides originaI monographs and compounds of the author's own published papers, reviews are also we1come if they are more than the sum of the parts. The publisher promises speedy publication, and the editors will see that the manuscripts will be readable as well as interesting. Tubingen, Summer 1977 V."

Heiligenberg's pioneering research describes the behavior of one species, the jamming avoidance response in the electric fish Eigenmannia, providing a rich mine of data that documents the first vertebrate example of the workings of the entire behavioral system from sensory input to motor output. Neural Nets in Electric Fish presents the principles and detailed results that have emerged from this exciting program.Heiligenberg's introduction familiarizes the reader with the unusual sensory modality electroreception, demonstrating the rationale and the motive behind the research. The text, which includes many helpful new pedagogical graphs, takes up the behavioral work done in the early 1980s, from explorations of peripheral receptors, the hindbrain, the midbrain, and finally diencephalon, to the most recent studies of motor output.Neural Nets in Electric Fish clearly describes Heiligenberg's analysis of the complex nature of the electrical stimulus delivered to Eigenmannia during jamming avoidance, and explains the novel two-parameter notation he uses to represent the different stages in information processing, giving many examples of the notation's power. The book relates all known behavioral phenomena of the jamming avoidance response to specific properties of the underlying neural network organization and draws interesting parallels between the electric sense and other sensory processing systems, such as the barn owl's sound localization system, motion detection systems in vision, and bat echolocation.Walter F. Heiligenberg is Professor of Behavioral Physiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.