Neural Organization: BBS call for Multiple Review
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Wed Jul 14 13:24:52 EDT 1999
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 at 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 at 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 at 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
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*** 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
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(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.
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(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/
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(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 at 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
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(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!).
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