Search results for ""author john e. dowling""
WW Norton & Co Understanding the Brain: From Cells to Behavior to Cognition
No reader curious about our “little grey cells” will want to pass up Harvard neuroscientist John E. Dowling’s brief introduction to the brain. In this up-to-date revision of his 1998 book Creating Mind, Dowling conveys the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience—examining the progress we’ve made in understanding how brains work and shedding light on discoveries to do with aging, mental illness and brain health. The first half of the book provides the nuts-and-bolts necessary for an up-to-date understanding of the brain. Covering the general organisation of the brain, early chapters explain how cells communicate with one another to enable us to experience the world. The rest of the book touches on higher-level concepts such as vision, perception, language, memory, emotion and consciousness. Beautifully illustrated and lucidly written, this introduction elegantly reveals the beauty of the organ that makes us uniquely human.
£20.99
WW Norton & Co Creating Mind: How the Brain Works
What makes us human and unique among all creatures is our brain. Consciousness, perception, emotion, memory, learning, language, and intelligence all originate in and depend on the brain. Over the past century, our understanding of the brain has raced forward to reveal many of the mechanisms by which the brain creates mind and consciousness. In this brief introduction to the brain, neuroscientist John Dowling conveys to the general reader the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience-the progress we are making in understanding how brains work and some of our strategies for studying brain function. Dowling often relates the exciting discoveries of neuroscience to specific examples of brain phenomena such as disease, mental illness, aging, or brain injury, demonstrating how these alterations in brain function cast light on normalcy and describing some of the therapies enabled by our understanding of the brain.
£22.99
Harvard University Press The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain, Revised Edition
John Dowling’s The Retina, published in 1987, quickly became the most widely recognized introduction to the structure and function of retinal cells. In this Revised Edition, Dowling draws on twenty-five years of new research to produce an interdisciplinary synthesis focused on how retinal function contributes to our understanding of brain mechanisms.The retina is a part of the brain pushed out into the eye during development. It retains many characteristics of other brain regions and hence has yielded significant insights on brain mechanisms. Visual processing begins there as a result of neuronal interactions in two synaptic layers that initiate an analysis of space, color, and movement. In humans, visual signals from 126 million photoreceptors funnel down to one million ganglion cells that convey at least a dozen representations of a visual scene to higher brain regions.The Revised Edition calls attention to general principles applicable to all vertebrate retinas, while showing how the visual needs of different animals are reflected in their retinal variations. It includes completely new chapters on color vision and retinal degenerations and genetics, as well as sections on retinal development and visual pigment biochemistry, and presents the latest knowledge and theories on how the retina is organized anatomically, physiologically, and pharmacologically.The clarity of writing and illustration that made The Retina a book of choice for a quarter century among graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, vision researchers, and teachers of upper-level courses on vision is retained in Dowling’s new easy-to-read Revised Edition.
£89.96
