Signal and Sense: Local and Global Order in Perceptual Maps

by Gerald M. Edelman (Editor)

Here is a complete investigation of the correlation between brain cell mapping and nerve impulses. This informative text concentrates on how the structure and function of the nervous system allows perceptual categorization and learning to occur. Incorporating the latest theoretical and experimental approaches, it examines recognition of biologically significant stimuli in the environment; biological constraints in the fundamental process of categorization and generalization; development of patterns of anatomical and functional connectivity within the nervous system; varieties, locations and uses of mapped representations in the nervous system; interactions between sensory systems, and between sensory systems and motor systems in the control of movement; brain mechanisms in language and much more.

Hardcover

First published October 22, 1990

About the author

Gerald Maurice Edelman (born July 1, 1929) is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system.[1] Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules.[2] In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind.