It used to be said that the human brain was impossible to study because it was encased in bone. Today we might say that it is encased in a wall or plethora of knowledge. The postwar information explosion concerning the CNS has no precedent in medical history. Symptomatic of this factual bombardment is the meteoric rise of the Society for Neuroscience to 5,600 members from the time of its inception in 1970. The phenomenon exists principally in North America, Europe, and Japan.
Conscious of this massive expansion of interest in neuroscience, the authors have set out to make the mammalian nervous system accessible to students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners insofar as its main characteristics are concerned. Seventy-five years ago, Sherrington could write his classic on The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. The present authors have written an integrative volume on man's knowledge of the CNS.
As a review volume,