Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 36: Cellular Analogues of Conditioning and Neural Plasticity is a collection of paper that details the various aspects of neural plasticity from various methodological perspectives. The title covers the physiological–morphological and biochemical methods in studying neural plasticity. The coverage of the text includes topics such as neuroplasticity in the superior cervical ganglion as a consequence of long-lasting inhibition; evidence for remodeling of synaptic contacts in muscles of adult frog; and calcium and presynaptic factors in synaptic plasticity. The selection also covers the regulation of acetylcholine receptors; molecular mechanisms of sensitization and desensitization of ß-receptors connected with adenylate cyclase; and cellular and behavioral studies of learning and memory in simpler systems. The book will be of great use to neurologists, neurosurgeons, and behavioral scientists.

Originally published in 1991, this title was the result of a symposium held at Harvard University. It presents some of the exciting interdisciplinary developments of the time that clarify how animals and people learn to behave adaptively in a rapidly changing environment. The contributors focus on aspects of how recognition learning, reinforcement learning, and motor learning interact to generate adaptive goal-oriented behaviours that can satisfy internal needs – an area of inquiry as important for understanding brain function as it is for designing new types of freely moving autonomous robots. Since the authors agree that a dynamic analysis of system interactions is needed to understand these challenging phenomena – and neural network models provide a natural framework for representing and analysing such interactions – all the articles either develop neural network models or provide biological constraints for guiding and testing their design.

Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 21: History of Physiology covers the proceedings of the symposia of the 28th Congress of Physiology. Comprised of nine chapters, the book reviews the history of physiological studies. The first chapter discusses the beginnings of the quantitative thinking in medicine, while the second chapter tackles the relation of clinical to non-clinical medicine according to Thomas Sydenham. The next chapter reviews the history of comparative physiology, and Chapter 4 discusses the historical development of cognitive psychophysiology. Chapter 5 deals with the study on the medical heritage of Avicenna, and Chapter 6 talks about studies on the anatomy and physiology of the pig fetus and placenta. The seventh chapter tackles physiological concepts in ancient and medieval India, while the eighth chapter discusses Jan Nepomuk Czermak in Hungary. The last chapter presents A Short Summation of Physiology, the first book of physiology in Hungarian. Readers who have an interest in the history of medical studies will find the book appealing, since it focuses on the historical aspect rather than the technical aspect.

Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 1: Regulatory Functions of the CNS: Principles of Motion and Organization covers the proceedings of the 28th International Congress of Physiological Sciences, held in Budapest in 1980. This text is comprised of six parts. Before presenting the six major topics, this book first explains the principles of neural organization and the perception and action. The first part studies the mechanisms of transmission in the monosynaptic reflex pathway in the spinal cord, while the second part looks into the neural mechanisms of voluntary movements and precentral motor area. Other parts of this book present papers on motor organization, eye movements, sleep, and unitary activity of the brain. This selection will be invaluable to physiologists, students of physiology, and others interested in studying the principles of motion and organization.

Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 32: Contributions to Thermal Physiology is a collection of papers that details the advances in the understanding of the thermal aspects of physiology. The first part of the title presents articles about central nervous control of body temperature, while the second part covers papers about fever. Next, the selection deals with brain cooling, along with thermoregulation and sleep. The fifth part covers phylogenic aspects of temperature regulation, while the sixth part tackles acclimation. Next, the selection talks about age-related difference in temperature regulation and the peripheral effector mechanisms. The text also covers the brown adipose tissue and the relevance of exercise in regulating body temperature. The book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of medicine and biology.

Advances in Physiological Sciences, Volume 19: Gravitational Physiology covers the proceedings of the 28th International Congress of Physiological Sciences. The volume presents studies that tackle the biological concerns caused by the interactions between complex living organisms and altered gravitational field. The articles in the text are organized into parts, based on their main theme. The first part presents materials about the general problems when adapting to altered gravity system, such as physiological mechanisms of adaptation of mammals to weightlessness, and studies of biorhythms in biosatellite experiments. In the next part, the selection presents papers about metabolism and morphology that include stress metabolic aspects in space flight and the effect of spaceflight on human lymphocyte activation. The text also covers the function and structure of gravity-dependent systems, along with hypokinesia and immobilization. The book will be of great interest to health professionals involved in various space programs.