Review
"This research is one of the cornerstones of modern neuroethology and systems and behavioral neuroscience. It is a major contribution to understanding the whole chain of events leading to behavior. Heiligenberg's approach has brought a degree of clarity to our understanding of information coding and processing by the nervous system that is rarely achieved in any scientific undertaking." --James A. Simmons, Professor of Biology and Psychology, Brown University
Product Description
Heiligenberg's research describes the behaviour of one species, the jamming avoidance response in the electric fish Eigenmannia, providing data that documents the first vertebrate example of the workings of the entire behavioural system from sensory input to motor output. "Neural Nets in Electric Fish" presents the principles and results that have emerged from this programme. Heiligenberg's introduction familiarizes the reader with the unusual sensory modality electroreception, demonstrating the rationale and the motive behind the research. The text, which includes many pedagogical graphs, takes up the behavioural work done in the early 1980s, from explorations of peripheral receptors, the hindbrain, the midbrain, and finally diencephalon, to the most recent studies of motor output. The book describes Heiligenberg's analysis of the complex nature of the electrical stimulus delivered to Eigenmannia during jamming avoidance, and explains the two-parameter notation he uses to represent the different stages in information processing, giving many examples of the notation's power. The book relates all known behavioural phenomena of the jamming avoidance response to specific properties of the underlying neural network organization and draws parallels between the electric sense and other sensory processing systems, such as the barn owl's sound localization system, motion detection systems in vision, and bat echolocation.
