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Obesity is one of the prime contributors to ill health in modern society, affecting around 20–25% of the population. It can cause or exacerbate a variety of health problems and is often associated with several other diseases including type II diabetes, coronary heart disease and certain types of cancer. Significant progress has been made in understanding the role of the nervous system and, in particular, the complex interplay between a range of orexigenic and anorectic agents within specific hypothalamic nuclei in the regulation of energy balance, appetite and adiposity. Several different neuronal pathways, neurotransmitters and hormones have been identified as major players in the regulation of feeding behavior and body weight and these are now being targeted as having therapeutic potential. Written for academic researchers and graduate students, Neurobiology of Obesity is a concise overview of recent developments in this field, written by leading international experts.
The purpose of this 2006 book is to present non-invasive methods of measuring the biological responses to psychosocial stress in humans, in non-laboratory (field) settings. Following the pathways of Seyle's General Adaptation Syndrome, the text first describes how to assess the psychosocial stressors of everyday life and then outlines how to measure the psychological, behavioral, neurohumeral, physiological and immunological responses to them. The book concludes with practical information on assessing special populations, analyzing the often-complicated data that are collected in field stress studies and the ethical treatment of human subjects in stress studies. It is intended to be a practical guide for developing and conducting psychophysiological stress research in human biology. This book will assist students and professionals in designing field studies of stress.
Mirror neurons may hold the brain's key to social interaction - each coding not only a particular action or emotion but also the recognition of that action or emotion in others. The Mirror System Hypothesis adds an evolutionary arrow to the story - from the mirror system for hand actions, shared with monkeys and chimpanzees, to the uniquely human mirror system for language. In this accessible volume, experts from child development, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, primatology and robotics present and analyse the mirror system and show how studies of action and language can illuminate each other. Topics discussed in the fifteen chapters include: what do chimpanzees and humans have in common? Does the human capability for language rest on brain mechanisms shared with other animals? How do human infants acquire language? What can be learned from imaging the human brain? How are sign- and spoken-language related? Will robots learn to act and speak like humans?
'I had the good fortune to behold for the first time that fantastic ending of the growing axon. In my sections of the spinal cord of the three day chick embryo, this ending appeared as a concentration of protoplasm of conical form, endowed with amoeboid movements. It could be compared with a living battering ram, soft and flexible, which advances, pushing aside mechanically the obstacles which it finds in its path, until it reaches the region of its peripheral termination. This curious terminal club, I christened the growth cone.' (Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Recollections of My Life, 1937). In Neuronal Growth Cones, Phillip Gordon-Weeks presents the molecular biology of the behavior of growth cones. The book covers the basic morphology and behavior of growth cones, motility and neurite extension via the growth cone cytoskeleton, pathfinding, intracellular signalling, and synaptogenesis. It is the first detailed, critical analysis of all aspects of growth cone biology.