There has been a great flowering of our knowledge about the physiology of nerve, muscle and sensory cells in recent decades. This book aims to help the reader to learn about the subject by giving an account of some of the experimental evidence on which this knowledge is based. It is intended primarily for use by students taking courses in physiology, neuroscience, cell biology or biophysics, but it should also prove useful to those beginning research and to scientists of related disciplines.

This fourth edition reflects the continuing emphasis on molecular mechanisms that has been such a feature of the biological sciences in recent years. Exciting new developments have continued to flow from the use of the patch clamp technique for examining the currents flowing through single membrane channels, and from the application of recombinant DNA methods for determining the structures of proteins. Hence the book has been extensively revised to take account of these and other advances, and there is much new material throughout. I have also extended the range of the book to cover a wider range of sensory cells and to consider the cellular basis of learning, and I have restructured some of the chapters to maintain a sensible arrangement of the material.

Learning about science is a complicated business. Students are expected to know the phenomena that occur in the natural world and understand the concepts which we use to explain them.