I approached this book as a dachshund lover, and found much, much more. By the time I left the last page, I knew intimately the life of a person with epilepsy and the near-miracle of a small dog who is the key to a new and more confident life for his owner. A true story of struggle against adversity and passion for the advancement of a good cause -- assistance dogs. You'll want to fly to Los Angeles to see this wonderful dog for yourself.

An amazing, heartfelt and honest description of the level of affection and mutual trust possible between man and dog...

Through Alex, Davis opens our eyes to the untapped potentials of assistance dogs and the sense of freedom and happiness they provide, and educates us about the urgent need for tolerance of these day-to-day canine partners.

This is a man's-best-friend story, in the true sense.

Assistance dogs enable their human partners to have confidence, independence, and the ability to continue their lives in any way they choose. These canine bravehearts provide eyes, ears, alarms and strength, all while giving their partners the love, loyalty, and devotion of 24-hour companionship. Joel Davis shows us size doesn't matter and that his relationship with Alex, his seizure-alert dog, is special.

This is a great book and has changed my life you should try it.

It is shown how the synaptic connections of the piriform cortex are analogous to the input and recurrent connections of classical autoassociative memory. Processing units are the pyramidal cells in piriform cortical layers II and III. The dendrites of these pyramidal cells extend into piriform layer I. Piriform layer Ia (lateral olfactory tract, LOT, input from the olfactory bulb) synapsing with the pyramidal dendrites, represent the input connections to the autoassociative memory. Recurrent excitatory axons from the pyramidal cells projecting to piriform layer Ib and synapsing with the dendrites of multiple pyramidal cells, represents the recurrent connections of the autoassociative memory.

A particularly glaring error fabricates a civil war between Mary I and Elizabeth I after the death of Edward VI. There was no such civil war. The successions of Mary I and Elizabeth I were peaceful with the exception of the uprising in favor of Lady Jane Grey, which was put down by Mary, and though carried out by Protestants completely disowned by Elizabeth, as a basic survival measure.

Joel Davis' "Mother Tongue" is an excellent overview of language development in people and in cultures. I would recommend this book to anyone with a casual interest in linguistics, in spite of rumoured "historical errors". (As a matter of fact I gave it to my son as a source for his homeschooling work.)

Davis is an excellent writer who's friendly, informative approach makes the complexity of his topic fascinating rather than the more usual dense tangle of language most science writers bring to their topics.

I finished this 333 page book in less than a week and couldn't put it down!

There are so many egregious historical errors that they undermine one's confidence in the linguistic material. Examples: It is stated that after an initial defeat at Stamford Bridge, William of Normandy defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold II at Hastings. Now, Stamford Bridge was a victory for Harold II indeed, but not a defeat for William who was not even involved. There were multiple individual invasions and Harold II's opponent was King Harold III (Hardrada) of Norway who was allied with Earl Tostig, Harald's own traitorous brother. Nor was Harald II the son of Edward the Confessor as is stated. Edward had no issue, which is one reason it was open season on the English crown. Harold II is known to history as Harald Godwinsen, being the son of the Earl Godwin. Other more minor errors: There is a reference to Charles V of Spain, which confuses 2 of the many titles of this monarch, who as Holy Roman Emperor was Charles V, but as King of Spain Charles I. Also, the Spanish Academy could not have been founded in 1713 by Philip IV, since that monarch was long dead. One presumes the Bourbon Philip V was meant. One hopes the reporting of the linguistic material is more careful than the historical. If not ...

Aimed principally at the student and researcher working in cognitive neuroscience, this book reports the findings of the "Visual attention and cortical circuits" workshop held on Catalina Island, USA, in 1999. Its primary focus was to bring together a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to inform a better understanding of visual attention processing in the cerebral cortex. Some fourteen contributions are collected here, addessing the long standing implications of dorsal versus ventral stream visual processing, and, of more recent interest, the functional significance of the (often reciprocal) connections now known to exist between temporal, parietal and frontal cortical neurones. Appropriately illustrated throughout with task paradigms and experimental data presentations, it is perhaps surprising that this volume contains only one putative cortical circuit diagram [Tsotsos et al.] in an attempt to show the ways in which variously proposed cortical areas might be critically connected in support of their role in visual attention and/or its modulation.

Although it has been clear since the demonstration of Yarbus (1967) that we employ quite different brain circuitry when ?looking for?, as opposed to ?looking at? something in our visual field, I have never felt that the physiological significance of this observation has really been considered prior to single-cell recording from the awake, behaving monkey. At least nine of the contributions to this volume (both imagers and electrophysiologists, from human and monkey labs) explicitly argue for the existence of top-down, context-dependant, task effects of attention. One way or another, this amounts to claiming that at least some ?late? (typically frontal cortex) visual processing activity can be shown to be affecting the response properties of ?early? visual processing neurons, including primary visual cortex (V1), V2-V4, and extrastriate areas MT & MST. One clearly emerging story to be taken away from this book, is that traditional claims for the visuomotor system operating largely via unidirectional, monolithic ?Retina > RGN > V1 > V2... > frontal cortex? pathway models must be discarded. Recurrent, massively parallel cortical circuits are the order of the day here.

Throughout its middle six chapters, the results of visual attention experiments using monkey single-cell recording is variously interpreted as providing evidence for the biasing of response competition amongst early visual input neurons [Duncan; Reynolds & Desimone], their possible gating [Heeger et al; Tsotsos et al] and other modulations of their activity [Ito et al; Maunsell & MacAdams]. Several authors have now expressed support for Schall?s notion of the frontal eye-field area potentially serving as a task-based "saliency map" for the purpose of supporting both the selection and preparation of visually-guided action [Thompson et al] and a similar model is proposed to underlay visually-guided search [Sperling et al]. Others rightly encourage our caution lest we forget the necessarily constraining architectures of bottom-up processing, upon top-down operating pathways [Braun et al; Pouget et al].

The problem space for attentional research has always been one largely concerned with determining how the cortex selects and locates targets from a potentially infinite candidate array of such targets for focused consideration. Furthermore, attention experiments must be conducted in the face of limited processing capacity and with reference to one?s ontogenetic life-history of experience and learning with any number and variety of tasks. There are no surprises amongst the results presented in this book emerging from the studies of (visual) attention as reported, but it does provide for a useful review as to some of the current thinking ?outside the box? of the old monolithic pathways. However, and more importantly, it also warns that we must continue to explore the neural bases of behaviour bearing in mind that the subject?s task understanding, and the context(s) in which their tasks are presented, will necessarily affect the very cortical circuitries we are attempting to characterise. Fortunately, this holds true as much for the researcher?s brains, as it does for the brains of their research subjects, and for the fine details and anatomy of the neural circuits themselves, we must be content to await the reports of future workshops.

Attention is a hot topic in the cognitive neurosciences, and although there are many other much more comprehensive collections (The Attentive Brain), this book adequately illustrates the level of specificity aquired in the field of the neural bases of attention. The topic concentrates on visual attention, for the now commonlly expressed reason that the primate visual sistem is the best understood neural sistem in perception. This makes the probing of attention easier, for its effects on the visual sistem can be generalized to the mechanisms of attention in general.

The articles are all good, and many general issues arise. Attention depends on distribuited neural sistems, it can exert strong effects on the firings of neurons in many levels of the proccesing hierarchy, attention both increases firing of attended stimulus responsive neurons and decreases activity of the surround, or unattended receptive fields.
These general observations, among others, point towards where the researchers are starting to converge theoretically. Practically, however, one still finds the common inconsistencies. For example, in chapter 1 the author finds parietal activity in the selection of attention, but no frontal activity, while in chapter 4 the author finds frontal activity but no parietal activity. One could reconcile this observations by postulating that both parietal and frontal areas can select for attention (the view I prefer), but still these discrepancies say something about the field at large.

The papers deal with common issues from different prespectives, and use various methods. There are chapters on cognitive aspects, neural aspects, perceptual aspects, theorethical and even a computer neural network simulation. That one can find any agreement at all tells us that progress is being made.

The author sets out upon a great mission - to outline how scientific discovery has lead to a change in the public's perception of the world. However, the final product is left wanting. At times the examples used are obvious. At other times, the author does not explain the scientific innovation enough for even an experienced scientist. However, the conclusions drawn from the examples are accurate and well argued. Given the objective, I expected more than what was written.