Topics in Integrative Neuroscience: From Cells to Cognition (2008), edited by James Pomerantz, Professor of Neurosciences at Rice University, seeks to provide the reader with a sample of the “sweep of discoveries and advances” that have emerged in neuroscience research during the 1990s ‘Decade of the Brain.’ He comments that it is “impossible to capture fully the sweep of discoveries and advances that emerged from that decade within a single volume.” The goal of this text is to provide a sample of the best of neuroscience work in areas that represent great challenges to our understanding of brain and behavior. Pomerantz specifically identified four areas of importance and invited advanced researchers in each area to contribute chapters in thematically organized sections. The four sections or categories represented in this text are, higher order perception, language, memory systems, and sensory processes.

If there is an overriding theme to this text, it may be best summarized by Squire and Stark, who comment in the introduction to Chapter 9 (‘Memory Systems’): “For all its diversity, one can view neuroscience as being concerned with two central issues – the hard wiring of the brain and the brain’s capacity for plasticity.” Within each of the four sections individual chapters focus on anatomical systems and plasticity to varying degrees

Part I contains three chapters focusing on ‘Higher Order Perception.’ Posner and Fan propose that attention can be viewed as an organ system. The basis of this assertion is that there is a distributed system of neural regions which are consistently associated with attention, and that this system shows developmental progression during childhood, including in the emergence of executive self-regulation. The authors review evidence of genetic and environmental processes that shape the development of the attention organ system. The second chapter in this section, by Gilbert, examines a “continuum of experience-dependent cortical plasticity beginning early in postnatal life and continuing through adulthood.” He gives a very interesting review leading to the conclusion that neural responses to a particular shape in the environment will likely be unique to each individual based on experience and other factors. Kastner, DeWeerd, and Ungerleider follow with a chapter reviewing neural mechanisms involved in selective attention, with emphasis on both bottom-up and top-down processes.

Part II focuses on research on brain systems important for language functioning. In the section introduction, Helen Neville points out that while animal models have been very powerful in furthering understanding of other cognitive processes, this is not true in the area of language functioning. Alternatively, studies of humans with specific lesions have contributed to more advanced models for language relative to other areas of cognition. In the first chapter of the section, Sanders, Weber-Fox, and Neville provide an intriguing review of developmental plasticity in language systems in congenitally deaf adults and hearing adults who learn a second language. Poeppel and Hackl follow with a review of research on the linguistic and neural bases of speech perception. Patterson et al. follow with a clinically-oriented chapter reviewing the breakdown of language systems in semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia. In the final section chapter, Mehler, Nespor, and Pena discuss language acquisition in humans, and provide an integrated review of behavioral and imaging data from infant studies. They also discuss data suggesting early hemispheric specialization for language and distinctions between human infants and nonhuman vertebrates.

Part III (‘Memory Systems’) will likely be the section most familiar to, and comfortable for, clinical neuropsychologists. Squire introduces the section by reviewing seminal developments in increasing understanding of human memory, including clinical studies of single cases such as H.M., and recognition that there are multiple distinct memory systems, and that the ability to study memory at the cellular and molecular level is expanding. The first chapter of the section, by Squire and Stark, provides a concise review of declarative and non-declarative/implicit memory systems. The next chapter, by Ramus and Eichenbaum (‘A Brain System for Declarative Memory’) provides a more in-depth discussion of how the hippocampus, parahippocampal region, and association neocortex, contribute to declarative memory. The third chapter in this section, by Blair et al., focuses on role of the amygdala in auditory fear conditioning. They review the evidence supporting Hebbian synaptic plasticity in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala in establishing conditioned auditory fear responses. This chapter also includes a brief but interesting discussion of evidence that stable long-term memories can once again become unstable (“labile”) when retrieved, and may be lost if not reconsolidated into a stable form. The final chapter in this section, by Nakazawa, Wilson, and Tonegawa, examines the role of NMDA receptions in acquisition and recall of associative memory. They first provide a very interesting review of the technical aspects involved in producing gene manipulations in mice strains in order to selectively study the role of CA1 and CA3 hippocampal regions in establishment and retrieval of spatial memory. The end of the chapter includes a brief inferential section on how these data may relate to the behavioral manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders in adults.

Part IV of this text focuses on studies of the neural underpinnings of sensory processes, examining singing in songbirds and the functioning of hair cells in the inner ear. While it may seem odd to include a chapter on behavioral and neural processes in songbirds, the authors (Solis et al.) point out that human speech and birdsong share many features. They both are learned vocal behavior involving complex acoustic sequences, they involve vocal and respiratory apparatuses, and they both are highly dependent on hearing in early life and adulthood. Further, the developmental acquisition of birdsong and human language has many similarities. Their chapter focuses learning and synaptic plasticity in the anterior forebrain pathway. The final chapter of the text (Wooltorton et al.) focuses on hair cells in the inner ear and research identifying three different types of sodium currents involved.

One additional chapter is included by Patricia Churchland, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. She begins by commenting “without the assumption of agent control and responsibility, human social commerce is hardly conceivable.” Expanding upon this, principles of reinforcement that shape social behavior presume that humans exercise control over their actions. However, are we truly agents with free choice? She reviews both historical philosophical struggles over this dilemma as well as possible consequences of emerging data from the neurosciences. Churchland reaches the following point: “On the whole, it seems to be assumed, social groups work best when individuals are presumed to be responsible agents” directing their own behavior. She raises further questions about the moral implications of neuro-biological interventions if it becomes possible to affect criminal or other types of undesirable behavior in much more precise ways than currently possible. Interestingly, this chapter is placed at the front of the text, which implicitly reinforces the integration of neurosciences, philosophy, and ethics.

On one level this text successfully provides a sampling of advanced neurosciences research across several domains. There are very interesting, and at times complex, reviews of studies of the neural underpinnings of behavior. The several chapters that integrate behavioral and neuroimaging studies are also a strong component of this volume. However, the reader may feel that he/she is reading several separate texts within this single volume. This is not a criticism and, in fact, may be viewed as consistent with Pomerantz’s introduction, where he describes this text as a sampling across several domains. For the most part this is not a clinically-oriented text, and readers lacking a sound foundation in basic neuroscience and behavioral research may find it difficult. It is however, worth spending the time to read and digest.