This book is intended for undergraduates studying the biological and medical sciences. The field of excitable cell physiology is one which is found quite baffling by a significant minority of these students. My aim here is to provide a brief introductory account, based on a conceptual approach, rather than on a mathematical or historical description. Once the student has grasped certain basic ideas concerning excitable cell function, the individual examples which follow fit into a well-defined pattern. No attempt has been made to give credit in appropriate measure to the many scientists who...

The origins of this book are in my first attempts to understand psychology as a post-war student in the Cambridge of the late 1940s. Sir Frederic Bartlett and his colleagues in the Psychology Department were talking and writing about the concept of the skill as the fundamental unit of behaviour. This made entire sense to me but not apparently to very many other people because the movement dwindled rapidly with the retirement of Sir Frederic in 1952. It got lost within performance studies which were essentially behaviouristic and stimulus-response in origin, a quite different style of thinking...