Ever since the behavioral work of Lissrnann (1958), who showed that the weak electric discharges of some families of fish (hitherto considered useless for prey capture or for scaring away enemies) are part of a strange sensory system, these fish have attracted attention from biologists. The subsequent discovery of the electroreceptors in the skin of gymnotids and mormyrids (Bullock et al. 1961; Fessard and Szabo 1961) and the evidence that the ampullae of Lorenzini of nonelectric sharks and rays are also electro- receptors (Digkgraaf and Kalmijn 1962) was a start for a lively branch of...

Understanding human hearing is not only a scientific challenge but also a problem of growing social and political importance, given the steadily increasing numbers of people with hearing deficits or even deafness. This book is about the highest level of hearing in humans and other mammals. It brings together studies of both humans and animals thereby giving a more profound understanding of the concepts, approaches, techniques, and knowledge of the auditory cortex.

Of the three organizers of this NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Neocortex: Onto- geny and Phylogeny," one derived most of his knowledge about neocortex from studies on birds, another had never studied any animal but the cat and could probably recognize not more than ten animal species, and the third had very limited experience with mountaineering. They had in common the belief that evolutionary thinking permeates what biologists do, but that evolution of species and structures cannot be directly experimentally addressed. Although the fossil record can provide some major insights, the...