The Sherrington School of Physiology at St. Thomas' Hospital provided a natural venue for four days of enthusiastic debate on Sherrington's Final Common Path -the alpha motoneurone and related matters; Sherrington himself held a lecturership at St. Thomas' just over a century ago. The occasion was a happy one. Most participants already knew each other, the topics were familiar, the discussion was vigorous and critical but without personal rancor. The program had set out to encourage debate with 'critiques' both of the oral papers and the posters; their inclusion in the present volume helps to...

I have been asked to write a brief foreword to this volume honoring Hisako Ikeda, providing a review of the accomplishments in our field over the past four decades, when Hisako was an active participant. This I am delighted to do. It has been a most exciting time in vision research and Hisako has been right in the middle of much of the excitement, publishing on a wide variety of topics and providing much new data and many new insights. Hisako's research career can be divided by decades into four quite distinct areas of inquiry. In the 1950s, as a student in Japan, her research interests were...