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Thursday, December 13, 2007

A Book on Learning and Memory

After seven years of writing, editing, class-room testing, and many many rounds of revisions, a new book, Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior, was published last week. My co-authors, Catherine Myers and Eddie Mercado, and I owe an enormous debt to many of you for your generous contributions in reading and commenting on early drafts, providing copies of your data and figures, and giving unstintingly of your time to help us understand your work and share with us your expertise.
Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior presents a broad, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary overview of learning and memory, integrating brain research and behavioral studies, animal learning and human memory, and experimental and clinical perspectives. We wrote the book primarily as an undergraduate textbook with a full array of pedagogical features (interim summaries, concept checks, key words, and a glossary), teacher support (plug-'n-play Powerpoint lectures, Instructor's Manual with supplemental material and classroom activities, test banks, etc.) as well as web-based supplements for the students. The book is is printed in full color throughout, with all original anatomical and circuit drawings, functional brain imaging data, graphical representations of experiments, lots of photos, charts, and tables, as well a sprinkling of cartoons.
The book has already been adopted (in either pre-publication versions or pre-ordered for this coming spring) at M.I.T., Stanford, and Princeton, as well as over a dozen other universities and small colleges such Keene State College, Texas Christian University, and Glenville State College: an eclectic and diverse mix of early adopters. Our publisher, Worth Publishers, is currently in negotiation with foreign publishers to bring out a French translation, as well as other European and Asian language editions.
In addition to serving as a new undergraduate textbook, we hope the book will also be read by graduate students and faculty in the behavioral and brain sciences -- as well as members of the general public -- who seek an accessible introduction to the behavioral and neural bases of learning and memory. We wrote the book assuming no specific prerequisites or prior training for the reader.
Two of the book's chapters are available free online for downloading as PDFs: Chapter 3 (Episodic and Semantic Memory: Memory for Facts and Events) and Chapter 7 (Classical Conditioning: Learning to Predict Important Events). They can be both be found at:
http://www.worthpub lishers.com /gluckpreview/ chapters. html . For those who might wish to purchase the book, it can be ordered directly from Amazon.com at
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Memory-Behavior-Mark-luck/dp/0716786540/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197132620&sr=8-1
(with a starting sales rank of #1,062,940 we clearly are not yet a threat to J. K. Rowling).
For those of you who teach a course in learning and memory, at either the undergraduate or graduate level, or are considering doing so in the coming year, I encourage you to contact our editor, Charles Linsmeier, at <clinsmeier@worthpub .com> to arrange for a complimentary instructors review copy.

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