The Symposium on the Neural Basis of Behavior, from which this volume was produced, was held at the Alfred I. duPont Institute on June 7 and 8, 1979. It brought outstanding investigators in four fundamental areas of behavioral neurobiology into juxtaposition, there to provide an integrated, multidisciplinary perspective on behaviorally significant brain mechanisms. Particular emphasis was placed on topics of interest to neurobiologists as well as to clinicians in neurological and psychiatric disciplines. The session on central activity states was selected as an appropriate point of departure because the continuum of brain activity states extending from the natural depression of hibernation through the heightened levels of arousal accom­ panying learning is such a clear and basic determinant of behavioral output. The papers on learning and memory outlined diverse approaches to un­ derstanding the basis of these interrelat~d CNS capabilities that constitute the neural basis of behavioral adaptation. Finally, the topics of affective states and mechanisms of pain provided a focus of clinically relevant discus­ sion covering multiple levels of functional and anatomical CNS organiza­ tion.

At the request of a Subcommittee of the United States Senate, in February, 1975, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (now the National Institute of Neurological and Communi­ cative Disorders and Stroke) conducted a Workshop on the Research Status of Spinal Manipulative Therapy. The Workshop was held in response to the Senate Subcommittee's request for an "independent unbiased study of the fundamentals of the chiropractic profession. " Since spinal manipulative therapy is a key tenet of chiropractic, the Institute felt a research workshop focused on that issue would provide a useful base upon which to examine the broad concept of the role of biomechanical alterations of the spine in health and disease.

It is a privilege and pleasure to write a foreword to this work. Who, twenty years ago, would have thought that a whole book could be devoted to the veins of the posterior fossa? Even today the standard text-books of anatomy only give a paragraph to the subject. Thanks to the dedicated work of rather a few neuroradiologists our knowledge has now reached a very sophisticated level. The careful correlation of anatomical dissection with the angiographic image has achieved this, but without the aid of subtraction (discovered by a world figure in neuroradiology - Professor ZIEDSES DES PLANTES) the subject would not be as advanced as it is. The authors are to be congratulated not only for presenting the most up to date anatomical information but also for showing how wide the applications are in the clinical field by the careful analysis of displacements of veins, many of which were quite unrecognised only a very few years ago. Drs W ACKENHEIM and BRAUN are in the forefront of this discipline to which they and the French school have contributed so much. Also it was their great enthusiasm and drive which led to the birth of the European Society of Neuroradiology, the first meeting of which was held in Colmar in September 1969. The Society has flourished under their guidance and very successful annual meetings have been held for nearly a decade.

Random matrices are widely and successfully used in physics for almost 60-70 years, beginning with the works of Dyson and Wigner. Although it is an old subject, it is constantly developing into new areas of physics and mathematics. It constitutes now a part of the general culture of a theoretical physicist. Mathematical methods inspired by random matrix theory become more powerful, sophisticated and enjoy rapidly growing applications in physics. Recent examples include the calculation of universal correlations in the mesoscopic system, new applications in disordered and quantum chaotic systems, in combinatorial and growth models, as well as the recent breakthrough, due to the matrix models, in two dimensional gravity and string theory and the non-abelian gauge theories. The book consists of the lectures of the leading specialists and covers rather systematically many of these topics. It can be useful to the specialists in various subjects using random matrices, from PhD students to confirmed scientists.

This is a monograph on geometrical and topological features which arise in quantum field theory. It is well known that when a chiral fermion interacts with a gauge field we have chiral anomaly which corresponds to the fact that divergence of the axial vector current does not vanish. It is observed that this is related to certain topological features associated with the fermion and leads to the realization of the topological origin of fermion number as well as the Berry phase. The role of gauge fields in the quantization procedure has its implications in these topological features of a fermion and helps us to consider a massive fermion as a soliton (skyrrnion). In this formalism chiral anomaly is found to be responsible for mass generation. This has its relevance in electroweak theory where it is observed that weak interaction gauge bosons attain mass topologically.