Steps toward a unified field of neural and behavioral ontogeny
✍ Scribed by Dr. Ronald W. Oppenheim
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1987
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 225 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0012-1630
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Beginning at least as early as the turn of the present century, attempts have been made to forge a merger between investigators and disciplines studying behavioral development with those studying neuronal development. Over the years a variety of terms have been employed to attempt to describe or name what was widely recognized as an area of mutual interest and conceptual overlap. Among these are developmental psychobiology, neuroembryology , psychoembryology , behavioral embryology, behavioral neuroembryology , developmental neurobiology , developmental neuroscience psychogenesis, and neurogenesis. Although none of these have proven to be entirely satisfactory, modem developmental neurobiology probably comes closest, both in name and concept, to fulfilling what many of us today, as well as what our predecessors earlier in this century, recognized as the empirical and conceptual nexus that exists between investigators interested in broad issues of neural and behavioral development. The title of the book under review here, Developmental NeuroPsychobiology , fails to improve upon prior attempts to name this field, and because the term itself is, in my opinion, a clumsy and unnatural fusion of the names of two fields that are historically independent, one can only hope the term quickly falls into oblivion. I should hasten to add at the outset, however, that the motivation behind the neologism is to be admired. There clearly is a very large area of overlap between the fields of developmental psychobiology and developmental neurobiology ; indeed, many individuals today move back and forth between the two fields with ease, asking questions and employing methods associated with both. The editors are also to be Reprint requests should be sent to Dr. Ronald W. Oppenheim, Department of Anatomy, Bowman-Gray School of Medicine, 300 S. Hawthorne St.