Chronobiological mechanisms regulating time-of-day mediated behaviors, such as sleep and circadian rhythms, are thought to interact with and/or share cellular and molecular signaling cascades that shape synaptic plasticity and neural excitability. These same factors are also known to underlie events that govern higher-order cognitive processing, including learning and memory formation, and often through phylogenetically conserved pathways. This suggests that factors which contribute to adaptive responses to changing environmental stimuli are likely derived from basic evolutionarily ancient processes, and underscores the importance of using both invertebrate and vertebrate models to study the interaction of chronobiology and cognitive processing. This issue highlights current views along with original research on sleep and circadian features of plasticity and memory in multiple species, models, and systems.

Chronobiological mechanisms regulating time-of-day mediated behaviors, such as sleep and circadian rhythms, are thought to interact with and/or share cellular and molecular signaling cascades that shape synaptic plasticity and neural excitability. These same factors are also known to underlie events that govern higher-order cognitive processing, including learning and memory formation, and often through phylogenetically conserved pathways. This suggests that factors which contribute to adaptive responses to changing environmental stimuli are likely derived from basic evolutionarily ancient processes, and underscores the importance of using both invertebrate and vertebrate models to study the interaction of chronobiology and cognitive processing. This issue highlights current views along with original research on sleep and circadian features of plasticity and memory in multiple species, models, and systems.

The cognitive and behavioral implications of sleep deprivation have been noted in the medical literature for many years. In addition, emerging research continues to demonstrate the contribution of sleep deprivation to some of the most common and costly health conditions today. Sleep Deprivation and Disease provides clinically relevant scientific information to help clinicians, public health professionals, and researchers recognize the ramifications of sleep deprivation across a broad spectrum of health topics. This timely reference covers sleep physiology, experimental approaches to sleep deprivation and measurement of its consequences, as well as health and operational consequences of sleep deprivation. Clinical challenges and areas of uncertainty are also presented in order to encourage future advancements in sleep medicine and help patients avoid the outcomes associated with the myriad causes of sleep deprivation.

The diagnosis of mental illness is frequently accompanied by sleep problems; conversely, people experiencing sleep problems may subsequently develop mental illness. Sleep and Mental Illness looks at this close correlation and considers the implications of research findings that have emerged in the last few years. Additionally, it surveys the essential concepts and practical tools required to deal with sleep and co-morbid psychiatric problems. The volume is divided into three main sections: basic science, neuroendocrinology, and clinical science. Included are over 30 chapters on topics such as neuropharmacology, insomnia, depression, dementia, autism, and schizophrenia. Relevant questionnaires for the assessment of sleep disorders, including quality-of-life measurement tools, are provided. There is also a summary table of drugs for treating sleep disorders. This interdisciplinary text will be of interest to clinicians working in psychiatry, behavioral sleep medicine, neurology, pulmonary and critical care medicine.

Sleep has long been a topic of fascination for artists and scientists. Why do we sleep? What function does sleep serve? Why do we dream? What significance can we attach to our dreams? We spend so much of our lives sleeping, yet its precise function is unclear, in spite of our increasing understanding of the processes generating and maintaining sleep. We now know that sleep can be accompanied by periods of intense cerebral activity, yet only recently has experimental data started to provide us with soem insights into the type of processing taking place in the brain as we sleep. There is now strong evidence that sleep plays a crucial role in learning and in the consolidation of memories. Once the preserve of psychoanalysts, 'dreaming' is now a topic of increasing interest amongst scientists. With research into sleep growing, this volume is both timely and valuable in presenting a unique study of the relationship between sleep, learning, and memory. It brings together a team of international scientists researching sleep in both human and animal subjects. Aimed at researchers within the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology, this book will be an important first step in developing a full scientific understanding of one of our most intriguing human characteristics.

While the first edition of the critically acclaimed and highly popular Circadian Physiologyoffered a concise but rigorous review of basic and applied research on circadian rhythms, this newest edition provides educators with the primary textbook they need to support a course on this cutting-edge topic. Maintaining the same accessible multidi

J ÜRGEN AscHOFF "Very bad habit! Very bad habit!" Captain Giles to Joseph Conrad who had taken a siesta. -Conrad: The Shadow Line On the Multiplicity of Rest-Activity Cycles: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes According to its title this book tries to answer the profound question of why we nap-and why Captain Giles was wrong in blaming Conrad for having napped. However, in this volume the term nap is not used in the narrower sense of an afternoon siesta; instead, emphasis is placed on the recurrent alternation between states of alertness and drowsiness, i. e. , on rest-activity cycles of high er frequency throughout the 24 hr. In view of this focus, two authors (Stampi, in Chapter I, and Ball, in Chapter 3) rightly refer to the psychologist Szymanski who was among the first to describe "polyphasic" activity patterns. Hence, I consider it appropriate to open this foreword with a few historical remarks. At the time when Szymanski (1920) made the distinction between "monophasic" and "polyphasic" rest-activity patterns and sleep-wake cy cles, respectively, not much was known about the mechanisms of such temporal structures. Although the botanists quite some time ago had demonstrated the endogenous nature of the "monophasic" sleep movements in plants, the hypothesis of an (still unknown) external driving force was favored by those who studied rhythms in animals and humans (Aschoff, 1990).

Over the years there has been growing interest among the scientific community in investigating sleep and how it affects the memory and other brain functions. It is now well established that sleep helps in memory consolidation and induction of neural plasticity, and that short-term deprivation of either total sleep or rapid eye movement sleep alone can induce memory deficits very quickly. Quantitative and qualitative changes in sleep architecture after different training tasks further suggest that discrete memory types may require specific sleep stage/s for optimal memory consolidation, and studies indicate that sleep deprivation alters synaptic plasticity and membrane excitability in the hippocampal neurons and synaptic up-scaling in the cortical neurons. Further, sleep alteration during pregnancy may increase the risk of depression and adversely affect maternal-child relationships, parenting practices, family functioning, and children's development and general wellbeing. This book coherently discusses all these aspects, with a particular focus on the possible role of sleep in memory consolidation and synaptic plasticity. It also highlights the detrimental effects of sleep loss on mental health, the immune system and cognition. This book is a valuable reference resource for students and researchers working in the area of sleep, memory, or neuronal plasticity.

Jasper's Basic Mechanisms, Fourth Edition, is the newest most ambitious and now clinically relevant publishing project to build on the four-decade legacy of the Jasper's series. In keeping with the original goal of searching for "a better understanding of the epilepsies and rational methods of prevention and treatment.", the book represents an encyclopedic compendium neurobiological mechanisms of seizures, epileptogenesis, epilepsy genetics and comordid conditions. Of practical importance to the clinician, and new to this edition are disease mechanisms of genetic epilepsies and therapeutic approaches, ranging from novel antiepileptic drug targets to cell and gene therapies.

With the invitation to edit this volume, I wanted to take the opportunity to assemble reviews on different aspects of circadian clocks and rhythms. Although most c- tributions in this volume focus on mammalian circadian clocks, the historical int- duction and comparative clocks section illustrate the importance of various other organisms in deciphering the mechanisms and principles of circadian biology. Circadian rhythms have been studied for centuries, but only recently, a mole- lar understanding of this process has emerged. This has taken research on circadian clocks from mystic phenomenology to a mechanistic level; chains of molecular events can describe phenomena with remarkable accuracy. Nevertheless, current models of the functioning of circadian clocks are still rudimentary. This is not due to the faultiness of discovered mechanisms, but due to the lack of undiscovered processes involved in contributing to circadian rhythmicity. We know for example, that the general circadian mechanism is not regulated equally in all tissues of m- mals. Hence, a lot still needs to be discovered to get a full understanding of cir- dian rhythms at the systems level. In this respect, technology has advanced at high speed in the last years and provided us with data illustrating the sheer complexity of regulation of physiological processes in organisms. To handle this information, computer aided integration of the results is of utmost importance in order to d- cover novel concepts that ultimately need to be tested experimentally.