R. Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man's heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he could recall his childhood but not his recent past; half his field of vision had been destroyed; he had great difficulty speaking, reading, and writing.Much of the book consists of excerpts from Zasetsky's own diaries. Laboriously, he records his memories in order to reestablish his past and to affirm his existence as an intelligent being. Luria's comments and interpolations provide a valuable distillation of the theory and techniques that guided all of his research. His "digressions" are excellent brief introductions to the topic of brain structure and its relation to higher mental functions.

    The third edition of this highly successful book has been extensively revised and restructured to incorporate the many recent advances in the subject, including new information on the properties of single ionic channels and the molecular biology of membrane proteins. There are many new illustrations and numerous references to recent work. The essential philosophy of the book remains the same: fundamental concepts are clearly explained and key experiments are examined in some detail. The contents of the book that was so successfully launched in 1971 are now appropriate to the challenges of the 1990s. The book is primarily intended for use by students of physiology, biophysics, neuroscience or zoology, and will be useful to those beginning research, and to scientists of related disciplines.