It recounts the life histories of those who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic. Sacks chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York.

    The main part of the book describes what we know today about the individual systems that make up the human brain and about the role of the individual zones of the cerebral hemispheres in the task of providing the necessary conditions for higher forms of mental activity to take place. Finally, Luria analyzes the cerebral organization of perception and action, of attention and memory, or speech and intellectual processes, and attempts to fit the facts obtained by neuropsychological studies of individual brain systems into their appropriate place in the grand design of psychological science.

    In 183 short chapters, the book provides the essentials clinicians need on symptoms/signs, diagnostic tests, and neurologic disorders of all etiologies.For this edition, Timothy A. Pedley, MD, Chair of the Department of Neurology at Columbia University, joins Dr. Rowland as co-editor. Coverage includes separate chapters on autism, autosomal recessive ataxias, and autosomal dominant ataxias, and new chapters on endovascular neuroradiology, parkinsonian syndromes, Lewy body dementias, frontotemporal dementia, vanishing white matter, vasculitis, normal pressure hydrocephalus, neuromyelitis optica, Kennedy disease, spinal muscular atrophy, complex regional pain syndrome, disorders of DNA translation, the immune restoration inflammatory syndrome (IRIS), and Hashimoto encephalopathy. Most chapters have been updated to reflect advances in molecular genetics.A companion Website will offer the fully searchable text and an image bank.