John G. Nicholls is Professor of Neuroscience at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (known as SISSA). He was born in London in 1929 and received a medical degree from Charing Cross Hospital and a Ph.D. in physiology from the Department of Biophysics at University College London, where he did research under the direction of Sir Bernard Katz. He has worked at University College London, at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Universities, and at the Biocenter in Basel. With Stephen Kuffler, he made experiments on neuroglial cells and wrote the first edition of this book. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Mexican Academy of Medicine, and the recipient of the Venezuelan Order of Andres Bello.

He has given laboratory and lecture courses in neurobiology at Woods Hole and Cold Spring Harbor, and in universities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His work concerns regeneration of the nervous system after injury and mechanisms that give rise to the respiratory rhythm. A. Robert Martin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He was born in Saskatchewan in 1928 and majored in mathematics and physics at the University of Manitoba. He received a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1955 from University College London, where he worked on synaptic transmission in mammalian muscle under the direction of Sir Bernard Katz.

From 1955 to 1957 he did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Herbert Jasper at the Montreal Neurological Institute, studying the behavior of single cells in the motor cortex. He has taught at McGill University, the University of Utah, Yale University, and the University of Colorado Medical School, and has been a visiting professor at Monash University, Edinburgh University, and the Australian National University. His research has contributed to the understanding of synaptic transmission, including the mechanisms of transmitter release, electrical coupling at synapses, and properties of postsynaptic ion channels. David A. Brown is Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology at University College London. He was born in London in 1936 and gained a B.Sc. in Physiology from University College London and a Ph.

D. from St. Bartholomew''s Hospital Medical College ("Barts") studying transmission in sympathetic ganglia. He then did a post-doc at the University of Chicago, where he helped design an integrated neurobiology course for graduate medical students. He has since chaired departments of Pharmacology at the School of Pharmacy and at University College in London, and has also worked in several labs in the United States, including the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Texas in Galveston, and as Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at NIH in the labs of Mike Brownstein, Julie Axelrod, and Marshall Nirenberg. At Galveston, he and Paul Adams discovered the M-type potassium channel, which provided new insight into how neurotransmitters could alter nerve cell activity by regulating a voltage-gated ion channel. He continues to work on the regulation of ion channels by G protein-coupled receptors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a recipient of the Feldberg Prize, and has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Kanazawa in Japan.

Mathew E. Diamond, like John Nicholls, is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (SISSA). He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from the University of Virginia in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the University of North Carolina in 1989. Diamond was a postdoctoral fellow with Ford Ebner at Brown University and then an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University before moving to SISSA to found the Tactile Perception and Learning Laboratory in 1996. His main interest is to specify the relationship between neuronal activity and perception. The research is carried out mostly in the tactile whisker system in rodents, but some experiments attempt to generalize the principles found in the whisker system to the processing of information in the human tactile sensory system.

Antonio Cattaneo obtained a Degree in Physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, after which he began research in Neurobiology at Scuola Normale Superiore with Lamberto Maffei. He worked with Rita Levi Montalcini and Pietro Calissano at the CNR Institute of Cell Biology and at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge UK) with Cesar Milstein and Michael Neuberger. In 1991 he became Full Professor of Biophysics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, where as Head of the Biophysics Sector and Deputy Director he was involved in setting up a new SISSA Neuroscience Program. In 2004 he assisted Rita Levi-Montalcini in launching the European Brain Research Institute, for which he served as the Scientific Director, before joining Scuola Normale Superiore in 2009. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and of the Accademia delle Scienze dei XL, has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College (University of Cambridge, UK) and has received many international awards for his research. He is the author of over 180 peer reviewed pubblications in international scientific journals and an inventor on several biotechnology patents, based on his research, all of which have been industrially exploited. His current research aims at deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms that lead to neurodegeneration, at studying protein misfolding in living cells and at identifying new targets for the development of new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases (most notably Alzheimer''s disease), based on these mechanisms. Francisco F.

De-Miguel is Professor of Neuroscience at the Instituto de Fisiologa Celular-Neurociencias of the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mexico (UNAM. From 1989-1992 Francisco was Research Associate (postdoctoral training) under Prof. John G. Nicholls at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His laboratory is focused in studying the mechanisms of serotonin extrasynaptic release and the regulation of chemical transmission by electrical synapses. Since 2004, he has been the Director of the "Experimenta" Laboratories for Science Education in High School and has coordinated the Brain and Art Project of UNAM since 2011. He has been visiting professor at the Biocenter of the University of Basel and the Universities of Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley, Pablo de Olavide, and at the Instituto Cajal of Madrid. He has taught over 126 courses at UNAM, the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, and in several universities in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, Peru and Bolivia.