Search Results

This book provides an updated theory of the nature of anxiety and the brain systems controlling anxiety, combined with a theory of hippocampal function, which was first proposed thirty years ago. While remaining controversial, the core of this theory, of a ‘Behavioural Inhibition System’, has stood the test of time, with its main predictions repeatedly confirmed. Novel anti-anxiety drugs share none of the side effects or primary pharmacological actions of the classical anti-anxiety drugs on the actions of which the theory was based; but they have both the behavioural and hippocampal actions predicted by the theory. This text is the second edition of the book and it departs significantly from the first. It provides, for the first time, a single construct — goal conflict — that underlies all the known inputs to the system; and it includes current data on the amygdala. Its reviews include the ethology of defence, learning theory, the psychopharmacology of anti-anxiety drugs, anxiety disorders, and the clinical and laboratory analysis of amnesia. The cognitive and behavioural functions in anxiety of the septo-hippocampal system and the amygdala are also analysed, as are their separate roles in memory and fear. Their functions are related to a hierarchy of additional structures — from the prefrontal cortex to the periaqueductal gray — that control the various forms of defensive behaviour and to detailed analysis of the monoamine systems that modulate this control. The resultant neurology is linked to the typology, symptoms, pre-disposing personality and therapy of anxiety and phobic disorders, and to the symptoms of amnesia.

After the chicken, the House Sparrow is the most widely distributed bird species in the world, occurring on all continents except Antarctica and on most human-inhabited islands. Although its Latin name is Passer domesticus, it is certainly not domesticated. In fact, it is widely regarded as a pest species and is consequently not protected in most of its extensive range. This combination of ubiquity and minimal legal protection has contributed to its wide use in studies by avian biologists throughout the world. This book reviews and summarizes the results of these global studies on House Sparrows, and provides a springboard for future studies on the species. House Sparrows have been used to study natural selection in introduced species, circadian rhythms, and the neuroendocrine control of the avian annual cycle. One current question of considerable interest concerns the catastrophic House Sparrow population decline in several urban centers in Europe. Is the House Sparrow a contemporary canary in the mine? Other topics of broad interest include the reproductive and flock-foraging strategies of sparrows, and sexual selection and the function of the male badge in the species. The book also explores the role of the House Sparrow in disease transmission to humans and their domesticated animals.

This book develops an authentic and revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It brings the interpretation of ancient verse into step with the sorts of analyses customarily enjoyed by works in all the more recent poetical and musical traditions. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. Such an analysis is now possible because of a new theory of the Greek tonic accent, set out in the third chapter, and its application to Greek poetry understood as choreia — the proper name for the art and work of ancient poets in both epic and lyric, described by Plato as a synthesis of dance rhythm and vocal harmony, in disagreement moving toward agreement. The book offers a thorough-going treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a ‘dance of the Muses’, lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. The book also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, applying the new theory of the accent and considering concretely the role of dance in performance.

This book reviews a number of clinical neuropsychiatric conditions in which brain oscillations play an essential role. It discusses how the intrinsic properties of neurons, and the interactions between neurons – mediated by both chemical synapses and by gap junctions – can lead to oscillations in populations of cells. The discussion is based largely on data derived from in vitro systems (hippocampus, cerebral and cerebellar cortex) and from network modeling. Finally, the book considers how brain oscillations can provide insight into normal brain function as well as pathophysiology.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired, which are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

This book offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. The book argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of “affordances” from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. The book rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, as well as evidence from neurobiology, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The music-theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats or beat subdivisions. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired that are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth‐century German Lied. It illustrates the transformation of poetic meter into musical rhythm and situates songs within larger aesthetic and historical narratives. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly determined periodicities of musical meter. A new method of declamatory‐schema analysis is presented to illustrate common possibilities for setting trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. Degrees of rhythmic regularity and irregularity are also considered. Recent theories of musical meter are reviewed and applied in the analysis and interpretation of song. Topics include the nature of metric entrainment (drawing on music psychology), metric dissonance, hypermeter, and phrase rhythm. The book provides new methodologies for analysis and close readings of individual songs by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. Whereas songs by Hensel, Schubert, and Schumann may generally be described as musical settings of poetic texts, songs by both Brahms and Wolf function as musical performances of poetic readings. The frequently mentioned differences between Brahms and Wolf are clarified, along with deeper affinities.

This is the first comprehensive, fully documented, intercultural history of tap dance, a uniquely American art form, that explores all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of contemporary tap luminaries. Tap dance evolved from the oral traditions and expressive cultures of the West Africans and the Irish that converged and collided in America, and was perpetuated by such key features as the tap challenge—any competition or showdown in which dancers compete against each other before an audience of spectators or judges. The book begins with an account of a buck dance challenge between Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn’s Bijou Theatre, in 1900, and proceeds decade by decade through the twentieth century. Vividly described are tap’s musical styles and steps—from buck-and-wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century; jazz tapping to the rhythms of hot jazz, swing, and bebop in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels (high and low) from the 1990s up to today. Tap dancing has long been considered “a man’s game,” and this book is the first history to highlight such outstanding female artists as Ada Overton Walker, Kitty O’Neill, and Alice Whitman, at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium.