The Human Brain and its Disorders

When our University promoted the introduction of new courses aimed at expanding undergraduate students' minds by offering modules beyond their core discipline, we were charged with providing a 'medical' course appropriate for students from all backgrounds. We opted for a course on the brain, that most complex of organs that controls every aspect of our existence and yet, when it malfunctions, can cause devastation to people of all ages.

The course was well accepted but a recurring theme was the lack of a suitable textbook that covered the course contents at an appropriate level. There are some wonderful books out there on the study of the brain and the nervous system, and on the clinical disciplines of neurology and psychiatry, but those aimed at medical students and practising clinicians were too complex for our target audience, and there appeared to be no single volume that covered all three of these areas.

Our aim in putting this book together was to present what is clearly a complex and relentlessly advancing area of knowledge at a level that challenged the scholarly mind but that was still accessible to those who are not specialists in medicine. Of our editorial team, Doug Richards is a neuroscientist, Carl Clarke is a neurologist and Tom Clark is a psychiatrist. Neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry are not three separate islands as they may sometimes appear; the borders of these specialities overlap considerably. Before explaining what may be going wrong in a particular neurological or psychiatric condition, we need to understand the fundamental processes underlying normal brain function in the first place. Our goal as editors has been to work together to blur the divisions between the specialities and to provide you with a text that provides a knowledgeable platform of understanding of brain function and dysfunction.

Doug Richards, Carl Clarke and Tom Clark
April 2007

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