Books by Donald Pfaff

This concise, ground-breaking book expands past theories limited to the cerebral cortex and emphasizes the longitudinally-integrated brainstem systems that 'wake up the brain' from deep anesthesia, sleep and brain injury. For neurologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as readers interested in the workings of the brain.

Throughout his career, Donald Pfaff has demonstrated that by choosing problems and methods with care, biologists can study the molecular mechanisms of brains more complex than those of fruit flies, snails, and roundworms. He offers a close-up, conversational perspective on a 50-year quest to understand how behavior is regulated in vertebrates.

Pfaff presents a daring perspective on the long-standing puzzle of what arousal is. He argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain.