Monoamine Innervation of the Cerebral Cortex

investor. With this care and interest, the physician should have a strong ally in this book. As a good amateur's guide to money management and investing, the text will help anybody with the common sense to realize the limitations of the authors' advice. No price. If the brain is the "black box" which holds the biological secrets of human behavior, then the cerebral cortex is the greatest mystery within the box. Psychiatrists, neurologists, and neuroscientists, daunted by its complexity, have largely ignored the cortex in favor of simpler systems. Yet this text, the product of the fifth annual neuroscience symposium from the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Neurologiques in Montreal, represents an early effort to develop a framework for understanding the role of discrete monoamine systems in their innervation of the cortex. One of the current goals of neuroscience is to be able to alter chemically a specific neural locus or system in a desired manner with the fewest unwanted effects. In this text, Reader and Jasper review the literature describing the overlap of monoamine and neuropeptide "systems" which holds great potential for selective manipulation of both cortical and subcortical activity. While their presentation is clear, they emphasize the excitatory effects of GABA on noradrenergic systems rather than the direct inhibitory effect of GABA and benzodiazepines, which have a postulated GABA-potentiating anxiolytic role at the locus coeruleus. In addition, the physiologic significance of noradrenergic-peptide interactions is not discussed in depth, while newer peptides such as neuropeptide Y are ignored. The potential richness of the monoamine-peptide interaction is, however, alluded to in the chapter by Thierry et al., who note that neurons of the ventral tegmental area (A10), which provide the dopaminergic innervation of the frontal cortex, also contain neurotensin and CCK-8, whereas cells of the substantia nigra (A9), which innervate the striatum, do not contain these peptides. This observation may yet have implications for the treatment of psychosis. Manipulations of the mesocortical dopaminergic systems are thought to underlie the antipsychotic action of neuroleptics, while alterations in the nigrostriatal systems produce the unwanted and debilitating side effects such as tardive dyskinesia. In this regard, the electrophysiological literature which is reviewed in the chapters by Thierry et al. and Bunney and Chiodo offers an alternative strategy for selective manipulation of dopaminergic subsystems. These chapters review the literature which suggests that the mesocortical dopaminergic neurons lack autorecepters and, when compared to nigrostriatal and …