FOREWORD 



X 



HIS volume entitled Information Storage and Neural Control is 

 compiled from the proceedings of the Tenth Annual Scientific 

 Meeting" of the Houston Neurological Society. This meeting, like 

 its predecessors, was concerned with the exploration of a specific 

 area of current biomedical investigation. For some of those persons 

 who may have occasion to read the contributions presented here 

 by scientists in various disciplines, there may be little that is im- 

 inediately applicable in clinical medicine. Many of the concepts 

 and techniques which are described relate at this time only to 

 fundamental research, but there is no doubt that in the future a 

 better appreciation of these facts will be exceedingly important 

 to clinicians. 



Progress in the biological sciences has been impeded to a con- 

 siderable extent by our inability to obtain objective quantitative 

 data in many critical areas of research. Biostatisticians and 

 geneticists were among the first to recognize this serious defect 

 and to inake attempts to fill in the gaps. The concept of vary- 

 ing information content was introduced when I — the informa- 

 tion value of a group of observations — was defined as the re- 

 ciprocal of the variance of the data. At first glance, this concept 

 appears to be in direct conflict with the modern idea of high 

 information content for a low probability datum. This need 

 not, necessarily, be the case, since a narrow range of variation 

 implies inclusion of low probability observations from the extremes 

 of the normal curve with the correspondingly high information 

 content of these low probability observations. The next iinportant 

 forward step resulted from the application in the biological sciences 

 of physical and chemical laws derived from the exact sciences. 

 This period began with the publication of A. J. Lotka's Elements 

 of Physical Biology in 1925, in which the theoretical concepts of 

 modern mathematics, physics, and physical chemistry were applied 

 rigorously to models of biological systems. Many of the laws and 



