This volume covers the proceedings of a symposium held in Marseille in
March 1982 as a satellite meeting of the IBRO First World Congress in
Lausanne. About 70 participants from more than ten countries attended
the symposium, whose central theme was "Neural Coding of Motor
Performance. " Whereas coding within the sensory systems has been dis-
cussed widely, coding in the field of motor control has been analyzed
much less. Over the past 10 years an impressive amount of information
has been assembled combining re- . cordings in central and peripheral
neural structures during the performance of simple and complex motor
tasks. Data such as those relating the behavioral phenomena of the awake
animal to single-cell recordings from various cerebral areas have been
carefully worked out by a number of investigators. It was thought at the
symposium that the time had come for this infor- mation to be collected
and reexamined, and presented in one volume. The present book was
conceived to cover the scope and significance of coding throughout the
nervous system. by "coding" in the central nervous system? This What is
meant question can be answered in general by bringing together data and
viewpoints from many disciplines - behavior, neurophysi- ology,
neuropharmacology - and clinical observations. Gen- erally speaking, one
may call coding a method of communica- tion, i. e., the language that
brain cells use for exchange of information.