Serotonin neurotransmission and behavior

Serotonin has been recognized as a major neurotransmitter for about two decades, and over that period intensive research has identified a growing range of roles that it plays in physiology and behavior. It is now known that serotonin is an important factor in perceptual motor responses, in mental illness (especially depression), in regulating the action of some hallucinogens and antidepressants, in governing such fundamental processes as sleep, appetite, pain, and hormone secretion, and in the inhibitory control of a variety of complex behaviors.This research has been conducted along parallel lines, using either invertebrates or vertebrates as experimental subjects, with very little synthesis of results from the two largely isolated levels. One purpose of this book is to achieve such a synthesis, by bringing together the most prominent serotonin researchers in invertebrate neurophysiology and in mammalian physiology and behavior, and encouraging each group to assimilate and where possible utilize the results of the other and to evaluate the extent to which the anatomy and physiology of serotonin is continuous across phylogeny.Thus, the book encompasses serotonin neurotransmission both in the peripheral autonomic nervous system and in the central nervous system, and indeed one of its main lines of inquiry is whether such neurotransmission in the higher-order neuronal systems represents a morphologically new type of synaptic relation--one lacking the classical pre- and post-synaptic elements and analogous to that found in the peripheral autonomic system.Another line of inquiry in the book focuses on the possibility that serotonin neurotransmission represents as well an "operationally" new type of synaptic action--one that is based on a mechanism of modulation as opposed to the more traditional mediation. This leads to the corollary issue of whether brain serotonin modulates, rather than mediates, behavior in animals and humans. In general, the emphasis throughout is on the cellular basis of behavior.In addition to papers by the editors, the book contains contributions by George Aghajanian (Yale), Floyd Bloom (Salk Institute), John Fernstrom (MIT), H. M. Gerschenfeld (Ecole Normale Superieure), Eric Kandel (Columbia), Edward Kravitz (Harvard), Irving Kupfermann (Columbia), Robert Moore (SUNY, Stonybrook), Andre Parent (Universite Laval), and Forrest Weight (National Institute of Mental Health).