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When I began graduate school in 1961, Physiological Psychology was alive with adventure and opportunity. It seemed possible, indeed easy, to determine which part of the brain influenced which aspect of behavior, and the relative absence of technical hurdles encouraged neophytes into the laboratory. New theories of brain function based on a wealth of reliable and provocative findings also stimu lated further laboratory investigation. And the results obtained in studies of food and fluid ingestion certainly were exciting, albeit perplexing. For example, eating could be stimulated by injecting one chemical agent into the rat brain, whereas drinking was stimulated by i~ecting a different chemical through the same hypothalamic cannula. After focal brain lesions rats would overeat but not work harder to obtain food. After other brain lesions in adjacent sites, rats would stop eating and drinking altogether, but ingestive behaviors would return gradu ally over a period of weeks or months despite permanent brain injury. Although some of these observations and related findings may provide less insight into the central control of ingestive behavior than had been believed initially, there was a strong impression then that much more was known about eating and drinking than other behaviors, and they became models of motivated activities in addition to being of interest in their own right. Twenty-two years ago, the American Physiological Society published the first handbook devoted exclusively to the subject of alimentary behavior.
List of contents
I Retrospective Essays.- 1 Brain and Behavior.- 2 Thirst and Sodium Appetite.- 3 Homeostatic Origins of Ingestive Behavior.- 4 Behavioral Treatment of Obesity.- II Food Intake and Caloric Homeostasis.- 5 The Ontogeny of Ingestive Behavior: Changing Control of Components in the Feeding.- 6 Caudal Brainstem Participates in the Distributed Neural Control of Feeding.- 7 Food Intake: Gastric Factors.- 8 Systemic Factors in the Control of Food Intake: Evidence for Patterns as Signals.- 9 Human Obesity: A Problem in Body Energy Economics.- III Food Selection.- 10 Gustatory Control of Food Selection.- 11 Comparative Studies of Feeding.- 12 Food Selection.- 13 Diet Selection and Poison Avoidance by Mammals Individually and in Social Groups.- IV Thirst, Sodium Appetite, and Fluid Homeostasis.- 14 Thirst and Water Balance.- 15 Sodium Appetite.- 16 Clinical Aspects of Body Fluid Homeostasis in Humans.- V Prospective Essays.- 17 The Behavioral and Neural Sciences of Ingestion.- 18 Prospectus: Thirst and Salt Appetite.- 19 Making Sense Out of Calories.- 20 Clinical Issues in Food Ingestion and Body Weight Maintenance.
