Michael Posner is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell, where he served as founding director of the Sackler Institute. Posner is well known for his work with Marcus Raichle on imaging the human brain during cognitive tasks. A volume Images of Mind resulted from that collaboration. He has worked on the anatomy, circuitry, development and genetics of three attentional networks underlying maintaining alertness, orienting to sensory events and voluntary control of thoughts and ideas. His methods for measuring these networks have been applied to a wide range of neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders.

• Introduction ; 1. The Attention System of the Human Brain ; 2: The Alerting Network ; 3. Orienting of Attention ; 4. Executive Network and Self-Regulation ; 5. Development of Attention Networks ; 6. Attention and Society ; 7. Concluding Remarks ; Index

Posner views attention as an organ system with its own functional anatomy, circuitry, and cellular structure. This approach promises to sketch out the evolutionary and developmental basis of a principle brain mechanism of voluntary control, thus paving the road toward an understanding of how genetics and culture shape control systems... For those familiar with Posners instrumental contributions, this little book may be old news, but this volume makes his revolutionary ideas and trailblazing science available to a wide and uninitiated readership...Posners exposition presents a delightful read and provides important insights and experimental sensibilities that many curious minds would appreciate. We recommend this book wholeheartedly.