This is a book series with publications from a multidisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners and clinicians for an international professional forum interested in the broad spectrum of functional neurology, health and human development.

About the Editors:
Gerry Leisman is Full Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Haifa in Israel and concurrently Professor of Restorative Neurology at the University of Medical Sciences in Havana, Cuba. He studies the relation between movement and cognition developmentally, examining mechanisms of self-organizing systems in the brain applied to fetal, neonatal, infant, and child development of sensation/ perception, memory, cognition, consciousness, death, autism, movement and gait. He was one of the first to identify functional disconnectivities in the brain. He has been involved since the early 1970s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that a fundamental understanding of consciousness can be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology and understood by mechanisms of theoretical physics, having, together with Dr. Paul Koch, developed biomedical applications of continuum theory. He has also been influential in examining mechanisms of self-organizing systems in the brain and nervous system applied to cognition exemplified by his work in movement-cognitive interaction, memory, kinesiology, optimization, consciousness, death, autism, and developmental disabilities. He has likewise applied optimization strategies to movement and gait, cognition, and coma recovery. He was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences in 1990, Senior Member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in 1986, Life Fellow of the International Association for Functional Neurology & Rehabilitation in 2010 & received its Lifetime Achievement Award 2011. He has published hundreds of papers and texts in the Neurosciences, Developmental Sciences, Cognitive Science, Biomedical Engineering, and in the Systems Sciences literature.

Joav Merrick, MD, MMedSci, DMSc, born and educated in Denmark is Professor of Pediatrics affiliated with the Division of Pediatrics, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Mt Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel, Kentucky Children’s Hospital, University of Kentucky, Lexington, United States and Professor of Public Health at the Center for Healthy Development, School of Public Health, Georgia State University, Atlanta, United States, the former medical director of the Disability Administration, Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Services, Jerusalem and the founder and director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Israel. Email: jmerrick@zahav.net.il