Ivane Beritashvili and his Doctrine of Image-Driven Behavior: Brief History in the Sciences of Brain and Behavior

Neuroscience, as a discipline born in the middle of the 20th century, it emerged as a result of the efforts of many eminent physiologists who conspired to highlight the structure of the nervous system, communication style in it, due to its reflexes and its relation to more complex behavior. One of the most creative of the scientists who contributed greatly to neuroscience was Ivane S. Beritashvili, who with Canadian Herbert Jasper and French Henri Gastaut was one of the founders of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) in 1958-1960. He was a Georgian physiologist who graduated from St. Petersburg University. Since the end of 1920s he pursued ingenious and extensive investigations of behavior and comparative memory in vertebrates that revealed the unique nature of mammalian behavior processes, which he forthrightly called ‘image-driven’. With a great progress in neuroscience a very little academic literature exist on authors of this advancement. This book aims at presenting the figure of an outstanding physiologist of the twentieth century I.S. Beritashvili through his fundamental achievements in neuroscience, as well as some adversities of his life.

Merab G. Tsagareli: Ph.D., D.Sc. His research focuses on the TRP channels, analgesia and tolerance effects of NSAIDs. His other interest is the history of neuroscience. He was Director of the Beritashvili Institute of Physiology (2006-2008). At present he is Laboratory director at Beritashvili Center for Experimental Biomedicine, Tbilisi, Georgia.