This book is intended for medical students and advanced undergraduates such as physicists and mathematicians with inter-disciplinary interests, biophysicists, medical physicists, applied mathematicians and others who wish to understand medicine in mathematical terms as well as current mathematical applications in physiology and medicine. The mathematical presentation is clear and self-contained.This book, representing 15 years of work at RAND Corporation and USC on chemotherapy, pharmacokinetics and nuclear medicine, attempts to direct medical scientists towards mathematical aspects of problems in medicine. The book begins with an introduction to compartmental models and matrix theory, highlighting the advantages of the approach. Discussions on how questions in observations and testing lead to multi-point boundary value problems are presented. The potentials of the digital computer in the bio-medical field are examined. A new approach -- dynamic programming -- to overcome clinical constraints is covered in detail. The reader should obtain a broad impression of where future research opportunities in the biochemical field lie.

Mental Chronometry (MC) comprises a variety of techniques for measuring the speed with which the brain processes information. First developed in mid-1800, MC was subsequently eclipsed by more complex and practically useful types of psychometric tests stemming from Alfred Binet. This class of mental tests, however, has no true metric relating the test scores to any specific properties of the brain per se. The scores merely represent an ordinal scale, only ranking individuals according to their overall performance on a variety of complex mental tasks. The resulting scores represent no more than ranks rather than being a true metrical scale of any specific dimension of brain function. Such an ordinal scale, which merely ranks individuals in some defined population, possesses no true scale properties, possessing neither a true zero or equal intervals throughout the scale. This deficiency obstructs the development of a true natural science of mental ability. The present burgeoning interest in understanding individual differences in mental abilities in terms of the natural sciences, biology and the brain sciences in particular, demands direct measures that functionally link brain and behavior. One such natural ratio scale is time itself - the time it takes the brain to perform some elementary cognitive task, measured in milliseconds. After more than 25 years researching MC, Jensen here presents results on an absolute scale showing times for intake of visual and auditory information, for accessing short-term and long-term memory, and other cognitive skills, as a function of age, at yearly intervals from 3 to 80 years. The possible uses of MC in neurological diagnosis and the monitoring of drug effects on cognition, the chronometric study of special time-sensitive talents such as musical performance, and presents a theory of general intelligence, or g, as a function of the rate of oscillation of neural action potentials as