My mother, when studying child psychology in the 1970s, would tell me and my teenage siblings to crawl on our hands and knees beneath the furniture to experience the world as it was for young children. Instead, I followed the family dog around, wondering how a dog's-eye view might change my outlook on life. Neural Primer might be my redress for that early failure to experience life as other.

After years of confused musings about human consciousness, I began to explore other neural views of the world. These five books pay homage to the nervous structures of various animals. I chose the animals for the unique sensory and perceptual terrain offered by their alien architecture, imagined from our incarceration within our own nerves. The ability to live without pain receptors, to turn color with each emotional shift and to have sex after losing one's head are among the options presented by the anatomies of these animals.

Gail Wight, 2716 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berkeley, CA 94703, U.S.A.

Zoo Kit, DNA samples in a chest, 6 x 12 x 8 in, 1996.