This volume is dedicated to the faith that the future will offer hard quantitative measures of the human thought process and affect-emotional system. the symposium from which this volume issues was an opportunity for us to invite a number of our friends to help in collecting some of the current contributions to this belief. the participants and topics weave a mosaic of the future. the selection was made in an attempt to project into the future what is most important in the present and in the relatively recent past in terms of generating hard data of the elusive cognitive-affect systems. we regret, because of editorial constraints, that we have not been able to include some of the outstanding contributions offered by our various chairmen. in particular, we are sorry that this volume does not reflect the thoughts of robert williams, r.j. ellingson, william fields, and especially those of our esteemed grand marshal, w. grey walter. this volume deals initially with the electroencephalographic measure ment of sleep profiles as such profiles may be used to measure the stresses of special environments and special patient populations. of particular interest is the correlation of sleep profiles with basic endocrine functions. we expect the measurement of sleep profiles to become more of a routine clinical examination in the next few years, as our understanding of this fascinating state of consciousness increases in terms of how it is influenced by real life stresses and disease processes.