neuroscience and neurobiology books

	The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow's Neuroscience
	By: Steven Rose ISBN: 019530893X Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Release Date: 13 July, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 279567	Steven Rose, a founding member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, has 40 years of publishing in neuroscience behind him. Since the 1960s he fought against "On Aggression," "The Territorial Imperative," "The Naked Ape" and has combated a whole succession of varieties of social Darwinism and biological determinism up to the current batch of snake oil salesmen marketing pharmaceutical solutions to social problems. <br />"The Future of the Brain" summarises the achievements and limitations of the great progress that neuroscience has made over recent decades, from one of the few neuroscientists who have appropriate modesty about what their science can tell us about the human condition and what it can't. If you have read any of the current crop of books on the mind, then you absolutely must read this book. If Rose is right, then we face grave dangers: not so much because neuroscience will enable a futuristic dystopia of thought-control or eugenic manufacture of super-brains, but rather that ill-advised and counter-productive medical intervention will enrich the pharmaceutical industry at the cost of increasing human suffering. <br />Rose gives a much more nuanced understanding of what the mind is, how it is enabled by our biology and shaped by our lives and those of our evolutionary and social forebears. <br /> Neurobiologist Steven Rose goes to great lengths to correct common misperceptions about the explanatory potential of current genetics, evolutionary psychology, and molecular neuroscience. Ultimately, only the last two chapters cover the "future" of the neurosciences, delving into topics like transcranial magnetic stimulation, pharmacological cognitive enhancement, and neuroethics. But before telling us where we're headed, Rose spends 10 chapters telling us where we've been, both in terms of cognitive change across the lifespan, the cascading processes of synaptogenesis and apoptosis seen in utero and in early childhood, and the changes in brains both across species and across evolutionary time. If "The Future of the Brain" could be said to have a central principle, it's that "the past is the key to the present," and it is here that Rose's talents as a writer truly shine: he integrates the histories of neurons, individuals, psychopharmacology, sociobiology, cognitive psychology and genetics into a coherent narrative, with both appropriate subtlety and engaging clarity. <br /> <br />Rose begins with theories of the origins of life, proto-cells, and nucleic acids. He uses this broad introduction to debunk the simplifications we often make without hesitation: thinking of humankind as the highest on some evolutionary scale of nature; considering organisms to be passive players in evolution; believing that evolution strives for increased complexity as time continues. As he writes, "all living forms on earth ... are more or less equally fit for the environment and life style they have chosen. I use the word chosen deliberately, for organisms are not merely the passive products of selection; in a very real sense they create their own environments ... The grand metaphor of natural selection suggers from its implication that organisms are passive, blown hither and thither by environment change as opposed to being active players in their own destiny." In this way, Rose complicates the popular notion of causality frequently seen in news articles, where researchers claim to have discovered a gene "for" this or that; to Rose, every result has multiple causes, both genetic and environmental. <br /> <br />After reviewing how neural nets may have initially developed in the first multicellular animals (Coelenterates), Rose describes the development of the mammalian cortex during gestation as autopoesis, the process of continual self-creation. The reader is whisked from fertilisation to the embryonic formation of the neural groove, to the birth of neurons and glia in the neural tube, to the migration of neurons as they follow concentration gradients of neural growth factors. We then follow changes in brain structure seen in hominins, then hominids, and finally homo sapiens. <br /> <br />The later chapters document the development of psychopharmacology and the rise of Big Pharma, from aspirin to valium and now Ritalin and Strattera. Rose winds up with fascinating predictions about the future of neurotechnology, all of them well-tempered by a thorough understanding of our past. <br /> <br />Rose's book is quite simply the best popular neuroscience writing I have read. It is hard to imagine another writer that could so seamlessly weave together the fields of genetics, cognitive science, neurophysiology, and pharmacology into such an entertaining yet informative book. Highly recommended... It is very well known that the brain is an incredibly complicated mass of tissue--not to mention a complicated and popular subject of today's trend sciences. Therefore to attempt to write anything concerning this feild would be considerably challenging, regardless of your educational and professional background...yet I believe that Steven Rose has done a great job for two very important reasons. <br /> <br />Firstly, Rose translates the subject and its ideas into a form that is digestible by all readers. Yet, the material is sometimes bland and redundant for those who have studied the subject in greater depth. <br /> <br />Secondly, Rose is honest. He not only critiques himself for past publications, but also comments how some of the material in the book has been illustrated in his own life. I believe that the latter is very important because it encourages the reader to do the same, and this type of learning, I personally believe, is awesome. Rose knows that although his entire audience are not experts, some of the ideas about the brain concerning memory, cognition and interpretation can be easily explored by experiences with one's surroundings; and this is what is so intriguing about biological sciences. <br /> <br />The book is a quick read and again, easy to understand. For those who have a background in the field, Rose presents the material well and gives a somewhat journalistic review of the current issues, fallacies and anticipations in the field. <br />
	Computational Neuroscience of Vision
	By: Edmund T. Rolls, Gustavo Deco ISBN: 0198524889 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Release Date: 10 January, 2002 Bioscience book rank: 881462
	Medical Neuroscience, Updated Edition: With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access
	By: Stephen E. Nadeau, Tanya S. Ferguson, Edward Valenstein, Charles J. Vierck, Jeffrey C. Petruska, Wolfgang J. Streit, Louis A. Ritz ISBN: 1416024042 Publisher: Saunders Release Date: 23 November, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 760079	The anatomy is explained with spacial relations of parts of the brain that have not been discussed. In some cases, the names exist only as descriptors and the location remains a mystery without another textbook. In other cases, there is a structure named with location shown in many places, but there is no description of it's function in the book. Acronyms exist without a glossary listing of them, so the only way to know the acronym is to flip back in the book until you find the location it is first used - fun for a >600 page book. when I first recived this book it seemed great, it was very colorful, has many diagrams and clinical case presentations that you may see on the USMLA. However, over time, it seemed difficult to read, often mentioning a topic without having previously having discused the topic. For example the motor systems chapter is very confusing and I had to use another textbook to understand plantar reflexes and B sign. I would say get the atlas and textbook by Nolte and the text by Martin.
	The Neuroscience Of Human Movement
	By: Charles T. Leonard ISBN: 0815153716 Publisher: Mosby Release Date: 01 September, 1997 Bioscience book rank: 895326	How do people make movements? <br />Do you want to know about movement? <br />This book give to you the information about how do people make <br />and control movements.
	The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience
	By: Thomas Stephen Szasz ISBN: 081560775X Publisher: Syracuse University Press Release Date: December, 2002 Bioscience book rank: 985212	The general impression of this book is that it is superficial, poorly argued, conspirative, unnecessarily accusatory and abusive, sometimes outright cynical, and fails to address fundamental questions about the relationship between brain and mind (or "mind", if you will). <br /> <br />Szasz asserts that mind as an entity doesn't exist, rather people mind (as a verb). Minding and thinking are self-conversations, we are told, inner dialogues that people have with themselves. And since the mind doesn't exist, mental illnesses don't exist, either. What does exist are people having self-conversations that society, in particular psychiatrists, don't understand and consider deviant (Szasz calls it "wrong-minding"). Therefore, these people are put away in psychiatric institutions and are forced to receive mental "treatment", which of course is no treatment at all but a poorly disguised means to keep "society's unwanted" at a safe distance. <br /> <br />Szasz focuses on "hearing voices" as a key symptom in schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), arguing, first, that "hearing voices" is an inadequate description of the phenomenology of this symptom. A better description is the "becoming audible of one's own thoughts". This may well be true. But, second and more importantly, Szasz claims that what is wrong with patients who "hear voices" is simply that they refuse to take responsibility for their own thoughts, that they willfully disavow their own inner voices. Szasz goes as far as claiming that "viewing the schizophrenic as a liar would advance our understanding of schizophrenia" (p. 130). "[T]he schizophrenic patient who "hallucinates" or has "delusions" is profoundly dishonest with himself. He denies that the voices he hears are his own thoughts and that his delusions are metaphors he interprets literally." (p. 130). "If, on balance, the voices would perturb him more than they please him, he would stop producing them" (p. 130/131). <br /> <br />Now, in the absence of very convincing evidence, I can't see such as view as anything else but utterly cynical and contemptuous. And there is nothing in the way of convincing evidence to be found in the book. Equally absurd is Szasz' claim that psychiatry, neuroscience and society at large have conspired to bereave unwanted citizens of their personal responsibility. Yet, we are told that exactly this is the hidden agenda of psychiatry and neuroscience. I don't know about American psychiatry, but at least here in Europe I know many psychiatrists or psychotherapists who are primarily motivated by the desire to help - simple as that. Szasz' claim is even more outlandish with regard to neuroscientists. I agree with him that in the US there is indeed an increasing erosion of personal responsibility, and an "infantilization" and "paternalization" of the citizen, evident mainly in legal practice. But this is a different issue, concerning normal, truly self-responsible people, not mental patients. <br /> <br />Regarding the ontological status of the mind, Szasz' book is as unsatisfactory as the rest. Although he repeatedly asserts that thinking or "minding" is internal self-conversation ("autologue"), this idea is left almost entirely unelaborated. For example, we're left to wonder if all mental phenomena are self-conversations, and if so, how this is supposed to work (e.g. feelings, pains, bodily sensations and sensory perceptions as self-conversations?). In fact, Szasz remains almost entirely silent on the relationship between brain and mind. He does, however, severely criticize the fashionable view that the mind is the brain, and pours derision over all those misguided neuroscientists and philosophers who believe so or who believe that something like a mind even exists. But his accusations are superficial and characterized more by abusive language than by argument. In this part of the book he comes across as someone who believes himself to be in certain possession of the truth and thinks that all others are idiots. This arrogant stance hardly conceals that Szasz simply evades the crucial question of how the brain is connected to what we call the mind. All he offers us are vacuous statements like "Mind and brain belong to different discourses." And simply asserting that mind as an entity doesn't exist likewise evades the important issues. Clearly, there are mental phenomena: various forms of consciousness, cognition, language, memory, imagination, to name just a few. Even insisting that all mental phenomena come down to self-conversations (a view I'm not sure Szasz holds), we would still be left with these inner conversations as mental phenomena. Whether or not you subsume these phenomena under the term "mind" doesn't seem to be such an important issue, provided using the term "mind" in this way doesn't lead our thinking astray. Of course, Szasz insists that the reification of the mind has already done enough damage, but if he thinks that the use of the word "mind" as a noun by neuroscientists or psychiatrists means that they hold dualist views of the mind as an immaterial substance or some such, he is clearly wrong. Most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind are not dualists. <br /> <br />In any case, we are left with the overwhelming evidence that mental phenomena are dependent on the brain. And it is the task of neuroscience and related disciplines to examine and explain the nature of this dependence. Like any organ of the body, the brain can be damaged or parts of it can become dysfunctional, and this can and often does manifest on the mental level. So there is no a priori reason to rule out that schizophrenia and other mental disorders are caused by brain alterations. Szasz has not much to say against this possibility except that patients with aphasia due to stroke (i.e. "real" brain damage) don't exhibit the same speech impairment as schizophrenics, and therefore the schizophrenic's disordered speech is unlikely to be based on brain damage. This, of course, is a non sequitur. <br /> <br />In the end, Szasz evades the relevant questions about the relationship between the brain and mental phenomena by drawing an all-too-convenient distinction between persons and brains. Persons have responsibility, brains don't. So don't blame a lack of personal responsibility on deficits of the brain. But the real challenge, I submit, is exactly to understand how something like personal responsibility and free will (etc.) can be rooted in a physical organ, our brain. It is just a cheap excuse to claim that mind and brain, or person and brain, belong to "different discourses". In the face of the overwhelming evidence for a tight link between the two, this explains absolutely nothing. <br /> <br />Yes, I too am worried about the increasing erosion of personal responsibility, including the dangers and abuse potential of insanity defenses in court (for an absurd example, google "twinkie defense"). I believe there is an important sense in which human beings are responsible for their actions (even if the latter turn out to be completely determined by brain processes), but taking seriously the evidence that, like all mental phenomena, responsibility depends on brain processes and doesn't just float free of any material substrate (that belief would be a true reification of the mental!), we have to acknowledge the possibility that it can be impaired or absent when certain processes in the brain run off track. That is, there is no easy answer to the question under what circumstances somebody is fully or partly responsible for their actions. Each case must be judged separately. And sometimes, brain damage and/or mental illness are relevant factors. To claim otherwise is to ignore the fruits of 20/21th century science - and psychiatry. This is an important book for anyone interested in such big issues as free will, neuroscience, morality, and the meaning of personhood. If you've wondered how Thomas Szasz can possibly believe that mental illness is a myth, here is the most basic answer. The idea of mental illness depends on a particular notion of "mind," and if that notion is mistaken, then the concepts dependent on it are likely mistaken also. Read it and see. Wonderfully written, informative, and thought-provoking. I still believe in everything I said about those remarks in THE MEANING OF MIND in my last review. But I would like to add that Thomas Szasz's view of psychiatry is the most profound critical appraisal available in the literature.
	Neuroscience of Communication (Singualr Textbook Series)
	By: Douglas B. Webster ISBN: 1565939859 Publisher: Singular Release Date: 01 August, 1998 Bioscience book rank: 647264	This book is definetely not an intro to a seriously heavy topic, the book <br />is wordy, the diagrams are all poorly drwn in plain black and white. And believe me when it comes to tracing pathways up to the brain a little color coding would help. Even the most simple concept is ultra wordy and is basically there to show how verbose Mr. Webster is. Im an Audiology doctoral student with a Speech Path and Psych background and this book will confuse the fudge out of anybody(and did)but neuroscience undergrads and neuroscientist.Do not buy,read other sources like Barr's The Human Nervous System or if you have to just share a copy and make copies this book sucks!! I received the book at the time I was told I would receive it.
	Clinical Neuroanatomy and Related Neuroscience
	By: M. J. T. FitzGerald, Jean Folan-Curran ISBN: 0702025585 Publisher: Saunders Ltd. Release Date: 15 December, 2001 Bioscience book rank: 780254	I highly recommend Clinical Neuroanatomy by FitzGerald and Fokan-Curran published by W. B. Saunders. It is marvelously colored and illustrated with much greater detail and clinical information than any other text I have seen. It is not in 'comic book' style. It is the real thing. It is an exceptional medical text (and priced accordingly). The medical illustration, scans, photos and other teaching aids are excellent and profuse. I have not seen a better text on neuroanatomy. If you are seriously in need of learning or reviewing your knowledge of this subject, this is the one. This text is very clear and concise, with excellent illustrations. It is easy enough to understand for someone without a strong biology background. definitely helpful! Do not bother buying this book. I think it was rated by professors rather than students. Most people in my class could not even use it as reference. Unless the buyer has a neuroscience background, this book will not be much use. I think the previous edition was better.
	Fast Oscillations in Cortical Circuits (Computational Neuroscience)
	By: Roger D. Traub, John G. R. Jefferys, Miles A. Whittington ISBN: 0262201186 Publisher: The MIT Press Release Date: 11 June, 1999 Bioscience book rank: 1014618
	Neurolab Spacelab Mission: Neuroscience Research in Space, Results From the STS-90, Neurolab Spacelab Mission
	By: Jay C. Buckey, Jerry L. Homick ISBN: 0972533907 Publisher: Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center Release Date: 21 May, 2003 Bioscience book rank: 944077	This book, published in 2003 as NASA Special Publication, NASA SP-2003-535, describes the experiments conducted on the Neurolab module which was flown on the Space Shuttle during the STS-90 mission and the subsequent results. The Neurolab module is essentially a Spacelab module which had flown 15 times on the Space Shuttle. This Spacelab mission focused specifically on the effects of microgravity on the nervous system, the understanding of the mechanisms responsible for neurological and behavioral changes in space. The book also includes technical reports on the procedures and equipment developed for the flight and perspectives of the crewmembers. <br /> <br />It is important to note that while this book is still in print (as of 3/2007) and can be purchased directly from the Government Printing Office. Regardless, many excellent quality used copies of this book in hardback are available cost between $25 -50. <br />
	Discoveries in the Human Brain: Neuroscience Prehistory, Brain Structure, and Function
	By: Louise H. Marshall, Horace W. Magoun ISBN: 0896034356 Publisher: Humana Press Release Date: 15 January, 1998 Bioscience book rank: 249754	I would not recommend this book unless the areas of the brain are already known to the reader. It was well written and the history of the discoveries are well explained. I had trouble when, for example, the book would say a certain section of the brain was at one time thought to be the seat of all emotions. It would list various experiments that would take place. You ended up knowing the history, but not necessarily the location within the brain, or what the final verdict of that area of the brain actually turned out to be. I am sure with a little introductory background reading about the brain this book would have made more of an impact on me. I believe the author should have expended with a few more paragraphs to tie-in and explain the final result or today's best guess about that area of the brain. I read this book doing research as a criminal defense lawyer. I found it fascinating and very helpful. thanks to editors.