Author: James W. Kalat
By Brooks Cole

A wonderful book anyone interested in the human body, 2001-12-17
This book really does have it all!
Whether you are a student on a course with a need for knowledge of neurological biology, or just have an interest into how the body works, this is the book for you.
As a psychology undergraduate with no great basis in biology, I had found the thought of learning about the physiological basis of psychology quite daunting. But this book makes everything so clear and easy to understand, it was a joy to read. The descriptive writing is good, and the use of diagrams for just about everything going in clear, easy steps is an absolute godsend!
If that makes it sound as if this is a beginner's book, it's not. The book merely starts from the basics and goes on into greater depth at a level that should suit all readers, no matter what their biological background. I have friends who often pick this book up and read sections of it just because they are fascinated with the subject, and they also find it highly interesting.
If you are taking a science course with any biological requirements to it, this is definitely one book you cannot afford to be without. I should know - I managed to get a first with a lot of help from it!!

Author: M. R. Bennett, P. M. S. Hacker
By WileyBlackwell

Excellent deconstruction of "nothing butery", 2007-12-09
This is a fine and detailed book. Takes a lot of reading, and thinking.

It's a necessary book at this time, and it takes on those people who think that thoughts are "nothing but" electrical and chemical events in the brain.It's a necessary counterbalance to some of the somewhat reductive views of brain function being proposed at present.

A very useful contribution to debate for both philosophers and neuroscientists. Doctors engaged in mental health work will find it interesting as well.

Author: György Buzsáki
By OUP USA

Rhythms of the Brain - a tour de force, 2008-10-18
Rhythms of the Brain
Professor Buzsáki has written an excellent, scholarly book on brain oscillations, his speciality. The work is dense but very readable and is all the better for being by a single author rather than an edited collection of review articles. Appropriately, the book is divided into 13 cycles rather than chapters and each cycle ends with a brief and useful summary. He combines ideas from the neurosciences with those from chaos theory and non-linear dynamics, pointing out in the introduction (p13) that "complexity can be formally defined as nonlinearity and from nonlinear equations, unexpected solutions emerge". Put simply complex behaviour of a dynamic system such as the brain cannot be predicted from the behaviour of individual neurones or small neuronal ensembles.

Professor Buzsáki promotes the view that the inside-our approach to neuroscience enhances our understanding of relatively unperturbed brain states because "self-generated behaviour and emergent large-scale oscillations tend to occur in the unperturbed brain". In the introductory cycle he argues that during exploration of the brain, experimental perturbation of network interactions and emergent functions will yield hints of causality. He then successfully adopts this approach for much of the rest of the book. In cycles 2 and 3 Professor Buzsáki discusses form and function, indicating that preferentially connected areas of the cortex form the basis of higher order cortical systems, e.g. for movement and/or vision. He points out that the diversity of cortical functions can only be achieved by inhibition and by complex networks of interneurones offering the basis for temporal coordination, often accomplished by oscillations. In Cycle 4 (Windows on the Brain), he outlines the currently available monitoring techniques most frequently used to investigate the oscillatory behaviour of neuronal networks, including EEG, positron emission tomography, optical imaging, recordings from single neurones, and high density recordings with silicon probes.

Professor Buzsáki's fundamental argument is that most of the brain's activity is generated from within and that external inputs cause only minor departures from its internal programme. Thus the brain "does not simply process information but also generates information", observable in the EEG as a blend of rhythms unable to phase-lock with each other because their mean frequencies are not integers. These oscillations are metastable and result from the physical architecture of neuronal networks (cycle 5). In cycle 6 he discusses synchronization by oscillation based on self-organized interactions among neurones, which he argues may be the source of cognitive function. Cycle 7 discusses the self-organized oscillatory rhythms connected with rest and sleep - the default pattern of the brain in the absence of environmental inputs. In cycle 8 the perturbation of various default patterns by experience is explored and it is shown that sensory representations in the brain acquire real-world metrics early in development by first acquiring information about the three-dimensional nature of the skeletal muscle system. Cycle 9 considers the "Gamma Buzz" in the waking, activated cortex through which neuronal assemblies organize themselves into "temporal packages" lasting 15-30 ms which may be involved in perceptual binding of object features. Buzsáki then goes on to show that perceptions and actions are brain-state dependent (cycle 10), which adds to his argument that a given environmental perturbation leads to modification of "a perpetually evolving network pattern in the brain's landscape". Cycle 11 talks of navigation in real and memory space and how the hippocampus is the search engine for the retrieval of archived information with theta oscillations related to episodic and semantic memory, path integration and "map-based"/landmark navigation. Further transient oscillations are used to transfer this information to the neocortex, when cortical assemblies are transiently entrained to the theta rhythm (cycle 12). The final cycle investigates the relationship between structural connectivity and global function.

It is difficult to do justice to Professor Buzsáki's tour de force in a short review. I can only recommend that those with an interest in the neuroscience should read and learn from it.

Author: Martin Brüne
By OUP Oxford

Author: James D. Fix, Jennifer Brueckner
By Lippincott Williams and Wilkins

very good review book, 2002-05-31
a very good book for review for both the usmle board exams or for revision for neuroanatomy a few days before exams. nice helpful diagrams but they are in black and white also no index but overall a good book

Author: Eric J. Nestler, Steven E. Hyman, Robert Malenka
By McGraw-Hill Medical

Author: Daniel J. Levitin
By Atlantic Books

Mind blowing, 2009-01-05
I got this book as a birthday present and my first thoughts were: am I going to understand any of this? Isn't it just going to take away from the joy of listening if I know the reasons why I respond in certain ways - like revealing how a magic trick is done?

The answers to these questions came fast. Yes, I could understand all of it. Having little to no knowledge of science or biology, a lifelong obsession with playing guitar but with little theoretical knowledge, I assumed large parts of this book would go straight over my head. Not true. I haven't read a non-fiction book that was such a page-turner and constantly revelatory in I don't know how long. Daniel Levitin's down-to-earth, chatty prose belies the wealth of information that he gives the reader, and every five minutes I was sitting back and saying 'Wow!'.
My other reservation, about the 'magic' being diminished, was also unjustified, and in fact I found this book reigniting curiosity in the music I like and causing me to reevaluate the music I don't - was it some bad experience in my youth that caused me to loathe jazz, or is it simply that I wasn't exposed to the right stuff at the right time and my brain never made those all important schemas when it was malleable enough?
Some of the passages I found inspired me to write music in different ways, and think about the music I write in different ways, and as a (direct?) result, I have just finished composing a piece of music which I think is the best I have ever done.

Most of the more negative reviews I have read about this book seem to come from a reader's own musical tastes not being reflected by the writer - his own tastes seem to be mostly 70's rock and 50's jazz. I think these people missed the point. I certainly didn't know a lot of the music he was talking about (but if you're that interested, Daniel has put up all of the specific pieces referenced in the book on his website), but the points he made could be attributed to any style of music, and he is simply using the genres he is most familiar with to give the greatest insight. If you're looking for a book on how West Coast hip hop from 1994-1996 affects your brain, I think you'll be looking for a while.

Having now finished the book, and despite a number of other books sitting in my 'to read' pile, I've started reading it again. It's just that good.

Author: S Ings Simon
By W. W. Norton & Co.

Author: M Bennett
By Columbia University Press

Proper excitement over mind-body language, 2008-10-27
This brilliant book contains selections from 'Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience' of Maxwell Bennett (neuroscientist) / Peter Hacker (Wittgenstein specialist) and a 'triangle' discussion between these authors and Daniel Dennett and John Searle.
It is common in science to use intentional and phenomenal terms ('thinking', 'feeling', 'deciding') not only for people, but also for parts of people (especially brains and brain parts). According to 'Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience' this is not - as it seems - a matter of handy metaphor, but it reveals a misunderstanding and in the end incoherence of the language used. Talk about human beings and talk about biology are mixed in a way that adds smoke, to say the least.
Searle (as usual, imho) misses the point and keeps repeating that, for example, the foot as we feel it (part of the 'phenomenal body') is 'in our head'. It is just this sort of embarrassing silliness that Bennett and Hacker expose. In this way Searle does not really add to the discussion, but nevertheless he provides a clear illustration of the misunderstanding at stake.
The reaction of Dennett (beautifully written, but maybe a bit too sharp and personally hurt) is much more important. The differences between Bennett/Hacker and Dennett reveal an interesting tension: in what way can or must we stretch the common use of words like 'think', 'interpret', etc. that they provide more insight and not less?
Yes, Bennett and Hacker are right to warn us that you cannot jump to conclusions by using words in inconsistent ways (with clashing criteria or 'rules'). Don't confuse metaphor with explanation. Projecting human properties on body parts can actually hinder our understanding of the way brains work.
Dennett is right that stretching words is an inspiring way to try to make sense of the growing information we have on brain mechanisms. And he makes a point that his vision of sub-agents ('homunculi' with less functionality than the whole, and with appropriately and gradually less reason to be viewed with an 'intentional stance') does give a fascinating model for future research.
This subject can be seen as: how strictly (and how rigidly) Wittgensteinian should we want to be?
There's much to be said for both parties and this discussion alone already contributes to what Bennett and Hacker clearly had in mind: to sharpen our awareness of the words we use and to put full light on the boundaries between profit and distraction, between adding sense and getting under the spell of our own metaphors.

By Academic Press