Reddit reviews Principles of Neural Science

Kandel - Principles of neural science is the best by far, despite being just a little bit outdated on some areas (but so are all other textbooks in this field). Bears Neuroscience: Exploring the brain is a very easy read, goes down like yoghurt, but is far less comprehensive and not so in depth as Principles.

Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science is the classic textbook used by everyone. It's pretty dense and may be a little outdated but it's still among the best and most popular out there.

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016

The principles of neural Science:
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016

Great book all around. See if you can grab it used at a college at the end of a semester.

you should read up into the organization of the visual cortex and temporal lobes - learning about the structure and function of the brain is very helpful in understanding why the psychedelic experience is the way it is. an excellent introductory book if you are interested in learning about neuroscience is Kandel's Principles of Neural Science.

http://www.amazon.ca/Principles-Neural-Science-Fourth-Edition/dp/0838577016

If you want the standard sequence of Neuroscience textbooks, there is a rough ordering of 3 common books. Each are very comprehensive and more than you would likely be able to read cover to cover, but they get more sophisticated and comprehensive as you go. The last one specifically is essentially the bible of neuroscience and you will be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive coverage of any of the topics outside a specialised textbooks or research papers.

These books will cover the general overview of neuroanatomy, physiology, pharmacology and pathology but if you want to go further in depth, there are more advanced books for each of those and dozens of other subfields.

1. Purves - Neuroscience
   
2. Bear - Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain
   
3. Kandel - Principles of Neural Science
   
   I would specifically recommend Nolte - The human brain: an introduction to its functional anatomy as an exceptional example of a specialised text. Unfortunately, I do not recall the neurpharmacology text that I used, but it was very good too. I shall look it up and get back to you! For a more general introduction to pharmacology, the standard text is Rand and Dale - Pharmacology.

This is my go-to review on the subject, written by the man who won a Nobel prize on the subject: Eric Kandel.

He also literally wrote the book on neuroscience.

Also, microbiology is the study of bacteria, viruses and protozoa. The term you want is cellular and molecular biology.

I was in the exact same place as you near the end of my undergraduate years. I started college with the idea of getting an MD and joined a lab only to pad my application to medical school. After shadowing doctors, volunteering at free medical clinics, and working in two different research labs, I finally decided to do the PhD. I even went so far as to take both the MCAT and GRE. That turned out to be a good thing since I did well enough on the MCAT to teach MCAT prep for Kaplan and supplement my meager PhD stipend. Have you considered a combined MD/PhD program?

1. A PhD generally takes five years, but the range of people I know is from 4-7 years. The nice thing is that there is no debt. You get paid to go to graduate school. It's not much, but it's enough to live on.
   
   
2. The job market is pretty diverse actually. Academia is certainly a very common path, but tenure track jobs are hard to come by right now. There are lots of opportunities in industry (biotech, pharma), government (policy, advisory roles), legal (patent), or anything where an analytical mind and the ability to quickly adapt to new information is important. I know people who have gone on to all of those types of positions. None of my grad school colleagues are unemployed, but some of them have had to change their paths when their first choice didn't work out. I don't know about more comprehensive statistics on the job market for PhDs though.
   
   
3. If you want to learn more about basic neuroscience, I would recommend a textbook like this one:
   http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016
   It's a bit out of date, but it's widely regarded as one of the best basic neuroscience textbooks out there. I keep hearing rumors of a new edition, but the release dates keep changing.
   Depending on your level of skill and access, you could always check out new issues of the journals Neuron or Nature Neuroscience. It's a good idea to know a bit about what interests you so you can target your grad school applications.
   
   
4. Right now? Probably cancer. We don't know enough about how to work with these cells yet.

kandel
bear
purves
martin

Each of these books is aimed at a different audience, but this should get you started.

This is how I understand the two most popular out there:

Principles of Neural Science (4th edition) has been the gold standard of neuroscience textbooks. It's been called the "bible" of neuroscience and a great jumping off point for anyone who wants to get a very technical and medical perspective on the various functions of the brain. The fifth edition is set to come out this October so I don't know if you'd want to wait or jump into this one but from what I understand this is the number 1.
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016

The other textbook that is popular, that I've read most of, is Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (3rd edition). This textbook makes a lot of the topics that you'd like to learn about organized and easy to understand. While this book probably doesn't go into as much detail as Kandel's, it is a wonderful jumping off point to learn a lot of the basics about neuroscience and to get a solid understanding of a lot of mechanisms controlled by the brain. I highly suggest this one if you're new to neuroscience and not in medschool.

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-Mark-F-Bear/dp/0781760038

Most of my sources are textbooks and wikipedia for a quick search... On my desk I have Molecular Biology of the Cell and Principles of Neural Science both of which are decent reference texts to have on your shelf. Beyond that, I think I can scrounge up a few good reviews on the subject if there's any interest, but this being Reddit, most people don't have access to papers behind paywalls...

It all depends on what your intent is. Neuroscience is so broad and interdisciplinary that my recommendations depend largely on how much time and effort you plan to put into it. Are you trying to understand the brain so that you can go into research someday? Is neuroscience relevant to your separate field of research, and you just wanna get to know all the acronyms? Or are you just a curious layman who wants to understand the organ of understanding? In the latter two cases, many of the suggestions are very good; books by anyone from Ramachandran to Koch will suffice.

But if headed into neural research, you should really grab an introductory textbook that explains the principles of the brain (I recommend this one) and go through it, chapter by chapter, so you get the fundamentals down before you move onto deeper inquiries. If you have the money to spare, you should also pick up Principles of Neural Science as a reference book for more in-depth inquiries. The reason for this is that the Kandel book is really dense and somewhat poorly organized, which makes it rather inefficient to a neuroscience newcomer who mainly needs the basic ideas.

More important than which book you pick up, though, is how you read it. It's very important at this stage to really start thinking about the big questions in each subfield so that 1) you don't gloss over important details or, worse, crucial principles; and 2) you're preparing your mindset for research. You can't read it as a passive observer, absorbing information rather than processing it. Ask questions. How do we know this and this about the brain? What principles can we anticipate about the brain (and by implication: perception, memory, cognition) based on its structure and development? When do neurons first start firing anyway? If you're doing it right, you'll be making use of Kandel a lot to probe deeper — and eventually review/experimental papers when you're ready.

tl;dr - Read that shit if you're doing research and you'll thank me later.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0838577016/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1517968463&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=principles+of+neural+science&dpPl=1&dpID=51aom9pcslL&ref=plSrch

Principles of Neural Science by Kandrl et al.

As someone who studies neuro and works in neuro I can safely say this tome is my bible. It is huge, 37 bucks new because it is an old edition, one of the few textbooks I'd call well written, and has huge listings of primary lit to read for each chapter. It's not primarily for entertainment like most of the books I've seen put here. Man, it is worth its substantial weight in gold. If you actually want to learn, and a diverse amount in the field, get this. If you ever get stuck on points the internet is a truly amazing resource. However, this book is so well written I doubt that will happen often.

My SO uses this!

Edit: The 5th edition, my bad.

Kandel's Principles is a great one, and the textbook I used when I was a TA. You can buy older issues for like $15 shipped

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/ol/0838577016/ref=mw_dp_olp?ie=UTF8&condition=all

Anything by Oliver Sacks is going to give you a really cool look at individual case studies.

I think the best resource for starting out, or for more advanced readers, is Principles of Neural Science by Kandel. You could choose the chapters you're most interested (e.g., embryology and functional anatomy) and read them in any order since each chapter is essentially free-standing. (Source: b.s. in neuroscience + m.d.)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0838577016?pc_redir=1405881514&robot_redir=1#productDescription_secondary_view_pageState_1405953363324

Per amazon: "The book is a feast for both the eye and mind. The richness, the beauty, and the complexity of neuroscience is all captured in this...book."

The chapter on the basal ganglia and related motor disorders from Eric Kandel et al.'s last edition of Principles of Neural Science has a very nice overview IMO. If you search around the dark corners of the web, I'm sure a .pdf will find you.

My honest advice is to email some researchers whose work interests you. Grad school is a strange business, where the right advisor will want you to study under them and will pay you to make it happen. If you are really interested in doing research in a field for which your own country has no framework, you will have to move at some point. Grad studies are the ideal time to try it out, precisely because there isn't much financial risk.

As for teaching yourself, textbooks are your best friend. One that I really enjoyed was Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience by Purves et al.. Another panelist recommended a text book by Eric Kandel for a good background of basic neuroscience. There are also some good online resources like WikiBooks, though they are admittedly sparse or incomplete. Just start with the basics and work your way up.

Re: staying up to date, your current school may give you access to an online article database, which I would recommend scouring and reading everything you can get your hands on.