(Part 2) Top products from r/neuro

This is a great list so far, and I'd love to see it added to the sidebar.

I'd suggest adding "Neuroethics" by Martha J Farah under "Other". It gives an interesting perspective on the influence of neuroscience on law and society.

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroethics-Introduction-Readings-Basic-Bioethics/dp/0262514605

"The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams" is good for anyone interested in neuroanatomy. I've only used the 3rd edition- there is an updated edition, but I can't speak to how useful it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Brain-Photographs-Diagrams-CD-ROM/dp/0323045731/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411223019&sr=1-2&keywords=the+human+brain+in+photographs+and+diagrams

"Structure of the Human Brain" is a very comprehensive section-by-section atlas of the brain.

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Human-Brain-Photographic-Atlas/dp/019504357X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223434&sr=8-1&keywords=structure+of+the+human+brain+a+photographic+atlas

"Molecular Neuropharmacology" is a good advanced text for anyone interested in drug development.

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundation-Clinical-Neuroscience/dp/0071481273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223180&sr=8-1&keywords=molecular+neuropharmacology

I've mentioned these because they seem to fill gaps that are currently in the library. If anybody knows of better anatomical texts, though, I'd be interested to know about them!

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.

Hi there,

Some suggestions for ya!

The Quest for Consciousness by Christof Koch. Minimal neuroscience background required, but the more you know, the more you'll derive from this book. Focused on illustrating how complex networks can manifest behaviour (and consciousness). Outside of Koch's regular pursuits as an electrophysiology, he worked alongside Francis Crick (ya that one), to study arousal and consciousness. It's a fantastic read, and it's quite humbling.

Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki. Written for neuroscientists and engineers as an introductory textbook into network dynamics, oscillations, and behaviour. One of my favorite books in the field, but it can also be the most challenging.

Treatise of Man by Rene Descarte. Personal favorite, simply because it highlights how far we've come (e.g. pineal gland, pain, and animal spirits).

Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux provides the fantastic realization that "you are your synapse". Great circuit/network book written with a lot of psychological and philosophical considerations.

Finally...

Physical control of the mind--towards of psychocivilized society by the one and only Jose Delgado. (In)Famous for his experiments where he stopped a bull charging at him through amygdala stimulation- along with some similar experiments in people- Delgado skirts the line between good intention and mad science. It's too bad he's not taught more in history of neuroscience.

Get Seeley's Anatomy & Physiology / Seeley's Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology or Sherwood Physiology.


All of these books have older editions on eBay for a lot cheaper than what Amazon sells new ones for, and not a whole lot changes in both topics over the years (almost none). Physiology textbooks cover basic biology pretty well. Sherwood is written in a way that can easily be understood by a non science major and I enjoyed the analogies they gave to clear up concepts. Seeley's A&P texts have physiology with anatomy integrated - basically two textbooks in one - and also include a good refresher chemistry chapter as well. But if anatomy is not necessary, then I'd go with Sherwood Physiology.

If you want a more, in-depth college Biology textbook, look into Campbell's Biology.

~I used Sherwood and Seeley's a few times during first year in Med School.

• Purves text isn't that easy but a great and thorough introduction.
  
• Gazzaniga's text is fantastic but less on the biology side of things.
  
• Others have mentioned Kandel's text but I don't think that's a good first text for anyone wanting to "dip their toes" in.
  
• Someone else also mentioned the Bear text, which is very good.
  
  Those are really all you'll need; from there you will find things on your own or from professors.

My lab had this book by Ashby. I didn't use it that much but the first few chapters do a good job of introducing concepts behind proper experimental design and why design is so important to the GLMs you'll use to analyze the data. To be honest though, Vince Calhoun is the real person to listen to when it comes to fMRI analysis. He has a way deeper and broad understanding of the bold signal and how to analyze it than old school people like Friston or Ashby.

I cannot more strongly recommend Steven W. Smith's The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing.

Every chapter is freely available as a PDF on the website.

Everyone who is interested in EEG/ECoG/LFP/single-unit research should absolutely read this book.

Steve Luck's Introduction to the Event Related Potential Technique is great, and will really help you to set up a top-quality ERP lab, but the DSP book really teaches you what happens to the signals you're recording.

If you want to get deeper into the underlying physiology of EEG, I'd recommend Electric Fields of the Brain by Nunez & Srinivasan.

You'd also be happy reading Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain.

It looks like the other answers are sufficient, but I want to mention the book I just read, which details how brain size and brain region size evolves. It is called Principles of Brain Evolution and it is a fun, easy read for someone who already has a background in neuro as well as evolution.

I've read quite some books in this area, including The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. I've also read quite a bit about synaptic plasticity, brain changes, adult neurogenesis etc. in Dale Purves his textbook on Neuroscience.

It seems clear to me that certain brain circuits have been reinforced over time, which lead to his current state of a very fixed mindset. For instance, the brain region very much involved in emotions is the amygdala. Which has projections to the vmPFC which seems to play a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision making and self control. It seems like there's something in this area which might be relevant to this particular case.

What do you think?

Principles of Neuroscience is a grad-school level book. I would not recommend shelling out $100 for it.

This book, Cognitive Neuroscience by Michael Gazzaniga, is a great book for someone at your age. It's super cheap and very easy to understand.

If you go with a textbook from an author like Kandel or Purves or Bear, you are going to be jumping straight into the deep end and might easily get discouraged.

Dale Purves et al, Neuroscience, 6th edition. This is a good overview of neuro. I've seen it used in grad courses but it was also was a mainstay of undergrad.

After that, the latest edition of Principles of Neural Science, Eric Kandel et al. This is more involved and is often used as a reference for labs and grad students. Some might say this is a grad level book; however, I personally needed it for both undergrad and grad.

You might want to get both of them at the same time, so Kandel can be used if needed for further information whilst reading Purves. Both of these books can likely be found as pdfs on libgen.io.

Neuroanatomy: I used a book called The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams by John Nolte but there are many resources out there. She might want to get some free software to examine the brain in 3d. The Allen institute comes to mind.

I imagine this program is not research based, but she should still get used to reading papers, and also keep an eye on current neuro news. Science Daily, Neuroscience News, and New Scientist are good places to start. That said, reading papers can be hard if you don't have the background (neuro, stats, lab techniques).

I'm not sure how much time she has, so realistically speaking I would focus on reading Purves front to back and use everything else I've listed as supplementary first, and then dig deeper into them if she has the time.

Maybe this was already obvious to you, in which case apologies, but those are very broad topics. What kind of level of aggregation are you thinking of? Neural engineering sounds a bit more neural network-y, rather than large-scale human cognitive processes, which would involve measurement methods like EEG and fMRI that won't tell you much (broadly speaking) about the way networks of neurons do computations. You also have local field potential or clamping measurements, where you're looking at what specific neurons (or at least way smaller scales) are doing, which is more animal research. And there's computational modelling which is (relatively, to my knowledge) as yet hardly connected to the usual methods of measuring brain activity.

That said: I read this as an intro to neural networks, http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computational-Neuroscience-Thomas-Trappenberg/dp/0199568413 and remember liking it, but I was coming from a psych background so I don't know if it would be rigorous enough for you. For the biology / anatomy, the classic is http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/dp/0071390111/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=17R09KD62178HQ06E1VJ.

There's a paper by Wang (1999) with an integrate-and-fire neuron model that I implemented as a toy model that helped me get to grips with the computational side of things. I can't comment on how influential it is theoretically.

http://www.amazon.com/Synaptic-Self-How-Brains-Become/dp/0142001783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311384751&sr=8-1

Also look it up on Google books.

It covers topics with enough depth for you to actually learn something, while keeping things way more brief and interesting than a typical textbook, plus it has a bunch of very helpful illustrations. It does all that while still teaching you a substantial amount of the science, experiments, terminology and theories.

Don't forget that it's also 12 dollars.

As the saying goes, this book is like a good skirt. Long enough to cover the material, but short enough to keep things interesting. Enough said. I can't recommend it enough.

The brain is a computer. To the limit that language is all metaphor, this is the most accurate way of describing what the brain does. You have to begin with the appreciation that your desktop PC is not the sole definition of a "computer". The brain is a device that computes. Neurons do indeed perform algorithmic transformation, including addition/subtraction, division, integration, etc.

I highly suggest checking out this book for a gentle beginning example: https://grey.colorado.edu/CompCogNeuro/index.php?title=CCNBook/Main

This book has been recommended to me, but I found it too dense to be a fun read: http://www.amazon.com/Spikes-Exploring-Neural-Computational-Neuroscience/dp/0262681080

I'm reading Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience right now and find it to be a great source of information on topics like this. Definitely a lot more in depth than just brief summaries, but you could probably skim around it and find the information you need pretty quickly. Brains are complicated.

All right. I took that one on the side while working on my thesis. I'd say the tricky part is SPM; learning what to do, and when to do it. As I mentioned my data were already pre-processed yet I still struggled to understand what I actually had to do in SPM. It's a steep learning curve (at least it was for me) but I was doing it all via GUI since I'm wasn't that familiar with MATLAB prior to this. If you are, then scripting will make your days a lot easier.

This book is a good introduction to the underlying methods of fMRI, if you haven't already got that covered. Then I'd suggest you head over to the SPM8 website and try out their data sets and tutorials!

This book is incredibly helpful. It goes into the nitty gritty on ion channels and interneuronal function, so I'm not sure how helpful it would be to large scale modeling of function. Labmates are always borrowing it because of how useful it is. I got it used but it looks like amazon is only selling it new.

I'm a fan of Martin's Neuroanatomy - Text and Atlas.
It seems to be the best one I've come across so far.
Sadly, I haven't a pdf/epub edition.

I've always found Geoff Nicholl's intro text to be my favorite- it's what I was taught with, and what my friend now use to teach intro to neurosci-

http://www.amazon.com/Neuron-Brain-Cellular-Molecular-Approach/dp/0878934391/ref=pd_sim_b_51

It's a very nuts and bolts approach to the brain from the basics of cellular physiology.

Another good read is David Linden's accidental mind:

http://accidentalmind.org/free_chapters/

This is a nice place to start. Here is another free online asset.

MATLAB for Neuroscientists will probably come in handy.

Theoretical Neuroscience is a classic.

Then we have Fundamentals of Computational Neuroscience.

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Brain-Evolution-Georg-Striedter/dp/0878938206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397844469&sr=8-1&keywords=georg+striedter

The above is a great book. If you want the full treatise, try this:

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Nervous-Systems-Four-Volume-Set/dp/0123925606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397844453&sr=8-1&keywords=evolution+of+nervous+systems

I went to a lecture by Terry Sejnowski last year, you may enjoy his work.

Some of his research included making a computational video camera that 'sees' like our eyes and brains do. It was able to reduce bandwidth to several orders of magnitude below that required for a classic camera.

http://cnl.salk.edu/

http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Brain-Neuroscience/dp/0262531208

Also, for a basic understanding of edge detection, see Hubel and Wiesel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VdFf3egwfg

For an explanation of how edge detection emerges from neurons, see the animations in the Visual Cortex section here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paskari/report_4

do you not have a textbook available to you in your phd course?


http://www.amazon.com/Ion-Channels-Excitable-Membranes-Third/dp/0878933212/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425570312&sr=8-1


This is the one a lot of grad courses use. It's fairly easy to read and peppered with subtle humor.

Former human neuroimager here. This is the best textbook intro to functional neuroimaging.

+1 on the Purves text. I find it pretty accessible even though my background is not neuroscience (or any other type of biological science). Also, you can pick up a used copy of an older edition for less than $20

Yep. I got one for you

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B009F7NF6K/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

This book and really anything by Sejnowski

For those looking for the non-mobile site:

Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines---and How It Will Change Our Lives

kandel
bear
purves
martin

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

Seconded. Another book in that vein is Ashby's Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data:(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262015048/ref=rdr_ext_sb_pi_sims_2)

From Neuron to Brain is a concise yet thorough introduction to the field. If you don't feel like getting Kandel or Squire, this should do. It's meant to be read through chapter to chapter.

None.

Honestly, neuro is in such flux that much of what I learned in my intro class at the beginning of grad school is now wrong, superseded, or not interesting anymore.

I also think that it depends on what you are interested in. Systems? Cognitive? Molecular? Each of these things have a different set of 'useful' readings; I tend to be more of a systems/computational guy so I would recommend Spikes but ymmv

I have some suggestions but don't depend on supplements, only use them for emergencies or kinks in your schedule, and never take more than one sleep aid at a time. Magnesium is just a general vitamin, so it's fine. Obviously the goal is your own body clock, not 'a clock made out of drugs.' I'm not sure if your job helps keep your wake-up cycle regular but I'm assuming you came here because your own natural rhythm isn't working for you. Better than any supplement or drug will just be waking up at the same time every day- yes booboo even on the weekends.

Definitely Block Blue Light: Like everyone else is saying this needs to be done on ALL devices. Phone and computer (get a program called f.lux, for mac and pc) and TV if you can figure out how. Otherwise you never produce your own melatonin- AND you might keep making cortisol. Make sure your LIGHT BULBS in your house are warm and orange/yellow, think 'SUNSET,' none of that bright white mortician LED bullshit they keep selling now. I use night lights after sun down.

Wake Up With The Same Amount of Sunlight: Once your eyes detect high frequency blue/sunlight, your body will make cortisol to wake you up. I don't want to wake up at DAWN so I keep mine half closed with the same amount of space open for a strong sliver of light to greet me. Keep the blinds closed and you won't get this, or as much. You'll feel groggy and unrested. If you don't have access to sunlight, you'll need to get an alarm clock that mimics it with growing light in your face.

Melatonin: Not only is melatonin a good idea, but you want to take the SMALLEST dose you can find, otherwise you'll screw up your own melatonin system and make both your own and the drug ineffective. Don't ask me why but most supplements are 5 mg when they should be 1 mg or less. Melatonin is also a really powerful antioxidant, it's kind of like a facial for your sleeping brain.

Magnesium: you really can't go wrong with taking more Magnesium (you'll know when you've taken too much bc you'll shit yourself), most americans are deficient.

"Magnesium plays a part in regulating GABA, a neurotransmitter that is made in the brain. Low levels of GABA have been linked to chronic pain, depression, anxiety and even epilepsy. GABA imbalance has also been implicated in panic disorder and sleep disturbances, according to health expert Dr. Josh Axe." It is also a natural anti-inflammatory that should also reduce symptoms of chronic pain, restless legs, and other ailments you might have, and will even help your digestion.

Valerian: Another "natural" sleep aid is Valerian root, a plant which is believed to mimic adenosine, aka the opposite of taking caffeine. Usually if you've had an active day, adenosine builds up and your brain measures this to make you sleepy- but you might not have enough if you just have an office job. I've found it in liquid herb or tea form. It smells AWFUL. I prefer the tea. This one really knocks you out, but you can build tolerance fast, so I'd save it for your most restless nights.

My uncle is a sleep doctor, I'm a neuroscience grad and I went from the most chaotic schedule ever to just naturally waking up at 8 am. I use blue light filters on everything and occassionally take melatonin or valerian for sleepless nights.