Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

READING LIST: WHAT ARE THE BEST NEUROSCIENCE BOOKS FOR BEGINNERS?
by Alessandro Crimi PhD, University of Copenhagen
(with adds my your’s truly)

Neuroscience is a very broad term for a set of overlapping topics from different disciplines.
First of all, I would separate
… 1) clinical neuroscience from
… 2) psychological/behavioural/cognitive neuroscience.
… 3) Then there is computational neuroscience (also called neuroinformatics) which are a series of mathematical models to study or simulate at microscopic level certain aspects of the brain or groups of neurons.
… 4) Lastly, with the raise of high resolution MRI, we have an emergence of neuroimage which is now a field on its own.
Those topics are still full with open questions and complicated concepts. It is hard to mention books which are not superficial and delve a bit:

1) Despite that he won’t answer my PM’s and requests for a suggested reading list 😉 I’ll recommend a popular press book “Innate” by Kevin Mitchell, which is about as entry level as is useful.

2) If you want to have a broader view, which is not really academic, touches other fields, and are relatively lighter than what I mentioned before, I enjoyed recently the latest books of Antonio Damasio “the strange order of things” and Sean Carrol “the big picture” (mostly a criticism to Decartes and a revisiting of Schroedinger and Friston)

3) As an introductive book for all aspects I would recommend “Neuroscience” by Dale Purves, George J. Augustine, David Fitzpatrick, William C. Hall, Leonard E. White. It is probably among the most used textbook for introductory undergraduate course. I think it is even recommended by a Coursera course from Duke university. I think we are now at least at the 6th edition. The alternative is “Principles of Neural Science” by Eric R. Kandel et al.

4). For an introduction to neurobiology and some behavioral science I recommend “Cognitive neuroscience” of Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun.

5). For Neuroimage and brain-connectivity the first book of Olaf Sporns, the alternative is the book of Bullmore, Fornito and Zalesky.

6). Since I can imagine Izhikevich’s book are not easy to digest (I had a lot of headaches), a start for computational neuroscience is the Sterrat et al. text.
“Principles of Computational Modeling in Neuroscience”

And of course, you can watch my videos on the subject, where I focus on an operational understanding of how information works through the brain.