Anyone know a good book on neuroscience?

Jamin2112

Banned
I've been interning for a neurologist (making mathematical toolkits for him) for over a year. He occasionally tells me about his patients and about the latest experiments in neuroscience. It's quite frightening, actually. Patients who have their brain hemispheres surgically severed ......... very frightening what can happen to them.

Anyways, can someone suggest for me an interesting book?
 

ollinger

G.O.A.T.
Principles of Neural Science by Eric Kandel is one of my favorites. Kandel is a gifted writer and highly respected scientist. (And having the cerebral hemispheres severed is less catastrophic than you may think; there are people born with congenital absence of the corpus callosum, and some have gone on to be members of this forum!)
 

Eph

Professional
Books? No. Journals are what you want. I typically use scholar.google.com, with a plugin for my school library so I can access any article I find.
 

ollinger

G.O.A.T.
As Avles points out, journal articles are really for people who already have a reasonably solid background in the field. I don't get the impression that's the case for the OP.
 

Jamin2112

Banned
In particular, I want to know how consciousness works and how an organism can be "self-aware." Any books that deal with neuroscientific theories of that nature?
 

PCXL-Fan

Hall of Fame
https://play.google.com/store/books...=book-MI0q14cy0QEC&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome But True Story About Brain Science

Phineas Gage was truly a man with a hole in his head. A railroad construction foreman, Phineas was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vermont, in 1848 when a thirteen-pound iron rod was shot through his brain. Miraculously, he survived another eleven years and became a textbook case in brain science. But he was forever changed by the accident, and what happened inside his brain will tell you a lot about how your brain works and what makes us who we are.
 

millicurie999

Semi-Pro
I want to know how consciousness works and how an organism can be "self-aware.

No one knows. It's the forefront of brain research. Nevertheless, have you read this by Crick?

Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

http://www.amazon.com/Astonishing-Hypothesis-Scientific-Search-Soul/dp/0684801582/ref=pd_sim_b_3

And this by Gerry Edelman:

A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination

http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Consciousness-Matter-Becomes-Imagination/dp/0465013775/ref=sid_av_dp
 
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Jamin2112

Banned
No one knows. It's the forefront of brain research. Nevertheless, have you read this by Crick?

Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

http://www.amazon.com/Astonishing-Hypothesis-Scientific-Search-Soul/dp/0684801582/ref=pd_sim_b_3

And this by Gerry Edelman:

A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination

http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Consciousness-Matter-Becomes-Imagination/dp/0465013775/ref=sid_av_dp


Looks good! I might buy it.
 

sureshs

Bionic Poster
Monkeys and very young human children cannot understand who their reflection is, chimps and older humans can. An octopus has an idea of the extent of its body and uses that as a gauge of whether it can squeeze through a hole. On the other hand, a human with hippocampus removed (due to medical reasons) may not be able to recognize himself in a mirror or a photo ID.

It is fascinating how this might be happening, but it may just be a function of complexity of many units of the brain communicating with each other.

More interesting to me is the question of whether there is a link to Physics - i.e., is biological consciousness required to collapse the quantum wave function, thus rendering the Universe a mere figment of our imaginations.
 

Eph

Professional
As Avles points out, journal articles are really for people who already have a reasonably solid background in the field. I don't get the impression that's the case for the OP.

Um, okay, sure... In that case, while I was at MIT, we used the following books in the two neurosci classes I took:

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-Mark-F-Bear/dp/0683305964/ref=tmm_hrd_title_2

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393972194/ref=nosim/mitopencourse-20

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262041995/ref=nosim/mitopencourse-20


I still have the first two; the second is an excellent primer in the subject.


If you are trying to understand consciousness, you will need to study many fields and devote your life to it. If you want to talk intelligently on the subject to impress a female at a coffee shop, read a book written by a neuroscientist (perhaps one of the above, if one catches your fancy), read Turing's _Computing Machinery and Intelligence_ and maybe Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_.
 

Rippy

Hall of Fame
Kandel et al, or Bear et al are both popular textbooks. (Bear et al is less detailed and more accessible.)

For a lighter read, there's stuff like "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sachs.
 

PCXL-Fan

Hall of Fame
Monkeys and very young human children cannot understand who their reflection is, chimps and older humans can. An octopus has an idea of the extent of its body and uses that as a gauge of whether it can squeeze through a hole. On the other hand, a human with hippocampus removed (due to medical reasons) may not be able to recognize himself in a mirror or a photo ID.

It is fascinating how this might be happening, but it may just be a function of complexity of many units of the brain communicating with each other.

More interesting to me is the question of whether there is a link to Physics - i.e., is biological consciousness required to collapse the quantum wave function, thus rendering the Universe a mere figment of our imaginations.

Not sure how "complex" it is. It just means the brain is organized into different sections each with their unique function which the other sections have a varying degrees from hard to impossible replicating (given a length of time for an adult neuroplasty to occur). Recognition takes memory. The hippo-campus is the equivalent of the memory controller used for "retrieval of memories". Likely in the visual cortex there resides the image of ones self from past experiences with mirrors, reflections and photos, but when presented with the situation that requires recalling their visual self they fail. The memory still exists but its not retrievable.

If those surgical patients were told "this mirror image is you but through surgery you lost the ability to remember yourself" they would comprehend that statement for a minute until they forgot the statement. As long as there is no damage to other regions of the brain associated with short term memory and comprehension. I bet you people who suffer trauma to the visual cortex have varying degrees of difficulty remembering what they look like.

Monkeys don't seem to have the cognitive horsepower to realize their reflection. However give months or years of continuous exposure to a mirror I wouldn't be surprised if an intellectual breakthrough might occur.
 
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sureshs

Bionic Poster
Not sure how "complex" it is. It just means the brain is organized into different sections each with their unique function which the other sections have a varying degrees from hard to impossible replicating (given a length of time for an adult neuroplasty to occur). Recognition takes memory. The hippo-campus is the equivalent of the memory controller used for "retrieval of memories". Likely in the visual cortex there resides the image of ones self from past experiences with mirrors, reflections and photos, but when presented with the situation that requires recalling their visual self they fail. The memory still exists but its not retrievable.

If those surgical patients were told "this mirror image is you but through surgery you lost the ability to remember yourself" they would comprehend that statement for a minute until they forgot the statement. As long as there is no damage to other regions of the brain associated with short term memory and comprehension. I bet you people who suffer trauma to the visual cortex have varying degrees of difficulty remembering what they look like.

Monkeys don't seem to have the cognitive horsepower to realize their reflection. However give months or years of continuous exposure to a mirror I wouldn't be surprised if an intellectual breakthrough might occur.

I have read that monkeys could not recognize themselves after 20 years of looking at their reflection.
 

PCXL-Fan

Hall of Fame
I have read that monkeys could not recognize themselves after 20 years of looking at their reflection.

quick google search
Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Do Recognize Themselves in the Mirror: Implications for the Evolution of Self-Recognition
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012865

fetchObject.action

Examples of monkey self-directed behaviors in front of the mirror.

(A,B) images from video recordings taken over the course of approximately eight months following initial observations. In each photograph the hand used for grooming is highlighted with a red arrow. In (A) the monkey leaned to his left while sitting on the perch to be able to look at himself in the mirror. In (B) The same monkey held the mirror at the appropriate angle for viewing himself with the right hand while grooming the area around the implant with the left. (C,D) Self-directed behaviors with the large mirror from two other monkeys. View of the implants have been masked for discretion (A–C).
 
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sureshs

Bionic Poster
Then self-awareness and consciousness are probably overrated and easily explainable from brain structure.
 
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