Customer Reviews

Neuroscience, Fourth Edition

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The reason that this reader was dissatisfied with the book was not because it was a bad book, but because he picked up the wrong book for what he was interested in, namely cellular/molecular neuroscience, which this book is clearly not about. I regard this book more of a systems-based approach to neuroscience - the book attempts to give you a "gestalt" view of how the different functional subsystems work. For a more basic text, I'd advise you to read Bear's Neuroscience. For a more reductionist text, maybe you could read something like "From the Neuron to the Brain"

Oh, and I forgot to add, this is an excellent book for the purpose for which it was written.

While taking neurobiology as a graduate student I used this text to supplement Principles of Neural Science. While I read Principles and enjoyed it, I used Neuroscience to study for course exams and my departmental preliminary examination. The writing is clear, concise, and very to the point. Unlike Principles, experimental studies underlying the facts are not described in as much detail in Neuroscience (this presentation of information is better when you want to get to the core of what you need to know). While many new texts like to go into heavy detail about new drug and genetic manipulations for neurological and psychological disorders, speculations in Neuroscience about such "up to the minute" information is kept to a minimum. The messages of the wonderful color illustrations accompanying the text are easy to grasp (they serve their purpose very well). An excellent upper level undergraduate or graduate level neuroscience text. Very good for a concise review of the information.

As an undergraduate Psychobiology student, this text served me well in my Neuroscience course. In all honesty I never went. I just read this book. I got excellent marks in the class. As a serious slacker and bibliophile, I recommend this textbook for any like-minded student.

This book is a really tough read. I know neuroscience probably isn't supposed to be an easy read, but the author jumps all over the place. The chapters are divided up into broad sections with long heading names that don't always imply what the section is about. There are no subheadings or lists, just block text and pictures, making it difficult to outline the book in your notes. There are boxes about pathologies thrown in randomly throughout the chapter, but because the box begins when you are in the middle of a sentence about something completely different I'm rarely drawn to read them. For the most part the pictures and diagrams are clear, but when I study from this book I have to supplement with my general anatomy and physiolgy book. On several occasions the text has referred to parts of the anatomy that aren't labeled on the diagram. Not my favorite textbook...

Neuroscience is an essential book for any neurology course. I am currently a first year medical student in the midst of an brain and behavior course, and I have found this textbook to be very helpful.

As an undergraduate Neuroscience major I found this textbook to be highly informative and well-written. It was used to a Freshman-level course, and was easy to understand, yet thorough and interesting. The graphics are well done, and the format is better than most textbooks I'm used to. Anyone, even with minimal science experience could dive right in and learn a great deal. It may not be advanced enough, however, for grad or medical students. As a reference it does okay, but there are more-advanced texts which would probably do better. All-in-all it is an excellent book. In-fact, I liked it so much that I didn't sell it back at the end of the semester and keep it on my bookshelf for future reference (and future classes!)

This reference provides a well-written, fairly easy to read, introduction to human neuroscience. The reference begins with an overview of the organization of the nervous system - neurons, neural circuits, and neuroanatomy. The first group of chapters consider in more detail membrane potentials, voltage-dependent membrane permeability, membrane channels and pumps, synapses, neurotransmitters and receptors. The next group of chapters consider in more detail the sensory nervous system - somatic sensory receptors and pathways, pain, the eye and visual pathways, the ear, auditory pathways and vestibular system, smell and olfactory pathways, and taste and taste pathways. The next group of chapters consider in more detail the motor nervous system - spinal cord motor circuits, descending control of these circuits, basal ganglia, cerebellum and eye movements. The next group of chapters consider the development of the brain as well as plasticity in the adult nervous system. These are followed by chapters on cognition, language, sleep, emotions, sexuality, and memory.

A well written book that is pretty easy to read with very good pictures and diagrams. While it doesn't go into the same depth as some other medical neuroscience books, it's really more than efficient for general medical education. It's concise enough to be read from cover to cover!

This book is absolutely indispensible for anyone who wants more than lecture notes. It is without any doubt, the best textbook to date (in this field). The text is breazy and the captions are extremely well-done. Thank you, Dale!

This is a review for those who are interested in reading about neuroscience for reasons of personal curiosity rather than for a class. There are a few things that an aspiring autodidact should know before picking up this book.

First, it seems to be written for a medical/premedical audience rather than for a psychology/biopsych audience. Two things result from this fact:
(1.) It presumes familiarity with human anatomy, anatomical terms of location, etc. Sure, it briefly introduces anatomical terms of location in the first chapter. But understanding the meaning of terms like rostral, caudal, medial, lateral, dorsal, ventral, transverse, coronal, and saggital (which I do), is very different from being able to slog through a paragraph where these terms are used at a rate of five-per-sentence. To be able to do that, and not be miserable, requires some significant pre-exposure to these terms so that they are basically second nature already. And to give an example of the kind of micro-anatomical knowledge that it presumes of the reader, you'd better either know what an endothelial cell is, or have a Wikipedia tab open and ready, because it's going to start referring to them and it's not going to explain what they are.
(2.) It has a relatively greater focus on physiology, and a relatively lesser focus on explaining behavior, than a biopsychology book would have.

Second, it is difficult. If your background is in psychology, or anything OTHER than a biology-related field, you are NOT going to want to start with this book. An ideal sequence of books might be:
(1.) Biological Psychology by Kalat (a very simple Biopsych book, easy to comprehend, but a bit superficial)
followed by
(2.) Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral, Cognitive, and Clinical Neuroscience, Fifth Edition (a more in-depth Biopsych book)
and finally, if you find you are still really interested in the more medical aspects of neuroscience,
(3.) Neuroscience (Book with CD-ROM) by Purves

I have slightly older editions of all three of these books (you can get very cheap used copies of the slightly older editions on Amazon). What I did at first was read the early, foundational chapters of each textbook. For instance, I read about action potentials in Kalat, then in Breedlove, then in Purves. I repeated this sequence for the chapters about synapses, the chapters about nervous system anatomy, and so on. For these chapters, I really got a LOT out of Purves (though I would have gotten MORE if I'd had more of a hard science background).

Now, after having finished the chapters on all these early "foundational" topics, I'm moving on to the chapters on special topics within behavioral neuroscience/biopsych, such as vision, homeostasis and hunger, emotions, sex and reproduction, sleep, states of consciousness, and so on. It's here where the different focus of the biopsych books (Kalat and Breedlove) and the neuroscience book (Purves) becomes really clear. The tables of contents in Kalat and Breedlove are almost exactly parallel. However, after the early foundational topics, there's a major divergence between Purves and the other books. Purves has much more focus on motor control, embryonic brain development and plasticity, and so on. These chapters are interesting, but there's clearly much less of a focus (and in some chapters, no focus whatsoever) on explaining BEHAVIOR, or consciousness, from a biological perspective. Purves is clearly writing with the medical doctor or clinician in mind.

Being interested in the biology of the brain from the perspective of psychology rather than medicine, I've moved the Purves book to the end of my reading list. Now I read Kalat for an overview of each topic, and Breedlove for a little more depth. Instead of Purves, my long term neuro-reading queue now includes books that approach the biology of the brain from a more behavioral/cognitive (in a word, psychological) perspective, such as Neuroscience for the Mental Health Clinician, Psychopharmacology: Drugs, the Brain and Behavior, Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology (Student Text), A Primer of Drug Action: A Concise, Non-Technical Guide to the Actions, Uses, and Side Effects of Psychoactive Drugs, and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.

I'm still looking for a textbook on Behavioral Neuroscience/Biological Psychology that is a little bit more in-depth than Breedlove et al. That is what I originally expected Purves to be, but it is not. So if anyone has a recommendation in this regard, I'd welcome it (in the comments).

Hope this was helpful!