Customer Reviews

The Physiology of Excitable Cells

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So, You're in grad school or a major in Neurobiology and you are looking to see if the book is worth the money??

This book does not give core facts in a easy to regurgitate format.Don't read this a day before your exam.

What the book gives you and does better than any other neurobiology book I know about (yes,that's a tall claim, but Im comfortable making it) is a clear and concise walk through the relevant ideas and experiments that went into building a simple 'taken for granted' concept like say the synaptic vesicles.

This book more than any other made me see the facts I read in tons of other books through the eye of an experimentalist and I had a clear appreciation of the thought that went towards designing an experiment and interpreting the result.I'm not sure if this would be the best book to read for an introduction to Neurobiology but if you have some background this is a book you would like to come back to again and again.

David Aidley's 4th edition text is superb for the graduate student in experimental cellular neurophysiology. This text does not cover neuroanatomy or systems neurophysiology. That is probably a weakness for those students hoping to have a comprehensive review book such as Principles of Neural Science by Kandel & Schwartz. Strengths of the book include discussion of Hodgkin-Huxley equations, ion channel kinetics equations, entropy equations, pearls of wisdom related to different aquatic species, etc. LTP and LTD are covered well. Receptor physiology is discussed better in this book than any other with the exception of Handbook of Physiology Receptors Springer by Lowenstein. Cortical neurophysiology is weak here. If you had to choose between this book and other cellular neurophysiology books, you cannot go wrong with this one. Cellular Biophysics: Electrical Phenomenon by Weiss and Foundations of Cellular Neurophysiology by Wu & Johnston are two others to look at that are more complex than Aidley's book. It is a shame that David Aidley died in 2001 so that a 5th edition of this outstanding textbook will not be available.

As part of my degree I study neuromuscular physiology and this is the recomended text.It has well layed out chapters with each unit taking a major topic in electrophysiology. It starts with the extreme basic but this gives you the instant reminder of all that you've learned and the basis of electrophysiology. The chapters are layed out in the topics generally study at university, though it goes into more detail. The graphs that accompany many of the topics were found very useful for comparison for practical experiments. This text is helpful and detailed, and useful for study.