Customer Reviews

Signal Processing for Neuroscientists: An Introduction to the Analysis of Physiological Signals

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is clearly not intended for the beginner. It is intended for graduate students or undergraduates with a good working knowledge of at least calculus although many people benefit from previous exposure to differential equations in reading this book. There are many books out there in the math and physics literature that cover many of these topics but are entirely incomprehensible to the average neuroscientist. This book is the only book on the market that bridges the knowledge gap between students who already possess an introductory quantitative background and those capable of reading modern quantitative literature from fields such as engineering and signal processing. It is also the only book for neuroscientists that introduces these more advanced concepts from the perspective of a neuroscience (i.e. using EEG recordings, etc. to illustrate the methodology). Finally, the Matlab code presented in the book can in many instances be used directly in one's own research making this book a very practical investment.

This book contains useful exercises and demonstrations of MATLAB code that are worth looking at. Overall, I think it covers the major topics and does a decent job fulfilling that purpose.

Having said that, however, the language of the book is not reader-friendly. It's not to say that we aren't dealing with advanced material here, because it wasn't intended for the beginner. Don't expect that you'll just be able to pick up the text and read it without any prior knowledge.

I would have given this book an additional star, however, there are some errors of calculation in the beginning exercises. If you are the advanced reader, you'll pick up on these--someone other than myself actually picked up on these, so don't just take the calculation and their end result to be the answer--as always, be cautious when you read.

As a new user to Matlab, I found this book too challenging to be effective.