After its release was pushed back many times, the 5th edition finally came out within the past year, and I have been reading it on my laptop's Kindle app throughout my first year of core PhD courses and in preparing for my qualifying exam. I had read some of the 4th edition during undergrad, as well.
In general my feelings towards the book are warm, and I do expect that if you read the textbook, dear reader of this review, you will learn a lot from it.
Positives
1) Does a good job of not trying to be Alberts' *Molecular Biology of the Cell*. The sections on cell biology, the central dogma, and non-neuroscience-related signaling pathways are refreshingly bare-boned. Seek resources elsewhere if you want to go ham on transcription, translation, and the MAPKKK-MAPKK-MAPK cascade.
2) Perception, sensation, and movement were not the reasons that I first became interested in neuroscience, and, generalizing from my one example as is de rigueur in book reviews, I think that is true of most students. And while this might be just Stockholm syndrome, I'm actually quite happy that there is so much detail and care put into these sections which make up around 1/3rd of the text. These fields are way more tractable to study than the sexy emotion, learning, and personal identity, yet the most of the principles that have been discovered there are likely to generalize.
As an example of this, consider the work of Charles Sherrington, who among other accomplishments won the 1932 Nobel for explaining spinal reflexes as a balance of excitation and inhibition. And now that we have some fancy techniques like conditional genetic KOs and optogenetics, we know that a variety of other phenomena, from critical periods to anxiety, are also regulated via a very similar balance of excitation and inhibition.
3) Most chapters do an excellent job of motivating their material. For example, they emphasize themes from the history of how people have thought about the brain, e.g. James and Freud. There are also a few references to art and literature, such as Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, that are really money.
4) Most fundamentally, this is the eminent textbook on how your mind works and how you are able to understand the words that you are currently reading. And there are some chapters, especially the last three (65 - 67), that really delve into this. What's there not to love?
Negatives
1) In general neuroscience tries very hard to distinguish itself from psychology and this makes good sense in terms of specialization. But the field is still operating in the wake of Karl Lashley, a famous experimentalist who in the 1930s concluded that brain regions had "equipotentiality" for learning mazes not because his lesions were flawed but because his tasks were not specific enough. Designing behavioral tasks is not trivial. Yet, you will not read much about the principles behind how to do so, and nothing about the matching law or Rescorla-Wagner. (My bias: I did some research in learning and behavior in undergrad.)
2) For one of our classes we read an older (3rd edition) version of Chapter 13 on Neurotransmitters. There were way more equations explaining different models of neurotransmitter vesicle release patterns, e.g. explaining the use of the Poisson distribution as an approximation for the binomial. It doesn't make sense that the text has become less quantitative at the same time that math has become easier to use to explain phenomena, as a result of advances in systems biology and just programming generally.
3) Why does searching for "optogenetics" yield me zero results?
4) I prefer my pedagogical material to be structured in the format of *example 1*, *example 2*, (*optional example 3*), and *inducted principle*. The examples only matter insofar as they motivate the principles. Kandel's textbook strays slightly too far from this, I think. In particular, the text tends to enshrine the examples, such CREB, CamKII, PKA, and the ilk, as worthy of our worship in and of themselves. This sets the trend for how neuroscience courses should be taught and for that reason it is a bit troubling.
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Top reviews from other countries
I Castanho
it is a great book to read / study if you want to ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 7, 2015G. Yew
Most comprehensive and accessible
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 24, 2013
