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Neuroscience

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
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Esp. of perception, attention, imagination, memory, reasoning, serial-order behavior. Popular distortions. And psychiatry.

Once all of this was called "neurology," but now neurology is just neural medicine, if not just brain surgery, so we have neuroscience, or the neurosciences (including neurobiology, neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, neuroendocrinology, neuroimmunology, neuroethology, cognitive neuroscience and even the cognitivie neurosciences, and so on ad neuroseam). One constant in all this is that every single textbook on the brain, at least since William James's 1890 Principles of Psychology, declares that most of what we know about the brain has been learned in the last twenty-five years. The truly frightening thing is that this seems to be true.

Neural coding, synchronization and modeling and data-analysis are all important enough for me to deserve their own notebooks. Similarly neural nets, though their relation to real neurons is merely impressionistic.

See also: Cognitive Science; Complex Networks; Emotion; Excitable Media

    To see where this is coming from:
  • Denis Diderot, D'Alembert's Dream
  • Anne Harrington
    • Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought
    • Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler [Intruiging material on a school of neuroscience now completely, and deservedly, extinct]
  • William James, Principles of Psychology [Fascinating stuff on connectionism, and, indeed, almost everything else]
  • Marc Jeannerod, The Brain Machine: The Development of Neurophysiological Thought [The French title (Le Cerveau-Machine: Physiologie de la Volonté) is better: not only does it describe the subject more precisely --- Jeannerod is specifically concerned with voluntary motion ---- the English loses the play on La Mettrie.]
  • Julian Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine
  • Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System [The view from the beginning of the 20th century. Mini-review]
  • W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain [The view from the 1950s]
  • J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science [Another view from the 1950s]
  • Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain --- and How It Changed the World
    To read, philosophical and popular:
  • Ira Black, Information in the Brain
  • Changeux
  • Churchland and Churchland, On the Contrary
  • Corballis, The Lopsided Ape
  • Carl F. Craver, Explaining the Brain
  • Stanislas Dehaene (ed.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
  • Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Past
  • R. L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye
  • Richard L. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind
  • Joseph B. Hellige, Hemispheric Asymmetry: What's Right and What's Left
  • Gregory Hickok, The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition [Positive review by Patricia Churchland in Nature]
  • Philip J. Hilts, Memory's Ghost: The Strangle Tale of Mr. M and the Nature of Memory [More "neurography"]
  • Hobson
    • Chemistry of Conscious States
    • The Dreaming Mind
  • Hubel, Eye, Brain and Vision [Hubel is one of the discoverers of arrays of cells dedicated to looking for very specific visual features --- lines at certain angles, moving dark patches, etc.]
  • Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umiltà, Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science [Favorable review in Science]
  • V. S. Ramachandran and Andra Blakslee, Phantoms in the Brain
  • Roger N. Shepard, Mind Sights: Original Visual Illusions, Ambiguities and Other Anomalies, with a Commentary on the Play of Mind in Perception and Art
  • Snyder, Drugs and the Brain
  • Catherine E. Stinson, Cognitive Mechanisms and Computational Models: Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience [Ph.D. Thesis, Philosophy Dept., University of Pittsburgh, 2013; thanks to Dr. Stinson for a copy]
  • David Johnson Thornton, Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media [Review/exposition in The Atlantic]
  • J. Z. Young, A Model of the Brain
  • Semir Zeki
    • Inner Vision
    • A Vision of the Brain
    To read, historical:
  • Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology
  • Robert B. Campenot, Animal Electricity: How We Learned That the Body and Brain Are Electric Machines
  • Benjamin Ehrlich, The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron [Favorable review in Nature]
  • Finger, Origins of Neuroscience
  • Mitchell Glickstein, Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction
  • R. L. Gregory, Mind in Science: A History of Explanation in Psychology
  • Gross, Brain, Vision and Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience
  • Marshall and Magoun, Discoveries in the Human Brain
  • S. Weir Mitchell
  • Jonathan D. Moreno, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
  • Sidney Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms
  • Wilder Penfield, The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man
  • Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Recollections of My Life
  • Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James
  • Gordon Shepherd,
  • Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine
  • Sherrington, Man on his Nature
  • Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain
  • Elliot S. Valenstein, The War of the Soups and the Sparks: The Discovery of Neurotransmitters and the Dispute over How Nerves Communicate
  • Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the 19th Century

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