Neuroscience

by Dale Purves, George J. Augustine, David Fitzpatrick

Book Overview

Neuroscience, Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive textbook created primarily for medical, premedical, and undergraduate students. In a single concise and approachable volume, the text guides students through the challenges and excitement of this rapidly changing field. The book's length and accessibility of its writing are a successful combination that has proven to work equally well for medical students and in undergraduate neuroscience courses. Being...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0878936955
• ISBN13: 9780878936953
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Sinauer Associates Is an Imprint of Oxford Un
• Length: 759 Pages
• Weight: 4.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 11.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

medical school

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.

In response to "Confused"

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.

Excellent! Accessible, great graphics, good organization.

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.

Good intro to human neuroscience

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.

An excellent neuroscience text

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.