From the many excellent suggestions provided by the NeuWrite West community, I selected 5 books.* I decided to take some liberties with Gabby’s question, soliciting book recommendations from the NeuWrite West neuroscientists, most of whom did not receive their undergraduate degrees from Stanford.

Or filing cabinets, if you're my PI.) But the plethora of scientific journals can present an intimidating, and frankly unhelpful front to the enterprising student interested in an introduction to neuroscience.Ī couple of weeks ago, we received an email from such a student, Gabby, who wrote: So, neuroscientists tend to wander around with binders full of journal articles. And if the function of a textbook is to collect the fundamental principles of a field, (to paraphrase first year graduate student Alex Scharr), there just hasn't been enough time to figure out whether neurosciences 'fundamental' discoveries are actually fundamental. Neuroscience is a relatively new field of study, and as we ease into a century of active research, the pace of new discoveries is far outstripping the ability of those discoveries to be printed in a textbook. We rely on peer-reviewed publications, rather than the classic staple of scholastic education: the textbook.

The folder titled 'Cortical Sh*t' contains articles about, you guessed it, the cortex.Īs is the case for most neuroscience researchers, my primary source of neuroscience information are peer-reviewed publications thus the selection imaginatively titled.

pdfs of all the journal articles that I really need to read right away. I've got a folder on my computer titled 'To Read Pronto'.

From neuron to brain ebook