Neuroscience

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, Penguin Books, 2009.

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks, Vintage, 1996.

Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin, Vintage, 2006.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison, Three Rivers Press, 2018.

Brain on Fire (10th Anniversary Edition): My Month of Madness Paperback, by Susannah Calahan, Simon & Schuster, 2013. The author, a newspaper reporter, tells a good story of her experience with a rare and mysterious brain disease. I won't spoil the fun by telling you what the final diagnosis was.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks, Vintage, 2021.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, Scribner, 2017.

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind  by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, HarperCollins, 1999.  Phantom Limb Syndrome V.S. Ramachandran has done important work on phantom limbs. People who have had limbs amputated often retain the amputated limb in their body image. They also often experience pain in their phantom limbs. Ramachandran’s explanation is that the part of the brain devoted to the limb that was amputated now receives input from othe

The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science  by R. Douglas Fields, Simon & Schuster, 2009.  Neurons and Glia The cells that carry electrical impulses are called neurons. Neurons are unidirectional: they receive impulses on their dendrites and transmit nerve impulses along their axons. The axons are much longer than the dendrites. Glial (meaning glue) cells are cells in nervous tissue, such as th

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia  by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, MIT Press, 2009.  Qualia Qualia are the subjective experience of the senses, such as redness, sweetness or pain. Synesthesia occurs when one sense induces the qualia of a different sense. For example, hearing a sound causing a person to see a colored image. Synesthesia is almost always unidirectional. If hearing a sound causes the person to see an image, then seeing an image

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind  by Eric Kandel, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.  Synapse An early Spanish neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, suggested that memories may be stored in the synapses between nerve cells, rather than within individual cells. The ends of the axons usually have multiple terminals. A terminal is a protrusion that forms a contact (synapse) with a dendrite of the receiving neuron. The terminals release neurotransmitter mo