Principles of Neural Science
The standard textbook of neuroscience since 1981, and the reference behind most of what the other books here take for granted.
All behavior is an expression of neural activity.
Principles of Neural Science is the reference textbook of its field, first published in 1981 and now in a sixth edition of roughly 1,700 pages. It sets out how the nervous system is built and how it works, moving from single cells and synaptic transmission through perception, movement, and the biological basis of emotion, memory, and language. Each chapter was written by a working scientist and revised for the 2021 edition.
For a psychodynamic reader, the value sits in the later sections. The chapters on memory systems distinguish the kinds of remembering that operate without words from those available to recall. The treatment of affect and the limbic circuits gives a physical account of feeling states, and the material on synaptic plasticity shows how early relationships and repeated experience leave a lasting mark on the brain. It supplies a vocabulary for what shifts between sessions and over years of work.
About the authors
Eric Richard Kandel
Eric R. Kandel is an Austrian-born American neuroscientist and psychiatrist whose research established how memory is stored in the brain. Working with the sea slug Aplysia, he showed that learning changes the strength of connections between neurons. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work. Trained in psychiatry, he has long argued that psychoanalysis and biology have much to offer each other, and is the lead author of Principles of Neural Science.
James Harris Schwartz
James H. Schwartz (1932 to 2006) was an American neurobiologist based at Columbia University in New York. His research addressed the biochemical basis of learning and memory. He is known as a co-editor of Principles of Neural Science, the widely used neuroscience textbook, which he edited with Eric Kandel and Thomas Jessell. Across successive editions the book brought together cellular, molecular, and systems approaches to the nervous system for students and researchers.
Details
- 1981
- English
- McGraw Hill
- McGraw Hill, 6th edition, 2021
- 1696
- 9781259642234