BrainBlog

This weekend I crack open the files on my next book and begin work on it, which I plan to complete by the end of 2008. This will be a weekend and vacation-time effort, which is the only way I can fit it in. I've co-authored three academic books in the past and written a number of general-readership articles, but this will be my first venture into a book-length work written for a more general audience. The closest I've come to this in the past was a monograph (monograph:book as novella: novel) on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) waaaay back in 1984, so I'm looking forward to the task! The topic is on my area of expertise: the neuropsychological assessment of persons and what we can learn from these tests about the brain-behavior functioning of individuals.

While travelling on neuropsych business over the past week, I've been totally enjoying the new collaboration between Dana Press and Dr. Floyd Bloom - an edited book of feature articles from Scientific American . The book contains 21 articles of the many that have appeared in the magazine from 1999 onward. My favorite is the last one, "The Quest for a Smart Pill," by Stephen Hall. I may be mistaken, but I believe Hall has also written on this topic for the journal, Science . It deals with memory- and other cognitive-function- enhancing drugs currently under development by a number of biotech companies and some of the ethical issues involved in this domain. Good reads on the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders and computer-brain interfaces also are included. Articles by Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, and Fred Gage are representative of some of the neuroscientific leaders found in the book. Science journalist Carl Zimmer is represented, as well. List price of $25.00, The Be...

Picked up a nice-looking new book this afternoon, the first issue of a planned yearly anthology by The Dana Foundation: Cerebrum 2007 , with a foreward by Bruce McEwen. The softcover book includes more than a dozen contributions on neuroscience topics ranging from stroke prevention to neuroimaging biomarkers in drug development.