BrainBlog

Looking for reading material for a longish train trip I am about to take, I decided to hit to bookshelves of my Square's Barnes & Noble to see what popular neuroscience titles might be a good diversion (as well as potential supplementary 'lighter' references, should I re-teach an introductory course to neuroscience sometime over the next year). I chose three. The first is by Elkhonon Goldberg, a revision of an earlier work, which is titled "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World" and is available in paperback by Oxford University Press. I first met the author when I was a graduate student, so I am looking forward to reading up on what he's been up to. The second is about glial cells and is entitled, "The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia" by Andrew Koob. Five years ago, if someone said there would be a popular offering about glia, I would have thought 'Yeah, right...' Though I do enjoy adding discussion about glia to my...

An article written by Carl Zimmer for the September issue of Discover magazine: read the article The Dark Matter of the Human Brain Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do. === Neuropsychology and neuroscience students" One of Carl's books, Soul Made Flesh , is an excellent story about Thomas Willis and his times. Must-read history about neuropsychology, alongside that of the later times of Broca, Wernicke, and Hughlings Jackson.