Neuroscience

Esp. of perception, attention, imagination, memory, reasoning, serial-order behavior. Popular distortions. And psychiatry.

Once all of this was called "neurology," but now neurology is just neural medicine, if not just brain surgery, so we have neuroscience, or the neurosciences (including neurobiology, neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, neuroendocrinology, neuroimmunology, neuroethology, cognitive neuroscience and even the cognitivie neurosciences, and so on ad neuroseam). One constant in all this is that every single textbook on the brain, at least since William James's 1890 Principles of Psychology, declares that most of what we know about the brain has been learned in the last twenty-five years. The truly frightening thing is that this seems to be true.

Neural coding, synchronization and modeling and data-analysis are all important enough for me to deserve their own notebooks. Similarly neural nets, though their relation to real neurons is merely impressionistic.

Denis Diderot, D'Alembert's Dream
Anne Harrington
- Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought
- Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler [Intruiging material on a school of neuroscience now completely, and deservedly, extinct]
William James, Principles of Psychology [Fascinating stuff on connectionism, and, indeed, almost everything else]
Marc Jeannerod, The Brain Machine: The Development of Neurophysiological Thought [The French title (Le Cerveau-Machine: Physiologie de la Volonté) is better: not only does it describe the subject more precisely --- Jeannerod is specifically concerned with voluntary motion ---- the English loses the play on La Mettrie.]
Julian Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine
Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System [The view from the beginning of the 20th century]
W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain [The view from the 1950s]
J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science [Another view from the 1950s]
Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain --- and How It Changed the World

Michael A. Arbib (ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks
John Bickle, "Understanding Neural Complexity: A Role for Reduction", Minds and Machines 11 (2001): 467--481
Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology [Review: Hume on Wheels, or, One Must Imagine Frankenstein Happy]
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
William Calvin, The Throwing Madonna [Nice chapter debunking right-brain/left-brain superstitions]
Calvin and Ojemann, Conversations with Neil's Brain
Patricia Churchland and Terrence Sejnowski, The Computational Brain
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error
Karl Friston, "Beyond Phrenology: What Can Neuroimaging Tell Us About Distributed Circuitry?", Annual Review of Neuroscience 25 (2002): 221--250
Richard Gregory, Eye and Brain
Dan Hartline, The STG Homepage
Cyril Herry, Stephane Ciocchi, Verena Senn, Lynda Demmou, Christian Müller and Andreas Lüthi, "Switching on and off fear by distinct neuronal circuits", Nature 454 (2008): 600--606
Nikos K. Logothetis, "What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI", Nature 453 (2008): 869--878
A. R. Luria
- The Man with a Shattered World
- The Working Brain [described under neuropsychology]
Alex Proekt, Vladimir Brezina and Klaudiusz R. Weiss, "Dynamical basis of intentions and expectations in a simple neuronal network", PNAS (2004) 10.1073/pnas.0402002101 [What does a sea-slug's tongue expect to have to do next?]
J. D. Ramsey, S. J. Hanson, C. Hanson, Y. O. Halchenko, R. A. Poldrack and C. Glymour, "Six Problems for Causal Inference from fMRI" [Thanks to Prof. Glymour for a preprint]
Shephard, Neurobiology

Ira Black, Information in the Brain
Changeux
- Conversations on Minds, Mathematics and Machines
- Neuronal Man
- The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge [Blurb]
Churchland and Churchland, On the Contrary
Corballis, The Lopsided Ape
Stanislas Dehaene (ed.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Past
R. L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye
Richard L. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind
Joseph B. Hellige, Hemispheric Asymmetry: What's Right and What's Left
Philip J. Hilts, Memory's Ghost: The Strangle Tale of Mr. M and the Nature of Memory [More "neurography"]
Hobson
- Chemistry of Conscious States
- The Dreaming Mind
Hubel, Eye, Brain and Vision [Hubel is one of the discoverers of arrays of cells dedicated to looking for very specific visual features --- lines at certain angles, moving dark patches, etc.]
V. S. Ramachandran and Andra Blakslee, Phantoms in the Brain
Roger N. Shepard, Mind Sights: Original Visual Illusions, Ambiguities and Other Anomalies, with a Commentary on the Play of Mind in Perception and Art
Snyder, Drugs and the Brain
J. Z. Young, A Model of the Brain
Semir Zeki
- Inner Vision
- A Vision of the Brain

Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology
Finger, Origins of Neuroscience
R. L. Gregory, Mind in Science: A History of Explanation in Psychology
Gross, Brain, Vision and Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience
Marshall and Magoun, Discoveries in the Human Brain
S. Weir Mitchell
Jonathan D. Moreno, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense [blurb]
Sidney Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms
Wilder Penfield, The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man
Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Recollections of My Life
Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James
Gordon Shepherd,
Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine [History]
Sherrington, Man on his Nature
Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain
Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the 19th Century

Aidley, Physiology of Excitable Cells
Daniel Amit, The Hebbian Paradigm Reintegerated: Local Reverberations as Internal Representations
Arbib, Erdi and Szentagothai, Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics [Blurb]
Yuri I. Arshavsky, "Cellular and network properties in the functioning of the nervous system: from central pattern generators to cognition," Brain Research Reviews 41 (2003): 229--267
Abigail A. Baird, Mary Kathryn Colvin, John D. VanHorn, Souheil Inati and Michael S. Gazzaniga, "Functional Connectivity: Integrating Behavioral, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data sets", Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (2005): 687--693 [Full-text free on line as a teaser for the journal]
Valentino Braitenberg, On the Texture of Brains: An Introduction to Neuroanatomy for the Cybernetically Minded
Kevin L. Briggman, H. D. I. Abarbanel and William B. Kristan, Jr., "Optimal Imaging of Neuronal Populations During Decision-Making", Science 307 (2005): 896--901
Kevin L. Briggman and William B. Kristan, Jr., "Imaging Dedicated and Multifunctional Neural Circuits Generating Distinct Behaviors", The Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2006): 10925--10933
Timothy J. Buschman and Earl K. Miller, "Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Control of Attention in the Prefrontal and Posterior Parietal Cortices", Science 315 (2007): 1860--1862
Richard B. Buxton, Introduction to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Principles and Techniques [Blurb]
John Cacioppo (ed.), Foundations of Social Neuroscience
Thomas J. Carew, Behavioral Neurobiology: The Cellular Organization Of Natural Behavior
B. Cessac and M. Samuelides, "From Neuron to Neural Network Dynamics", nlin.AO/0609038
J. S. Damoiseaux, S. A. R. B. Rombouts, F. Barkhof, C. J. Stam, S. M. Smith and C. F. Beckmann, "Consistent resting-state networks across healthy subjects", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 13848--13853
Coralie de Hemptinne, Sylvie Nozaradan, Quentin Duvivier, Philippe Lefevre, and Marcus Missal, "How Do Primates Anticipate Uncertain Future Events?", Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007): 4334--4341
Tobias Egner and Joy Hirsch, "Cognitive control mechanisms resolve conflict through cortical amplification of task-relevant information", Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005): 1784--1790
Dean Falk and Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.), Evolutionary Anatomy of the Primate Cerebral Cortex
Leonardo Fogassi, Pier Francesco Ferrari, Benno Gesierich, Stefano Rozzi, Fabian Chersi, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, "Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding", Science 308 (2005): 662--667
Kevin Fox, Barrel Cortex [blurb]
Karl Friston, "Beyond Phrenology: What Can Neuroimaging Tell Us About Distributed Circuitry?", Annual Review of Neuroscience 25 (2002): 221--250
Robert F. Goldberg, Charles A. Perfetti, Julie A. Fiez and Walter Schneider, "Selective Retrieval of Abstract Semantic Knowledge in Left Prefrontal Cortex", The Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007): 3790--3798
Ralph J. Greenspan, An Introduction to Nervous Systems [Review by Danny Yee]
Sten Grillner and Ann M. Graybiel (eds.), Microcircuits: The Interface between Neuros and Global Brain Function
Jin-Hee Han, Steven A. Kushner, Adelaide P. Yiu, Christy J. Cole, Anna Matynia, Robert A. Brown, Rachael L. Neve, John F. Guzowski, Alcino J. Silva, Sheena A. Josselyn, "Neuronal Competition and Selection During Memory Formation", Science 316 (2007): 457--460
Christian Hlscher and Matthias Munk (eds.), Information Processing by Neuronal Populations [blurb]
Wilfrid Jänig, Integrative Action of the Autonomic Nervous System: Neurobiology of Homeostasis [Blurb]
Marcus Kaiser and Claus C. Hilgetag, "Nonoptimal Component Placement, but Short Processing Paths, due to Long-Distance Projections in Neural Systems", q-bio.NC/0607034 = PLoS Computational Biology 2 (2006): e95
Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire, "The Human Hippocampus: Cognitive Maps or Relational Memory?", The Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2005): 7254--7259 ["..the relational processing involved in navigating in a city was matched with similar navigational and relational processing demands in a nonspatial (social) domain. ... [P]articipants determined the optimal route either between friends' homes or between the friends themselves using social connections. Separate brain networks were engaged preferentially during the two tasks, with hippocampal activation driven only by spatial relational processing. ... [T]he human hippocampus appears to have a bias toward the processing of spatial relationships, in accordance with the cognitive map theory. Our results both advance our understanding of the nature of the hippocampal contribution to memory and provide insights into how social networks are instantiated at the neural level."]
Laberge, Attentional Processing: The Brain's Art of Mindfulness
Peter E. Latham and Sheila Nirenberg, "Computing and Stability in Cortical Networks", Neural Computation 16 (2004): 1385--1412 ["Cortical neurons are predominantly excitatory and highly interconnected. In spite of this, the cortex is remarkably stable: normal brains do not exhibit the kind of runaway excitation one might expect of such a system. How does the cortex maintain stability in the face of this massive excitatory feedback? More importantly, how does it do so during computations, which necessarily involve elevated firing rates? Here we address these questions in the context of attractor networks — networks that exhibit multiple stable states, or memories. We find that such networks can be stabilized at the relatively low firing rates observed in vivo if two conditions are met: (1) the background state, where all neurons are firing at low rates, is inhibition dominated, and (2) the fraction of neurons involved in a memory is above some threshold, so that there is sufficient coupling between the memory neurons and the background. This allows 'dynamical stabilization' of the attractors, meaning feedback from the pool of background neurons stabilizes what would otherwise be an unstable state. We suggest that dynamical stabilization may be a strategy used for a broad range of computations, not just those involving attractors."]
R. Levinson, "A Computer Model of Prefrontal Cortex Function," in Jordan Grafman, Keith J. Holyoak, and Francois Boller (eds.), Structure and Functions of the Human Prefrontal Cortex, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 769 (1995)
Tiago V. Maia and Axel Cleeremans, "Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 397--404 ["Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective attention, working memory and cognitive control involve competition between widely distributed representations. This competition is biased by top-down projections (notably from prefrontal cortex), which can selectively enhance some representations over others. This view has now been implemented in several connectionist models. In this review, we emphasize the relevance of these models to understanding consciousness. Interestingly, the models we review have striking similarities to others directly aimed at implementing 'global workspace theory'. All of these models embody a fundamental principle that has been used in many connectionist models over the past twenty years: global constraint satisfaction."]
Malia F. Mason, Michael I. Norton, John D. Van Horn, Daniel M. Wegner, Scott T. Grafton and C. Neil Macra, "Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought", Science 315 (2007): 393--395
Yasushi Miyashita, "Cognitive Memory: Cellular and Network Machineries and Their Top-Down Control", Science 306 (2004): 435--440
Bruno A. Olshausen and David J. Field, "How Close Are We to Understanding V1?", Neural Computation 17 (2005): 1665--1699
Raja Parasuraman (ed.), The Attentive Brain [blurb]
R. A. Poldrack, J. Clark, E. J. Paré-Blagoev, D. Shohamy, J. Creso Moyano, C. Myers and M. A. Gluck, "Interactive memory systems in the human brain," Nature 414 (2001): 546--550
Mikhail I. Rabinovich, Pablo Varona, Allen I. Selverston, and Henry D. I. Abarbanel, "Dynamical principles in neuroscience", Reviews of Modern Physics 78 (2006): 1213
K. Richard Ridderinkhof, Markus Ullsperger, Eveline A. Crone and Sander Niewenhuis, "The Role of the Medial Frontal Cortex in Cognitive Control", Science 306 (2004): 443--447
Yasser Roudi and Peter E. Latham, "A balanced memory network", arxiv:0704.3005
Elad Schneidman, Michael J. Berry II, Ronen Segev and William Bialek, "Weak pairwise correlations imply strongly correlated network states in a neural population", Nature 440 (2006): 1007--1012
Aleen I. Selverston and Maurice Moulins (eds.), The Crustacean Stomatogastric System [scanned PDFs]
Gordon Shepherd (ed.), The Synaptic Organization of the Brain
Stewart Shipp, "The brain circuitry of attention", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 223--230
John Smythies, The Dynamic Neuron ["a comprehensive account of our current knowledge of the neurochemical basis of synaptic plasticity"; blurb]
Ivan Sltesz, Diversity in the Neuronal Machine: Order and Variability in Interneuronal Microcircuits
Olaf Sporns and Giulio Tononi, "Strucutral Determinants of Functional Brain Dynamics"
Joan Stiles, The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture [Blurb]
Georg F. Striedter
- "Precis of Principles of Brain Evolution", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 1--12 [With extensive peer commentary following]
- Principles of Brain Evolution
Roger D. Traub and Richard Miles, Neuronal Networks of the Hippcampus [blurb]
Frank van der Velde and Marc de Kamps, "Neural blackboard architectures of combinatorial structures in cognition", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 37--70 [+ peer commentary]
Edward K. Vogel, Andrew W. McColough and Maro G. Machizawa, "Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to working memory", Nature 438 (2005): 500--503
Ajai Vyas, Seon-Kyeong Kim, Nicholas Giacomini, John C. Boothroyd, and Robert M. Sapolsky, "Behavioral changes induced by Toxoplasma infection of rodents are highly specific to aversion of cat odors", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104 (2007): 6442--6447
Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

Notebooks

Neuroscience