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Hi! I think the greatest thing you can do, is to join "Fundamentals of Neuroscience". It's an online course, but it's really nothing like most courses online. The production value is crazy high. It's truly experimental, because its purpose is to allow anyone to understand neuroscience without sandpapering the edges. I recently attended a university level introductory course in neuroscience. Our textbook was Purves'. Several of our instructors are published in Science and Nature. While the course was really great, the "Fundamentals of Neuroscience" delved deeper than the course and presented more nuanced pictures of the information. I can't think of any better introduction. To really learn this stuff, you need to learn a lot more than is presented in the online course, but you're very well off if this is your starting point.

As for textbooks, Purves, as mentioned earlier is good. Principles of Neural Science is mentioned often as its probably the greatest reference work, but it's not something you read as a first timer. Bear is good. I have read some of it, and it seems pretty good as introductory material. Both Purves and Bear are fine.

Ah, it also kind of depends of what your reason for interest is. If you want to learn about consciousness, attention, memory, and stuff like that, I would have different recommendations. If you want to learn about the hard biology of the matter, I have different ones. If you want to learn the computational aspects of how the brain works, I have different ones. I just assumed you wanted general introductions. As for general ones, I say the online course is top shelf. Bear is great as supplementary material. Purves as well.

Not dick-waving, just establishing credentials: I taught a neuroanatomy lab at Berkeley for three semesters, two with Marian Diamond, and won a teaching award for my efforts, so at least hear me out.

First, have your students buy the Human Brain Coloring Book. It may sound cheesy but it really does help and Dr. Diamond put together an amazing resource.

Second, have plenty of brain specimen (human if you can get them) on hand to let students do some hands-on dissections or viewings of what a real messy organic brain looks like.

Third, most undergrads learning neuroanatomy will be pre-med, so I like to roll in a lot of case studies with MRI/CT scans, videos, etc. Blumenfeld's clinical book is great for this.

Fourth, connect the anatomy to real research going on right now. Talk about how we now don't really think Broca's area is the actual spot for the motor aspects of speech (a la Dronkers). Show DTI images, etc.

Finally, something I've been doing for public outreach seems to be a great draw and works for a first class lecture: the zombie brain. It gets students thinking about how function and behavior link to the brain using something ridiculous, but not-as-boring (you can see me give a half-drunk lecture to a few hundred people at bar at the bottom of that page... it held their attention for 30 minutes).

Good luck!

It may be a bit specific/higher level than you are looking for as I used it in medical school, but I really liked Nolte's The Human Brain. It is a very readable and interesting text but may be more specific than what you are looking for (I may be able to scrounge up a pdf if you PM me)

Aside from that I also highly recommend Purves as others have. Another good one that deals with more of the brain behavior link and neuropsych side is Biological Psychology by Kalat.

Best of luck! I was a neuroscience undergrad and loved it.

Edit: look for used or one edition old if you want to buy them - will save you a lot

This is a great list so far, and I'd love to see it added to the sidebar.

I'd suggest adding "Neuroethics" by Martha J Farah under "Other". It gives an interesting perspective on the influence of neuroscience on law and society.

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroethics-Introduction-Readings-Basic-Bioethics/dp/0262514605

"The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams" is good for anyone interested in neuroanatomy. I've only used the 3rd edition- there is an updated edition, but I can't speak to how useful it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Brain-Photographs-Diagrams-CD-ROM/dp/0323045731/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411223019&sr=1-2&keywords=the+human+brain+in+photographs+and+diagrams

"Structure of the Human Brain" is a very comprehensive section-by-section atlas of the brain.

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Human-Brain-Photographic-Atlas/dp/019504357X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223434&sr=8-1&keywords=structure+of+the+human+brain+a+photographic+atlas

"Molecular Neuropharmacology" is a good advanced text for anyone interested in drug development.

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundation-Clinical-Neuroscience/dp/0071481273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411223180&sr=8-1&keywords=molecular+neuropharmacology

I've mentioned these because they seem to fill gaps that are currently in the library. If anybody knows of better anatomical texts, though, I'd be interested to know about them!

I usually recommend Bear-Connors-Paradiso as a first read, as it is simpler; almost in between a textbook and a popular book. And then you use Candel to go deeper on selected topics (or all).

And indeed, another approach is a "top-down" reading: download some papers from Pubmed, and start deciphering them. Use Wikipedia, and references from there, and reviews from Pubmed, to understand these papers - word by word, sentence by sentence. It's a long process, but extremely helpful. And there's no better way to charm the professor, and make them suspect that you are one of the best, most intelligent and proactive students ever.

Disclaimer: In no way to I want this to dishearten you. Rather, I want to save your new interests from being crushed by irrelevant jargon, and would rather you put that energy toward learning what we already know. If you insist on 'keeping up,' your best bet is probably something light and fluffy like Science Daily, Live Science, or New Scientist.

Are you a scientist? A neuroscientist? What kind of neuroscientist? Or just an interested citizen? By the language you're using, I'll guess that you're a biology undergrad with a burgeoning interest in neuro.

From that perspective, it really shouldn't matter to you what's "new" in the field, because you don't know how it's different from what's "old." Just learn what we know so far. Also, in science, if a finding is "new," the field isn't sure if it's "true" yet, and you therefore need to not pay attention yet.

If you insist on 'keeping up to date,' (which isn't possible unless you pick a very narrow subfield of a subfield), it's much more useful to read review journals than the 'latest' unreplicated neuroscience primary research.

• Nature Reviews Neuroscience
  
• Trends in Neuroscience
  
• Annual Review of Neuroscience
  
  etc.
  
  These are still way too specific to be useful by almost anyone but the close network of the authors of those reviews.
  
  Let's take an example. We'll go to Nature Reviews Neuroscience's page. Oh, look! Salience processing and insular cortical function and dysfunction. How interesting! Except that I have no idea what any of those words mean, or how this fits at all into any context. Attempting to read through this review paper will tell me how these researchers updated an extremely narrow model that isn't even included in textbooks because nobody but the authors and their colleagues care.
  
  While snarky, I hope this illustrates the futility of trying to 'keep up with neuroscience.' 90% of all neuroscientists who have ever lived are working right now, the field is humongous and expanding so rapidly that just updating Kandel took 12 years.

>So I think researchers don't believe our brains do backpropagation like is used in machine learning neural networks

Absolutely correct.

Also, there's multiple memory systems in the brain, and they each operate using different mechanisms (at least on the level of analysis you're discussing). You're discussing motor memories, which is fairly distinct from other types of memories like declarative, episodic, or semantic.

The good news is that people have been working on the questions you have for years, and there's some useful textbooks that you might read to get a start at better understand the psychology and neurobiology of learning and memory (which is a very rich area of research). One thing you'll learn is that there are analogies between the way neural networks learn and operate and how brains do it, but the actual mechanisms are very different.

Here's one from the late great Howard Eichenbaum: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Memory-Howard-Eichenbaum/dp/0393924475

​

>This could correspond to the neocortex having access to the initiation of each action, and sending the signal to initiate each action in the sequence required. Eventually each action grows direct connections from one action initiation to the next, so that the actions happen smoothly, right after one another. I was wondering if this could be the kind of learning that happens while we sleep.

So, this is an interesting thought. We know in rodents that memories for episodes (temporally ordered sequences of events) are replayed during sleep. The belief is that this reflects (in part) consolidation of that memory (a process that moves the dependence of episodic memories from the hippocampus to the cortex, and makes them highly resistant to degradation). We know this happens for episodic-like memory representations (and that this sequential replay likely happens because the circuitry of the hippocampus is well-suited for representing sequences), and while I'm sure consolidation happens for motor memories, I'm not sure if the mechanism is similar as that for episodic memory.

If you want the standard sequence of Neuroscience textbooks, there is a rough ordering of 3 common books. Each are very comprehensive and more than you would likely be able to read cover to cover, but they get more sophisticated and comprehensive as you go. The last one specifically is essentially the bible of neuroscience and you will be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive coverage of any of the topics outside a specialised textbooks or research papers.

These books will cover the general overview of neuroanatomy, physiology, pharmacology and pathology but if you want to go further in depth, there are more advanced books for each of those and dozens of other subfields.

1. Purves - Neuroscience
   
2. Bear - Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain
   
3. Kandel - Principles of Neural Science
   
   I would specifically recommend Nolte - The human brain: an introduction to its functional anatomy as an exceptional example of a specialised text. Unfortunately, I do not recall the neurpharmacology text that I used, but it was very good too. I shall look it up and get back to you! For a more general introduction to pharmacology, the standard text is Rand and Dale - Pharmacology.

I'm not sure about single-cell recordings but with EEG experiments (and most other electrophysiological measures i.e. EOG, EMG) the voltage (also known as electrical potential difference) recorded at a place on the scalp is measure of the potential for current to move from one place to another. So you need 2 electrodes to measure this: the one (or more) on the scalp, and the ground electrode which provides a common reference point for all the other electrodes.
As far as I recall the site for this can vary, I know the EEG system we use (Biosemi) has two electrodes that work as grounds that are placed on the scalp (they are slightly more complex than just ground electrodes though but don't ask me to explain how!).

In addition (and slightly confusingly) you have reference electrodes, which can be placed in a variety of places (earlobes, nose, mastoids, etc for EEG). The key property of a site for a reference electrode is that it must be unaffected by the source you are recording. It picks up all the internal and external noise and is then subtracted from the active electrodes to give a cleaner signal. Just like the normal electrodes the reference is measuring the potential difference between itself and the ground electrode.


Luck (2005) puts it like this: Signal = AG voltage - RG voltage

[A = Scalp electrode, R = Reference, & G = Ground electrode]


Hopefully that makes sense and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!

Source: I'm Cognitive Neuroscience PhD student, & Luck (2005) explains this pretty well.

Hi there,

Some suggestions for ya!

The Quest for Consciousness by Christof Koch. Minimal neuroscience background required, but the more you know, the more you'll derive from this book. Focused on illustrating how complex networks can manifest behaviour (and consciousness). Outside of Koch's regular pursuits as an electrophysiology, he worked alongside Francis Crick (ya that one), to study arousal and consciousness. It's a fantastic read, and it's quite humbling.

Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki. Written for neuroscientists and engineers as an introductory textbook into network dynamics, oscillations, and behaviour. One of my favorite books in the field, but it can also be the most challenging.

Treatise of Man by Rene Descarte. Personal favorite, simply because it highlights how far we've come (e.g. pineal gland, pain, and animal spirits).

Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux provides the fantastic realization that "you are your synapse". Great circuit/network book written with a lot of psychological and philosophical considerations.

Finally...

Physical control of the mind--towards of psychocivilized society by the one and only Jose Delgado. (In)Famous for his experiments where he stopped a bull charging at him through amygdala stimulation- along with some similar experiments in people- Delgado skirts the line between good intention and mad science. It's too bad he's not taught more in history of neuroscience.

I think the best resource for starting out, or for more advanced readers, is Principles of Neural Science by Kandel. You could choose the chapters you're most interested (e.g., embryology and functional anatomy) and read them in any order since each chapter is essentially free-standing. (Source: b.s. in neuroscience + m.d.)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0838577016?pc_redir=1405881514&robot_redir=1#productDescription_secondary_view_pageState_1405953363324

Per amazon: "The book is a feast for both the eye and mind. The richness, the beauty, and the complexity of neuroscience is all captured in this...book."

• Purves text isn't that easy but a great and thorough introduction.
  
• Gazzaniga's text is fantastic but less on the biology side of things.
  
• Others have mentioned Kandel's text but I don't think that's a good first text for anyone wanting to "dip their toes" in.
  
• Someone else also mentioned the Bear text, which is very good.
  
  Those are really all you'll need; from there you will find things on your own or from professors.

I wouldn't recommend anyone spend 100+ dollars on Kandel at this point, considering the new edition is due to be out soon. I guess they just pushed it to early 2012, but still, the previous version is 10 years old now.

Squires, Berg, Bloom et al. (2008) Fundamental Neuroscience - is a pretty good one.

A nice quick read for an introductory "crash course" on neurotransmitter systems try out

Iversen et al. "Introduction to Neuropsychopharmacology". OR

Cooper et al "Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology".

Those are probably my three favorite books that I read as an undergrad.

It looks like the other answers are sufficient, but I want to mention the book I just read, which details how brain size and brain region size evolves. It is called Principles of Brain Evolution and it is a fun, easy read for someone who already has a background in neuro as well as evolution.

Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science is the classic textbook used by everyone. It's pretty dense and may be a little outdated but it's still among the best and most popular out there.

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016

I found the MOOC.

I’m fine reading textbooks, it’s this one?

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kandel/dp/0071390111/ref=nodl_

I just usually read on my iPad so im glad there’s a digital version.

I’m particularly interested in mood, behavior, motivation, so maybe after I check out the textbook and course I’ll have a better idea of what to look for in terms of specifics.

Thanks so much for the info!!

I got a specialty in neuroengineering coursewise as a masters (it was still biomedical engineering). I took an Applied Electrophysiology class that I thought was very good. Most of our neuroscience classes and engineering classes lended from this Principles of Neural Science book.
The applied electrophys class also used an Applied Bioelectricity text.

We also has a pretty comprehensive Computational Neuroengineering course that relied on this Theoretical Neuroscience text.

As far as teaching these topics goes, it's pretty specific. You might want to look into related neuroscience labs to apply some of these theories.

I've read quite some books in this area, including The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. I've also read quite a bit about synaptic plasticity, brain changes, adult neurogenesis etc. in Dale Purves his textbook on Neuroscience.

It seems clear to me that certain brain circuits have been reinforced over time, which lead to his current state of a very fixed mindset. For instance, the brain region very much involved in emotions is the amygdala. Which has projections to the vmPFC which seems to play a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision making and self control. It seems like there's something in this area which might be relevant to this particular case.

What do you think?

depends on how much time you have... Kandel's text is very thorough, very detailed, and perhaps more than you'll need. Good if you're doing a PhD, or specific research. Way too much to it justice if you only have one semester in an undergrad course.

The first text is pretty common, but does not go into specific details as deeply. Still it gives plenty of information about pathways, reflexes, functions, and such.

If you are studying neuro for clinical reasons, this is a good resource as well.

Principles of Neuroscience is a grad-school level book. I would not recommend shelling out $100 for it.

This book, Cognitive Neuroscience by Michael Gazzaniga, is a great book for someone at your age. It's super cheap and very easy to understand.

If you go with a textbook from an author like Kandel or Purves or Bear, you are going to be jumping straight into the deep end and might easily get discouraged.

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life is a great introduction to affective neuroscience, if you're curious. Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain is also a good textbook for a general introduction and review of the subject.

That depends on where you're at.

For an introductory text, we used Nolte. I hated it at the time (it's not economic with the prose... as if NA isn't enough of a headache), but in retrospect it was still pretty good and I often return to it. Also bang up Scholar for review articles (if you have access) on the functional neuroanatomy of whatever region you're interested.

Dale Purves et al, Neuroscience, 6th edition. This is a good overview of neuro. I've seen it used in grad courses but it was also was a mainstay of undergrad.

After that, the latest edition of Principles of Neural Science, Eric Kandel et al. This is more involved and is often used as a reference for labs and grad students. Some might say this is a grad level book; however, I personally needed it for both undergrad and grad.

You might want to get both of them at the same time, so Kandel can be used if needed for further information whilst reading Purves. Both of these books can likely be found as pdfs on libgen.io.

Neuroanatomy: I used a book called The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams by John Nolte but there are many resources out there. She might want to get some free software to examine the brain in 3d. The Allen institute comes to mind.

I imagine this program is not research based, but she should still get used to reading papers, and also keep an eye on current neuro news. Science Daily, Neuroscience News, and New Scientist are good places to start. That said, reading papers can be hard if you don't have the background (neuro, stats, lab techniques).

I'm not sure how much time she has, so realistically speaking I would focus on reading Purves front to back and use everything else I've listed as supplementary first, and then dig deeper into them if she has the time.

Information theory and neural coding - Borst A, Theunissen FE (1999)

Abstract:

> Information theory quantifies how much information a neural response carries about the stimulus. This can be compared to the information transferred in particular models of the stimulus−response function and to maximum possible information transfer. Such comparisons are crucial because they validate assumptions present in any neurophysiological analysis. Here we review information-theory basics before demonstrating its use in neural coding. We show how to use information theory to validate simple stimulus−response models of neural coding of dynamic stimuli. Because these models require specification of spike timing precision, they can reveal which time scales contain information in neural coding. This approach shows that dynamic stimuli can be encoded efficiently by single neurons and that each spike contributes to information transmission. We argue, however, that the data obtained so far do not suggest a temporal code, in which the placement of spikes relative to each other yields additional information.

See also: Theoretical Neuroscience, Ch.4 - Dayan P, Abbott F (2005)

Maybe this was already obvious to you, in which case apologies, but those are very broad topics. What kind of level of aggregation are you thinking of? Neural engineering sounds a bit more neural network-y, rather than large-scale human cognitive processes, which would involve measurement methods like EEG and fMRI that won't tell you much (broadly speaking) about the way networks of neurons do computations. You also have local field potential or clamping measurements, where you're looking at what specific neurons (or at least way smaller scales) are doing, which is more animal research. And there's computational modelling which is (relatively, to my knowledge) as yet hardly connected to the usual methods of measuring brain activity.

That said: I read this as an intro to neural networks, http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Computational-Neuroscience-Thomas-Trappenberg/dp/0199568413 and remember liking it, but I was coming from a psych background so I don't know if it would be rigorous enough for you. For the biology / anatomy, the classic is http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/dp/0071390111/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=17R09KD62178HQ06E1VJ.

There's a paper by Wang (1999) with an integrate-and-fire neuron model that I implemented as a toy model that helped me get to grips with the computational side of things. I can't comment on how influential it is theoretically.

Thanks for your comment. I prepared a figure to illustrate my explanation.

here!

Please read a short article by Stewart 1999 paper for free here

First, I think we can all agree that current flows from positive to negative (as described by Kirchoff's Laws). If you think of a charged capacitator (current flowing from left to right) you will find that the left plate would be charged with positive charge whereas the right plate would be charged with negative charge. The membrane of cells behave like capacitators.

Now, an inward current (positive ions flowing towards the inside of the cell) would charge positively the outer membrane, and negatively the inner membrane. This makes the membrane hyperpolarized.

On the other hand, an outward current would charge positively the INNER membrane, and negatively the OUTER membrane. This makes the membrane depolarized.

This confuses a lot of people (even wikipedia has this wrong!). I would recommend this text for harden electrophysiologists (it also explains in detail potassium capacitated currents (as also Hudgkin and Huxley hypothesized in their original papers).

People are right when they say that the membrane depolarizes when Na+ enters the cell and that blocking VGNaC also blocks AP firing. What people do not understand is that Na+ does not directly depolarize the membrane, but triggers K+ to do so.

If you're looking for some basic neuroscience (which you'll definitely need in neural engineering - I was looking into doing it as well), then I highly recommend Neuroscience 3D: Exploring the brain. It's a really good beginner-medium text book, that covers everything from how EEGs work, to how individual neurons communicate with each other to brain disorders.
Here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-Brain-3rd-Edition/dp/0781760038

Source: I'm a neuroscience student and that textbook is prescribed for most of my courses

I'm reading Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience right now and find it to be a great source of information on topics like this. Definitely a lot more in depth than just brief summaries, but you could probably skim around it and find the information you need pretty quickly. Brains are complicated.

It all depends on what your intent is. Neuroscience is so broad and interdisciplinary that my recommendations depend largely on how much time and effort you plan to put into it. Are you trying to understand the brain so that you can go into research someday? Is neuroscience relevant to your separate field of research, and you just wanna get to know all the acronyms? Or are you just a curious layman who wants to understand the organ of understanding? In the latter two cases, many of the suggestions are very good; books by anyone from Ramachandran to Koch will suffice.

But if headed into neural research, you should really grab an introductory textbook that explains the principles of the brain (I recommend this one) and go through it, chapter by chapter, so you get the fundamentals down before you move onto deeper inquiries. If you have the money to spare, you should also pick up Principles of Neural Science as a reference book for more in-depth inquiries. The reason for this is that the Kandel book is really dense and somewhat poorly organized, which makes it rather inefficient to a neuroscience newcomer who mainly needs the basic ideas.

More important than which book you pick up, though, is how you read it. It's very important at this stage to really start thinking about the big questions in each subfield so that 1) you don't gloss over important details or, worse, crucial principles; and 2) you're preparing your mindset for research. You can't read it as a passive observer, absorbing information rather than processing it. Ask questions. How do we know this and this about the brain? What principles can we anticipate about the brain (and by implication: perception, memory, cognition) based on its structure and development? When do neurons first start firing anyway? If you're doing it right, you'll be making use of Kandel a lot to probe deeper — and eventually review/experimental papers when you're ready.

tl;dr - Read that shit if you're doing research and you'll thank me later.

Great list, thank you...

I would add:
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Shapes-Mind-Shaun-Gallagher/dp/0199204160
http://www.amazon.com/From-Molecule-Metaphor-Language-Bradford/dp/0262062534
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/

Kandel - Principles of neural science is the best by far, despite being just a little bit outdated on some areas (but so are all other textbooks in this field). Bears Neuroscience: Exploring the brain is a very easy read, goes down like yoghurt, but is far less comprehensive and not so in depth as Principles.

Med student here. I honestly can't say whether this is layman enough, but reading through the clinical cases made this subject a lot more enjoyable.

Blumenfeld

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Brain-Evolution-Georg-Striedter/dp/0878938206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397844469&sr=8-1&keywords=georg+striedter

The above is a great book. If you want the full treatise, try this:

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Nervous-Systems-Four-Volume-Set/dp/0123925606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397844453&sr=8-1&keywords=evolution+of+nervous+systems

I would recommend this book, Neuroanatomy through Clinical Cases by Moore. We used it for medical school and I found it particularly useful.

People love the text Neuroanatomy through Clinical Cases -- https://www.amazon.com/Neuroanatomy-through-Clinical-Cases-Blumenfeld/dp/0878936130

​

You can find it much cheaper on other websites!

The chapter on the basal ganglia and related motor disorders from Eric Kandel et al.'s last edition of Principles of Neural Science has a very nice overview IMO. If you search around the dark corners of the web, I'm sure a .pdf will find you.

do you not have a textbook available to you in your phd course?


http://www.amazon.com/Ion-Channels-Excitable-Membranes-Third/dp/0878933212/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425570312&sr=8-1


This is the one a lot of grad courses use. It's fairly easy to read and peppered with subtle humor.

EEG analysis is a bit of an art form and mastering it just comes with experience, trial and error, and really knowing your particular dataset and aims. I use Matlab with the EEGLAB toolbox for ERPs and FieldTrip for time frequency analysis.

There are so many different steps, it's definitely not just a matter of pushing a button and getting a nice p-value out at the other side. I'd recommend getting your hands on this book in the first instance.

This may be the best introduction.

Coursera also has a course.

The principles of neural Science:
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/dp/0838577016

Great book all around. See if you can grab it used at a college at the end of a semester.

Jeff Hawkins, if you don't know, wrote "On Intelligence", which is a fantastic [layman, which is what I am] book: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323396864&sr=8-1

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOkiFOIbTkE

Axon guide is good but lacks much of the theory behind EPhys.

This book helped me and is worth the money spent: https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Cellular-Neurophysiology-MIT-Press/dp/0262100533

I think Bear et al. (2006) Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain is a good introductory book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Neuroscience-Exploring-Mark-F-Bear/dp/0781760038/

Yes, absolutely. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Event-Related-Potential-Technique-Neuroscience/dp/0262621967

If you're looking for something that's a little less dense then a straight-up anatomy book, I highly recommend The Human Brain Coloring Book.

I spent a lot of time going through advanced neuroanatomy textbooks, but the information didn't stick with me. It took me actually going through the entire coloring book and meticulously coloring every single page.

And for the record, this wasn't some crackpot idea I had, this was the required work of my college neuroscience major's neuroanatomy course.

brain coloring book This is where I started. You may laugh, but it helped.

Bear Neuroscience

Used this for my comprehensive exams.

I'd go with Purves' textbook or Bear's book. Both are very good introductory books. If you want something more difficult, try Principles of Neural Science by Kandel or (even more difficult) Fundamental Neuroscience by Larry Squire.

kandel
bear
purves
martin

Each of these books is aimed at a different audience, but this should get you started.

I'll vote for Bear's Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain

I used this book for years and it was written by my neuro professors. I can't recommend it more highly: http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-Mark-F-Bear/dp/0781760038 (can get used for a little over $30)