Neurophysiology

Carpenter's book & CD-ROM w Neurolab experiments is a well illustrated text, with fewer in color photos than Kandel, Schwartz, & Jessell's larger tome. Carpenter has illustrations reinforcing the major points and concepts of functional neurophysiology. His expertise in Oculomotor Anatomy & Electrophysiology is a strength of this title, making the chapters on Motor Control, and Vision very well done indeed. Roger has end of chapter sections on the History of Neurophysiology with descriptions of key historical figures who have made a contribution to the field, chiefly from the English tradition, i.e. a European approach. Roger summarizes and paraphrases many interesting books on journal references with nice succinct commentaries at the end of each chapter as well. Dr. Carpenter has written an entire chapter on engineering concepts in neuroscience such as feedback control and how it applies to neural network theory. The chapter on balance & postural control (the vestibular system) is excellent. Neurophysiology reads like a student's textbook, but serves a wider purpose in my opinion. The CDROM contains a full text version, has a brain atlas of structures, highlights many clever experiments with electrophysiological parameters, and so on. The 4th edition of the book is longer by about 80-100 pages than the 1996 3rd edition. The 5th edition should prove to be even longer and better. This book is aimed for medical students in their first year, but will prove useful to the first year graduate student in a PhD Program. To review the essentials is one of the tasks I do find myself doing on occasion by referring to Roger's lucid prose. He makes you feel comfortable and at home with some of the global issues. Summing up Marr's computational view of the cerebellum succinctly and running Sir John Eccles functional modules and cross-talk into this text, makes it a good read. For more advanced computational models, one should really also have Michael Arbib's Handbook of Brain and Neural Network Theory (2nd edition) on your desk at the same time. He taught me albedo which is the visual quality of white light, not illuminance, a measure of brightness, i.e. intensity.