I have wondered about what goes on in the brains of animals and people since I was a youth. My research career began by studying how some genes affect behavior. Little surprise, it turns out, that many such “behavioral” genes influence the way the brain is built. So, I began to study brain development using embryos from a variety of experimental laboratory animals and developed a university course on this topic. When I retired, I decided to share what I learned. The other books on this list are great examples of readable books that would likely be exciting to anyone else interested in the story of how the human brain is built.
This book picks up brilliantly from where Zero to Birth leaves off. It’s the story of how the brain encodes the reality of the world outside the womb, how our experiences change the brain, and how we acquire knowledge, skills, and sociability.
I found this book to be extremely readable. It’s full of fascinating and illustrative examples of how the human brain continues to change to function effectively in the real world.
'This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.'
Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of the inner cosmos. It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality. On the way, amidst the infinitely dense tangle of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see: you.
This is a truly excellent book on brain evolution, mostly from the vertebrate and mammalian perspective. It is quite academic, though I found it much easier to read than most university-level textbooks. The flow is logical, and it covers a huge range of issues from a conceptual point of view.
I really enjoyed learning about how different animals evolved to possess different mental skills and capacities and how these abilities are linked to particular structures in the brain, such as the cerebral cortex.
Brain Evolution is a complex weave of species similarities and differences, bound by diverse rules or principles. This book is a detailed examination of these principles, using data from a wide array of vertebrates but minimizing technical details and terminology. It is written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and more senior scientists who already know something about 'the brain,' but want a deeper understanding of how diverse brains evolved. The book opens with a brief history of evolutionary neuroscience, then introduces the various groups of vertebrates and their major brain regions. The core of the text explores: what aspects of…
Not only does this book provide an up-to-date account of where science is at in terms of our basic understanding of how the brain works, but it also succeeds in putting this knowledge into a compelling history of basic discoveries. I really enjoyed this aspect of Cobb's book and tried to incorporate it into my book.
So, I found it to be an excellent introduction to neuroscience and a great book about the process of how science progresses in jumps. It engenders real excitement in this still very lively field of study and celebrates the key advances in our conceptual understanding of the brain.
This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain.
Today we tend to picture it as a computer. Earlier scientists thought about it in their own technological terms: as a telephone switchboard, or a clock, or all manner of fantastic mechanical or hydraulic devices. Could the right metaphor unlock the its deepest secrets once and for all?
Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how…
This is a wonderful book by one of the great pioneers of Evo-Devo. The title comes from the last lines of Darwin’s classic Origin of the Species, and the book fittingly illustrates how the theory of evolution is related to the development of plants and animals.
The lessons in this book are fundamental to my appreciation of biology and provide excellent context to the evo-devo stories in my book.
For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo-Evolutionary Developmental Biology-is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.
This is basic developmental biology written in a way that is fully accessible to a lay reader. I found that it provides clear and intuitive insights into the conceptual framework rather than primarily descriptive account of human development in the womb.
I am fascinated by questions such as how creatures as complicated as animals and humans can arise from a single fertilized egg, and this book does a great job of getting down to the nitty-gritty of this complex process without using overly technical language.
Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die?
Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: how can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg? A convergence of ideas from embryology, genetics, physics, networks, and control theory has begun…
How is the most complicated thing in the known universe built? What is the instruction manual like? How did animals evolve brains? How are animal brains like human brains, and how are they different? What is the role of nature, nurture, and chance in brain development? What kinds of things can go wrong in the building of the human brain, and how can knowledge of human brain development be used to advance medical treatments for neurological impairments? How does knowing how brains are made help us understand how brains work? Why do identical twins have such different brains?
This book gives a modern, basic scientific perspective on these questions in the context of telling the step-by-step story of how brains are constructed.
I am a Harvard- and MIT-trained physician-scientist, and I am drawn to research problems that bridge the basic and the practical – how a better understanding of cells and tissues can inform new therapies for cancer and other diseases. As children, we are all scientists – mini-hypothesis generators trying to make sense of the world. I suppose I never outgrew that curiosity. My list of best science books credits writers who bring to life the excitement that comes from looking at the natural world in a new way, a spirit that I try to emulate in my own writing. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
FROM ONE CELL is a dive inside the cell and its evolutionary prerogatives to explain how these "endless forms most beautiful," as Charles Darwin called them, come about. Along the way, we learn about the scientific process, filled as it is with serendipity, as the story is told through the eyes of the scientists who informed…
From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine
Every animal on Earth begins life as a single cell. From this humble origin, the nascent creature embarks on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster-yet with astounding regularity, it reaches its destination intact. From One Cell illuminates this epic transformation-still one of nature's most mysterious feats-to show where we all come from and where we're going.
Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling the secrets of development, we see how all the information needed to build a human fits into a fertilised egg, and how the trillions of cells that emerge know what to become and where to…
