| The class will follow Prof. Koch's book The
Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach published last year. You can buy it from the Caltech
bookstore for $45. This is the only required text.
Additional lecture material will be posted on the web against the
date of each class. Other books that I
recommend and that the Caltech bookstore carries
are:
- The Astonishing Hypothesis, by
Francis Crick, 1994.
The
most compelling overview of the problem. Compact and
inexpensive paperback.
- Mind: A Brief Introduction by John
Searle. Oxford University Press, 2004. A concise primer into the current
philosophical debates surrounding consciousness, volition
and related philosophical conundrums. I've written a review of this
monograph.
- The Human Brain Coloring
Book by
M.C. Diamond, A.B. Scheibel and L.M. Elson. Harper Collins
Publishers, 1985.
You probably want to read this, or a similar
neuroanatomy text, for the two homeworks that require you
to draw primate brains and parts thereof.
The following two books are great reference texts, but are
not cheap. You can buy them used via Amazon:
- Vision Science: Photons to
Phenomenology, by Stephen Palmer. MIT Press,
1999. This book is a great
introduction to those of you who want to dvelve deeper
into the psychology of vision.
-
Principles of Neural Science by E. Kandel, J.
Schwartz and T. Jessell. 3-rd or higher edition.
Elsevier. This is
the standard Neuroscience textbook familiar to
those of you who have taken Bi150. It will come in very
handy but not in a literal sense, given its 1,400+ page
girth.
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