Literature

From CNS120

The class will follow Prof. Koch's book The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach published in 2004. 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.