'NEUROSCIENCE: Exploring the Brain', a book review by Brenda Walker

22nd Nov 2024

BNA Associate member, Brenda Walker, shares her review of the book 'NEUROSCIENCE: Exploring the Brain', Bear, Connors and Paradiso, Jones Bartlett Learning, Enhanced Fourth Edition 2020.

MARK F. BEAR, BARRY W. CONNORS, and MICHAEL A. PARADISO 

    The term ‘Enhanced Fourth Edition’ is clearly explained on the back cover of this American publication when it invites the reader to: DISCOVER THE DYNAMIC, RAPIDLY CHANGING FIELD OF NEUROSCIENCE.  The additional key features mentioned are: a progressive approach to learning without the need for prior courses in Chemistry and Physics; new striking illustrations to help master complex concepts;  a full-colour neuroanatomy atlas insert with a self-quiz to help the student learn the brain structure in depth;  ‘Of Special Interest’ boxes that reveal real-life examples of neuroscience ‘applications and diseases’, and finally, the addition of ‘Path of Discovery’ boxes to enable a fly on the wall view of  the research process by  experts in the field, including the Nobel Laureates, Mario Capecchi, Eric Kandel, Leon Cooper, May-Britt Moser and Edward Moser.  

    Also provided for students is a ‘Dynamic Technology Solution’  that includes  Navigate Premier Access  to: online learning materials, e-book, TestPrep, videos and animations, student practise activities and assessments, learning analytics, reporting tools and more.’   

    Instructors are not forgotten, for their resources include: ‘Slides in Power-Point format, TestBank, Image Bank, guided lecture notes, grading and analytics tools with Navigate Premier, and more!  Technical support is also said to be available for this. 

    This large, heavy paperback has nearly a thousand pages, which include Appendices, Glossary, References with Resources, and finally an Index. It is just a pity the left-hand side of the page margins in the early and final parts of the book are so tight to the binding, that reading the end of a line of print becomes frustratingly difficult. The many coloured illustrations and figures are extremely well drawn, clearly defined and described; and the large coloured whole page images are surprisingly beautiful.  It is interesting to note that when it comes to abbreviations, those relevant to a specific chapter are placed and explained, not only at the end of that chapter, under the heading KEY TERMS, but also in the Glossary.   

   The boxes mentioned earlier are attractively designed on a cream background   and in general the printed text, on fine paper, is well spaced and easy to read. When the volume is on its side, the top of the page edges are colour- coded as are the page numbers providing the reader with easy access to the four sections when required. There is also a ‘User Guide’ to help students, featuring the chapter outline as a road map and with the addition of the ‘Brain Food Box,’ where students wishing to expand their learning can find ‘more advanced’ material.  At the end of each chapter is a summary, entitled CONCLUDING REMARKS; as well as REVIEW QUESTION and a list for FURTHER READING that includes Review Articles.  

    There are also fascinating images of parts of the brain acquired by technology such as magnetic resonance topography, an electron microscope, or staining with DNA markers which are used to introduce the start of each of the four parts of this volume. Part 1: FOUNDATIONS, (7 chapters) Part 2: SENSORY AND MOTOR SYSTEMS, (7 Chapters) Part 3:  THE BRAIN AND BEHAVIOUR, (8 Chapters) Part 4:  (3 Chapters) THE CHANGING BRAIN. 

    In the PREFACE, the advantages in knowledge gained by neuroscientists since their 3rd edition are described as ‘nothing less than breathtaking’.  Following this statement, the authors list the new neuroscience insights giving brief details of recent discoveries together with their importance and ongoing influence for future research. They also explain how this volume developed from an original course at Brown’s University called Neuroscience 1 which served as an introduction to the Nervous System with a dual purpose: the opening towards either a career prospect in neuroscience or simply a science course. It was apparently a great success with students developing their curiosity and fascination for how we ‘sense, move, feel, think’.  The text included:  commonsense metaphors, real-world examples, humour, and anecdotes to remind students that science is interesting, approachable, exciting and fun.  This user-friendly philosophy, that proved so popular over the years, has been continued in this new edition where material is presented – 

‘at the cutting edge of neuroscience in a way that is accessible to both science and neuroscience students alike’.   

    The introductory chapter in ‘Part 1 FOUNDATIONS’ sets the scene of exploration with a quotation from Hippocrates (On the Sacred Disease) highlighting the origins of neuroscience in Ancient Greece, although it is acknowledged that the word ‘neuroscience’ did not come into use until the 1970s. It is a fascinating, detailed introduction, sometimes with anecdotes, covering views from Greeks, Romans and the period from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Also included is the evolution of the nervous system due to Darwin’s influence and how brain research today involves levels of analysis. The role of the neuroscientist is explained as being vast and the training required long, whether it be to study Molecular, Cellular, Systems, Behavioural or Cognitive Neuroscience. In all these areas, the process of scientific enquiry is described as: Observation, Replication, Interpretation and Verification.  

     Animal Welfare and their Rights are also covered in this opening chapter along with a descriptive list of some major disorders of the Nervous System. In the   conclusion of the preface, the authors remind the reader that our present knowledge of the brain can help such disorders, but point out that despite much progress over the centuries there is a long way to go before a complete understanding of the brain is reached. Students are then reminded that a startling new discovery could be ‘just around the corner’ and that the search could also be fun.   

    The authors state a ‘neurophilosophy’ is threaded through the organisation of the book and any reader would verify this.  As one reads through this volume there is a feeling of a very interesting journey to explore, where the prose is very accessible and new learning explained clearly. This applies to whatever page you choose.  At the end of Part 1 are two relevant paragraphs quoted in full, and these concluding remarks, will also provide a sample of the book’s   clear, friendly style.     

    Neurotransmitters are essential links between neurons and other effector cells, such as muscle cells and glandular cells. But it is important to think of transmitters as one link in a chain of events, including chemical changes both fast and slow, divergent and convergent. You can envision the many signalling pathways onto and within a single neuron as a kind of information network.   This signalling network is in delicate balance, shifting its effects dynamically as the demands on a neuron vary with changes in the organism’s behaviour. 

    The signalling network within a single neuron resembles in some ways the neural networks of the brain itself. It receives a variety of inputs in the form of transmitters bombarding it at different times and places.  These inputs cause an increased drive through some signal pathways and a decreased drive through others, and the information is recombined to yield a particular output that is more than a simple summation of the input. Signals regulate signals, chemical signals can leave lasting traces of their history, drugs can shift the balance of that power – and, in a literal sense, the brain and its chemicals are one.  

   There are four Nobel Laureates in this volume writing about their work. ‘The Path of Discovery’ box in Chapter 2. Part One includes a 2-page section written by Mario Capecchi on how he succeeded in his research starting with the question, ‘How did I get the idea to pursue gene targeting in mice?’ The answer was –from reading a paper written by Mike Wiggler and Richard Axel indicating ‘exposing mammalian cells to a mixture of DNA and calcium phosphate would cause some cells to take up the DNA in functional form and express the encoded genes.’    The excitement of this discovery led to Capecchi asking himself why their efficiency was so low.  He wondered if the problem was ‘a matter of delivery, insertion of exogenous DNA into the chromosome or the expression of the genes once inserted into the host chromosome.’  The key question then was, ‘What would happen if purified DNA was directly injected into the nucleus of mammalian cells in culture?’  The rest of the article describes his ten-year journey to achieve his aim. 

    Part Four, THE CHANGING BRAIN, focuses on Memory and on pages 850/51 Edward and May-Britt Moser write about how the brain makes maps. Having grown up in Norway, they met on a behaviour analysis undergraduate course at university where discussion took place about the neural basis of behaviour and were inspired by the lecturer Carl-Erik Grenness. He alerted them to the pioneering work on brain-related behaviour relationships which then sparked their growing interest in neuroscience. The article goes on to recount how they set up their own lab in a bomb-shelter in a basement of the university allowing their dream from the early 80s to begin, grow, and explore neural networks. 

   With a grant from the European Commission to co-ordinate a consortium of seven groups whose aim, ‘collectively’ was to perform one of the first integrated neural network studies of hippocampal memory, one of those aims being, to determine how the position code of the hippocampus was computed. Earlier research by John O’Keefe had established that the hippocampus had place cells that fire if and only an animal is in a certain place, but it was unclear whether those place signals originated in the hippocampus itself or came from the outside. The article continues revealing their strategy to solve this problem with the help of Mareno Witter, a neuroanatomist whose research had already gained much information regarding the connectivity between the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus, and so was able to help the Mosers guide electrodes to the right spot.  

   By the year 2002, the research group had grown involving a team of outstanding students. They were surprised to find the entorhinal cells were grid cells that formed a regular hexagonal grid generated by the Cortex itself and looked like ‘the marbles on a Chinese checker board’. The organisation of these grids led to further research and the realisation that they were close to creating a ‘universal type of spatial map whose activity pattern in many disregarded the fine details of the environment. With their strict regularity, the cells had the metrics of the spatial map that had not been found in the hippocampus’.  In 2002, they published the hippocampal disconnection study, followed by more results in 2004, and the publication of the grid pattern itself followed in 2005.  For the authors of this article, the most fascinating part of their research was to discover that the hexagonal pattern was generated by the cortex itself, there being no grid pattern in the outside world and that grid cells helped them better understand the neural representation of space, but could also provide a window into some of the innermost workings of the brain. Due to these patterns being so reliable and regular, they knew they were ‘on track’ to understanding the fundamental computations of the cortex. 

    The third Nobel Laureate, Erik Kandel, also writes in Part 4 on pages 871-873, about what attracted him to the Study of Learning and Memory in Aplysia. Born in Vienna in 1929, he was eight when Hitler invaded Austria and saw the outburst of anti-Semitic violence. Luckily, he and his family were able to escape to live in New York with his grandparents. This ‘dark side of human behaviour’ raised many questions which eventually led to him changing his academic interests towards the ’human mind and its capability for good and evil’. He then left the subject of history to become a psychoanalyst. During this period he worked with the neurophysiologist, Harry Grundfest and discovered the delights of working in a laboratory. He was then able to set up an electrophysical system and explore and record the large axons of a crayfish.  Those laboratory exercises where he was able to listen to the sounds of action potentials led to him realising the excitement of research and of working alone.  

    His article is very detailed and well illustrated as he records how – from the 1960s to the 80s  he researched the marine snail, Aplysia, for the biological basis of memory formation and storage. Previous research provided two opposing views. ‘One was the aggregate field approach, which assumed that information is stored in the bioelectric field generated by the aggregate activity of many neurons. The other was the cellular connectionist approach, which derived from Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s  idea that memory is stored as an anatomical change in the strength of the synaptic connections between nerve cells.’   The years Kandel researched cellular studies of simple behaviours in a number of animals supported by developing insights and methods of molecular biology, enabled him to provide direct evidence to support Cajal’s suggestion that synaptic connections between neurons are not rigid but can be modified by learning and that any anatomical modifications can support memory storage. He describes the process involving alterations in gene expression, the synthesis of new proteins, the involvement of dendrites, increased synaptic strength and transmitter release. 

    He discovered that changes in synaptic strength occur not only in the connections between sensory and motor neurons  ‘but also in the connections between sensory and interneurons revealing that even in simple reflex, memory appears to be distributed among multiple sites.’ Importantly, he was able to prove that a single synaptic connection is capable of being modified in opposite ways in different forms of learning and for different periods of time paralleling the different stages of memory. When he returned to the Hippocampus he found that the general principles governing short and long-term memory storage applied not only to simple animals but also to complex ones.  

   Again in Part 4, on pages 880-881, the last of the Laureates mentioned in this volume, Leon Cooper, writes about Memories of Memory describing his journey of how he came to ‘stray’ from ‘the lofty world of theoretical physics to the earthy problem of the brain’ to explore the possibility of constructing networks of neurons that would reveal some association with animal memory. It was the 1970s,  and by this time it was acknowledged that networks of neurons could form ‘distributed representations of the world  ‘where  recollection of one memory could lead to the recollection of another linked by experience ‘ and this  occurred due  to content rather than a ‘physical address in the network’.  Such representations were resistant to ‘the loss of individual neurons and synapses and so provide a candidate substrate for memory storage in the animal brain.’  Cooper’s question was:  ‘How could such representations be constructed in networks of neurons? – or – How could the strengths of large numbers of synapses that make up neural networks be adjusted to obtain a mapping that corresponds to an appropriate memory?’ 

    He continues by describing his associative work with the lead author of this volume, Mark Bear and others during the 1980s and 90s when they re-examined the Hebbian rule and the theory known as the BMC Synaptic Modification in great detail along with research assumptions regarding   excitatory glutamatergic synapses in the cerebral cortex and synaptic plasticity in many species in vastly different regions of the brain. Their research also delved into hypotheses regarding visual memories revealing that the BCM theory ‘provided a bridge between the molecular mechanisms of synaptic modification and the systems-level properties of synaptic modification and the systems-level properties of distributed information storage’.  

    Forty years on, Kandel feels he has overcome the initial scepticism and that their aim ‘to build a theoretical structure relevant to a fundamental brain process that was sufficiently concrete so that it could be tested by experiment’ had not only been accomplished but had inspired other research and the discovery of new phenomena such as homosynaptic long-term depression and metaplasticity. He sums up in his final sentence ‘Possibly most important, we have an excellent example of the fruitful interaction of theory with experiment in neuroscience.’ 

    Overall, there are many other fascinating contributions by distinguished scientists in the ‘Path of Discovery’ and ‘Special Interest ‘boxes, but unfortunately too numerous to list in this review.    To conclude, Bear, Connors and Paradiso have focussed the reader’s attention on just how vital understanding neuroanatomy can be in perceiving how the brain works, and throughout have stressed that this is true not only for the student, but also for all those qualified in the profession; the importance of their statement being accentuated by their inclusion of the full- colour neuroanatomy atlas insert with its very challenging self-quiz.  Most likely, if the authors ever publish a ‘5th enhanced edition’, the current global research on neural spatial map connectivity and the International Network for Bio-inspired Computing will be included as well as the latest research from NYU’s Centre for Neural Science  where  a team of scientists, led by Nikolay V. Kukushkin and Thomas Carew, have just discovered that apart from the brain, cells in other parts of the body also perform a memory function by turning on a ‘memory gene’  thus ‘opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning and to treat memory-related afflictions.’    (“The massed- spaced learning effect in non-neural human cells.” James Devitt, Nature Communications Journal, Nov 2024.)                 

    Indeed, the growing tsunami of new advances in all aspects of neuroscience is not only exciting, but quite overwhelming for an author when it overtakes the informative text, partly due to the time scale involved in editing and publishing a large textbook.    However, whether a student or tutor, NEUROSCIENCE. EXPLORING THE BRAIN is certainly a volume worth owning.  Even readers outside this particular scientific field would certainly enjoy browsing into the exciting mysteries of their own resilient brains to discover how they – ‘sense, move, feel, think’.          

                                      An expensive book – but well worth it! 

Brenda Walker.  November 2024