Hey everyone. I’m in college right now (starting my sophomore year in the fall) and I want to be a neurologist. Can any of you guys suggest reading material (magazines, books, etc.) for me? Nothing too hard. Something that I can enjoy reading. Thanks!
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - by Oliver Sacks
Good read - although most of those cases are pretty rare
Thanks, I’ll check it out. Any other suggestions?
Do you definitely mean neurology as opposed to neuroscience? They are not the same thing. Neurology is a medical specialism, dealing with diseases of the (human) brain (and neurosurgery is another medical specialism again). Neuroscience is an encompassing term for the scientific study of the brain (from the level of single cells and below up to the brain as a whole), and deals mostly with healthy brains, and often, in practice, with animal brains (although usually with an eye to what be inferred about human brain function from animal experiments). Most of the stuff you will see in the media these days about the brain, brain scans, etc., is neuroscience, not neurology.
Obviously there is a lot of overlap, and neuroscientists can and do learn a lot about how healthy brains from the clinical studies of people with diseased and damaged brains carried out by neurologists. By the same token, neurologists gain great insight into brain disease and its treatment from the discoveries of neuroscientists. However, they are separate fields for which you would need very different sorts of training. If you want to be neurologist, you would have to qualify as a medical doctor first; this would not be necessary to be a neuroscientist.
On Neurology, specifically, DataX’s suggestion of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is a very good one. Sacks has written a lot of books, and they are very readable. Try a search for him on Amazon.com. Not all his books are about neurology, but I think several are (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat being the best known).
Another very highly respected neurologist who has written a number of readable books on the subject is V. S. Ramachandran. Again, it would be a good idea to search for him on Amazon.com (or in a good library catalog). He has published quite a few popularizing books.
Another possibility, readable, though a bit old now, is The Shattered Mind by Howard Gardner. I would hesitate to recommend such an old book (from the 1970s) in neuroscience, which is a very fast moving field, but neurology does not change nearly so quickly, and most older material is still valid. (Today’s neurologists will still frequently refer to case studies from the 19th century, or occasionally even earlier.)
If it is really neuroscience reading you want, it is hard to know where to start, because there is so much material out there these days, and neuroscience is a big, fast moving field with many aspects. The work of people who study the biochemistry of nerve cells, at one extreme, may have very little in common with that of those at the other extreme, whose work involves making MRI scans of living, functioning human brains, or again, with those who concern themselves with recording the activity of individual nerve cells implanted into the brains of highly trained monkeys carrying out various cognitive tasks. Very different sorts of laboratory (and data analysis) skills are going to be involved in these different sorts of neuroscience research.
I of the Vortex by Rodolfo R. Llinás is one neuroscience popularizing book (by a distinguished neuroscientist) that I have found particularly interesting, although it is not brand new (2001, which is old for neuroscience) and not very well written. It gives a rather different perspective on the brain’s function from that which you will find in much of the neuroscience literature (particularly, perhaps, teh more popularizing stuff), but one that does seem to be gaining followers in the field today.
You might also like to check out the web site neurosciencenews.com. Apart from actually getting the latest neuroscience news there, you will find the latest books advertised and reviewed.