Reddit reviews Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes

do you not have a textbook available to you in your phd course?


http://www.amazon.com/Ion-Channels-Excitable-Membranes-Third/dp/0878933212/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425570312&sr=8-1


This is the one a lot of grad courses use. It's fairly easy to read and peppered with subtle humor.

The two books that are listed by /u/ZigForGreatJustice and /u/nickelot are literally the classics of introductory neuroscience. They will cover you for everything up to about PGY1. Take things slow, some of the information will take a while to sink in.

For some more diversity, Nolte is one of the best neuroanatomy books you can buy and Rang and Dale pharmacology is the definiteve standard in pharmacology. Depending on what field you are most interesting in and what your background is, there are other great books. Hille is definitely not an intro to neuroscience book, but if you find yourself liking biophysics or membrane physiology it's the definitive Senior year to PGY2 reference for the field.

To get started, I recommend Bear. It's a somewhat lighter read than Kandel is.

https://www.amazon.com/Channels-Excitable-Membranes-Bertil-Hille/dp/0878933212

https://www.amazon.com/Patch-Clamping-Introductory-Guide-Electrophysiology/dp/047148685X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518292111&sr=1-1&keywords=patch+clamp+physiology

Going to jump in and take a stab at responding, if nobody minds...

Neuropsychology uses mathematics very rarely. Neuropsych is more about brain injury and rehabilitating the person around whatever neural issue they have. Neuropsychologists typically operate as part of a clinical treatment team, working alongside a neurologist, maybe a neurosurgeon if there was some intracranial or CNS trauma involved, and some sort of physical, behavioral, or cognitive therapist. In this team, neuropsychologists usually run the tests to diagnose disabilities or track symptoms over time. If you're interested in the neuroscience of psychology/cognition, you may be more interested in cognitive or behavioral neuroscience. These fields rely on mathematics but in a different way because the observations at that level are so hard to quantify. Mathematics in cognitive neuroscience (and even neuropsychology) is more about measurement theory: quantifying abstract or immeasurable phenomena and then attempting to explain how high-level function is tied to low-level events. Stuff that comes to mind includes the neurobiology of autism, visual attention, information processing in sensory networks, etc. This will lead into Bayesian decision theory, information theory, psychophysics, probability models, and from a very theoretical side, graph theory and looking at the mathematics of network topology and multi-sensory integration.

Mathematics is used in neurochemistry (or, more precisely, in fields like biochemistry, neuroendocrinology, neuropharmacology, biophysics, etc). In those fields, math is often used to describe the dynamics of whatever system you are studying, whether it's some kinetic process like diffusion or changes in protein conformation or receptor/chemical binding dynamics or even chemical metabolism. For this, you'll really want to know your differential equations and dynamical systems. The Dayan and Abbott textbook is great for this, but also look at http://www.amazon.com/Dynamical-Systems-Neuroscience-Excitability-Computational/dp/0262514206/ and even check out the journal Biological Cybernetics. Bertil Hille's book is also really good for things happening in and around the neuron.

http://www.amazon.com/Channels-Excitable-Membranes-Third-Edition/dp/0878933212