Is it too bold to say that the ultimate utility of a neuroscience textbook can be measured by its ability to explain the basal ganglia? Perhaps. If we were to accept such criteria, the fourth edition of Dale Purves’ Neuroscience would stand as one the finest and most economical texts in the field. While Kandel’s Principles of Neural Science is the tome that sits on the desks of most neuroscientists-in-training, Purves’ Neuroscience may safely serve as the undergraduate’s introduction to neuroscience. Medical students wishing to appreciate the neurophysiology of clinical phenomena — a component often lost in clinical neuroanatomy textbooks — may also use Purves. Be forewarned, however, that Purves’ Neuroscience lacks the clinical detail, radiographs, and case presentations that give books such as Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases (Blumenfeld, Sinauer Associates) and Clinical Neuroanatomy (Waxman, McGraw-Hill Medical) their weight. Medical students using Purves as their primary text would benefit by supplementing with Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple, the widely used, wonderfully useful, minimalist manual to clinical neuroanatomy.
Purves divides the 31 chapters of this fourth edition into five units: Neural Signaling, Sensation and Sensory Processing, Movement and Its Central Control, The Changing Brain, and Complex Brain Functions. Studded throughout the chapters, the reader will find Purves’ notable “yellow boxes.” Serving more than mere distractions, the “yellow boxes” included in each chapter highlight, discuss, and elaborate on special topics in neuroscience mentioned in the main body of the text. Most interesting are the boxes entitled “Excitotoxicity following acute brain injury (Box 6C),” “Deep brain stimulation (Box 18C),” and “Nuclear weapons and neurogenesis (Box 25B),” which describes a study published in a 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, wherein researchers studied the amount of Carbon-14 present in human brains to determine whether neurons divide throughout one’s lifetime. As Purves excellently explains, Carbon-14 can be generated atmospherically as a result of nuclear weapons testing. Researchers measured the level of this isotope in the brains of individuals born before 1955 (just prior to widespread nuclear testing) and in the decade that followed (marked by a near doubling in the amount of atmospheric Carbon-14). The results, which showed that only individuals born after 1955 had incorporated Carbon-14 into their brains, lent support to the hypothesis that only the developing brain undergoes neuronal proliferation.
Unlike other textbooks, Neuroscience lists references within the blocked text of the yellow boxes instead of drowning them in the litany of references that concludes each chapter. The curious student, therefore, has the advantage of following the footnotes without turning a page.
Purves’ Neuroscience begins to falter, however, outside the main textbook. The Sylvius neuroanatomy atlas, an accompanying resource available for download, features many color-coded images and brain sections, but without any instruction or guidance. While most atlases are meant to serve as repositories from which students can retrieve images and diagrams as they work through a primary text, the Sylvius atlas lacks even a common search feature. Instead, the student is left to forage from one neuroanatomical region to the next, searching for relevant sections. Moreover, few sections are provided in close sequence with each other. The result is an atlas that provides little continuity from one slice to the next, making it difficult for the user to follow nerve bundles of the spinal cord and contiguous columnar nuclei of the brainstem. In the reviewer’s experience, the best atlases provide a sequential continuity that rivals an actual MRI series, along with tutorials and instruction for the labeled structures on each slide or radiograph (see, for example, NetAnatomy Online at http://netanatomy.com).
In addition to the Sylvius atlas, Neuroscience also offers an online companion Web site, which is freely available at the Sinauer site at http://www.sinauer.com/neuroscience4e. Like the Sylvius atlas, unfortunately, the companion site is largely underwhelming. Each chapter on the site is presented in three Web pages: “Summary and Key Terms,” “Animations,” and “Flashcards.” The summaries are merely reprints of the last few paragraphs of each textbook chapter, the key terms are bare minimum definitions that will leave most students unsatisfied, and the flashcards are nothing more than the key term definitions in a question and answer format. The value of the site is wholly found in its animations, which are well narrated and illustrated. There are 35 animations for the 31 book chapters, but not all chapters have accompanying animations. In fact, 13 chapters are without any animation at all.
One feature that could have enhanced the site is open access to the online quizzes, which can only be made available after an instructor of a course activates the account for his or her students. The author and publisher of the text would do well to make the quizzes accessible to all readers, regardless of their enrollment in a course or status as a student.