Where Do You Start in Studying History of Neuroscience?

I want to build a bibliography of books that would help someone get a good introduction to the history of neuroscience. Single authored volumes are what I'm looking for. Here's what I've got:

• Finger, The Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function 
  
• Finger, Minds behind the brain : a history of the pioneers and their discoveries
• Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts
• Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions

Other recommendations?

Tools for Neuroscience Bibliometrics

I'm testing out tools for doing neuroscience bibliometrics to test the fruitfulness of co-citation as a method for identifying a community of researchers working in the same field of neuroscience under the same research model. The availability of software for identifying co-citation networks promises to simplify protocols for identifying communities of science researchers. Such protocols would make it easier to re-identify research communities. This capacity to re-identify research communities is critical if sociologists of science are going to be able to engage in systematic and unbiased research. How are you supposed to be able to tell that I've accurately represented what a community of researchers is doing if I can't tell you how to find them? Furthermore, why should I believe that you've identified an actual community unless you can tell me what unifies them? I think that bibliometrics can help to answer these questions.

Presently, I'm testing out CiteSpaceII, using my MacBook. The software has proven to be very buggy and finicky about which browser I use. For example, I can't open CiteSpaceII using FireFox, but I can open it using Safari. However, when I do open CiteSpace, the GUI is compressed, buttons are squashed and labels are hard to read. Apparently, these problems do not arise on a Windows system. Not sure what CiteSpaceII looks like on a Linux system.

Because CiteSpaceII doesn't like my Mac, I'm now looking into using NetworkWorkbench. The documentation appears to be more extensive and NetworkWorkbench appears to be able to do whatever CiteSpaceII can do. NetworkWorkbench does not appear to have the same kinds of compatibility issues.

Verging on Superblindsight?

Blindsight occurs when people have a blind spot in their visual field, due to cortical damage, but with some prodding, retain the capacity to guess (better than chance) that a stimulus has been presented to the blind spot. Apparently, at least one blindsight case who appears to have no awareness of visual perception can nevertheless navigate a hallway littered with obstacles.

In recent research led by Krystel Huxlin, it was shown that people who suffer from blindsight can learn to detect a variety of different types of stimuli presented to their blind spot (scotoma). Reuters offers a brief write-up of Huxlin et al's results. I've posted the abstract from Huxlin et al's paper for some additional details.

Krystel Huxlin et al (2009) "Perceptual Relearning of Complex Visual Motion after V1 Damage in Humans" The Journal of Neuroscience 29(13):3981-3991.

Damage to the adult, primary visual cortex (V1) causes severe visual impairment that was previously thought to be permanent, yet several visual pathways survive V1 damage, mediating residual, often unconscious functions known as "blindsight." Because some of these pathways normally mediate complex visual motion perception, we asked whether specific training in the blind field could improve not just simple but also complex visual motion discriminations in humans with long-standing V1 damage. Global direction discrimination training was administered to the blind field of five adults with unilateral cortical blindness. Training returned direction integration thresholds to normal at the trained locations. Although retinotopically localized to trained locations, training effects transferred to multiple stimulus and task conditions, improving the detection of luminance increments, contrast sensitivity for drifting gratings, and the extraction of motion signal from noise. Thus, perceptual relearning of complex visual motion processing is possible without an intact V1 but only when specific training is administered in the blind field. These findings indicate a much greater capacity for adult visual plasticity after V1 damage than previously thought. Most likely, basic mechanisms of visual learning must operate quite effectively in extrastriate visual cortex, providing new hope and direction for the development of principled rehabilitation strategies to treat visual deficits resulting from permanent visual cortical damage.

Dopamine Video

A super-brief tutorial on dopamine function.

Erasing a Memory

Researchers in Sheena Josselyn's lab report that a memory trace for a fearful experience can be selectively deleted in mice. Are we on the verge of localizing specific memories in the brain?

The full article can be found in JH Han et al. (2009) "Selective erasure of a fear memory." 323(5920): 1492-6. Here is the abstract:

Memories are thought to be encoded by sparsely distributed groups of neurons. However, identifying the precise neurons supporting a given memory (the memory trace) has been a long-standing challenge. We have shown previously that lateral amygdala (LA) neurons with increased cyclic adenosine monophosphate response element-binding protein (CREB) are preferentially activated by fear memory expression, which suggests that they are selectively recruited into the memory trace. We used an inducible diptheria-toxin strategy to specifically ablate these neurons. Selectively deleting neurons overexpressing CREB (but not a similar portion of random LA neurons) after learning blocked expression of that fear memory. The resulting memory loss was robust and persistent, which suggests that the memory was permanently erase. These results established a causal link between a specific neuronal subpopulation and memory expression, thereby identifying critical neurons within the memory trace.

Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience

Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience outlines an empirical framework for optimizing discovery in neuroscience. Drawing on illustrations from the molecular and cellular neuroscience of cognition, the framework is rooted in the everyday practice of experimental neuroscience. Toward the optimization of neuroscience, we offer concrete, detailed proposals for studying progress in neuroscience research.

The book is co-authored by Alcino Silva, John Bickle and myself.

Milestones in Neuroscience Research Timeline

There is a nice timeline of research in neuroscience at Eric Chudler's homepage (U. Washington).