MSc in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (CCN) MSc Texts
Preparatory Reading
In preparation for the CCN MSc course, we recommend the following books as
background reading.
Churchland P and Sejnowski TJ, The Computational Brain. MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass; London, 1992.
Comment: A good general introduction to computational neuroscience is
Ward J, The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology Press, 2006.
Comment: A good general introduction to cognitive neuroscience.
Ballard DH, An Introduction to Natural Computation, MIT Press, 1997.
Comment: Covers various topics relevant to the course, especially chapters 1, 2, 6, 11.
Greenfield S, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour, 1997.
Comment: A good general popular science accont of the brain.
Trappenberg TP Fundamentals of computational neuroscience.
Comment: An in-depth, fairly technical account of computational neuroscience.
Course Texts
The following texts are recommended for you to get a flavour of the type of material
covered on the MSc.
Some of these texts are also used as part of the course, so they serve to give a flavour
of the material to be learned on the course, and may be too advanced to be read in
isolation. These texts are mainly relevant to semester 1 courses, because semester 2
courses utilise current research papers as core reading material.
Module: Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience
Ward J, The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology Press, 2006 or
2010 edition.
Module: Computational Neuroscience 1: Neurons and Neuronal Codes
Seeing by Frisby and Stone MIT Press.
We make use of chapters 3, 13, and final sections of chapter 15.
We use parts of the book:
P. Dayan and L. F. Abbott. Theoretical Neuroscience. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
2001.
Rieke, F. and David Warland, Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck and William Bialek, Spikes
Exploring the Neural Code, 1999.
Very technically demanding, but a great book.
Module: Fundamentals of Neuroscience
Purves, D. et al., Neuroscience, 3rd Edition (2004) Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland,
Mass.
Module: Mathematical and Computational Techniques
There is no set text for this module, but you can acquire the student edition of matlab in
order to become familiar with matlab programming.
The mathematics document used as part of this module by J Porrill is available on the
CCN MSc web site, under the heading `technical material'.
-Semester 2 teaching tends to be more seminar/topic based, so only one module has
generic recommended texts.
Module: Brain Imaging
MRI: The Basics
by Ray H. Hashemi, William G. Bradley, and Christopher J. Lisanti
Human Brain Function
By R.S.J. Frackowiak, K.J. Friston, C.D. Frith, R.J. Dolan, J.C. Mazziotta
==
END OF FILE
==