Brain Architecture

I would recommend it for the very first undergraduates. Good definitions of common but often not well understood terms. It is a comprehensive and clear explanation of how brains are built and what the presence of different receptos means for the neural function. Very little on evolution but it's not the main subject.

The author gets credit for effort, but I found a lot of noise in the text, i.e. extremely detailed neurogenesis, research and discovery history, pop-science related topics. He tried to cover too much ground to make multiple access points of interest for the layman, but in the process jumbled the complex topic. The book is technical but also rife with overwhelming background that slows assimilation. I succeeded in pulling out a general architecture of the brain after an hour of wading.

Truly a great book for people with a very solid base in neuroscience. Not aimed at the lay audience, but well worth the effort. For anyone in a related field, this is a comprehensive conceptual framework for thinking about neural evolution that cannot be beat.

This book is heavy going - need lots of Wikipedia look-ups to define unfamiliar terms and ideas, the content is really storng,

excelente libro, muy fácil de leer

Unlike pretty much every other book on this subject, this book is well written, progresses gently from the simple to the complex, defines all terms as it goes, and never loses the reader. A perfect book. Thank you, Dr. Swanson!

Great book, amazing for those who want to understand better brain structure and how it works.

Swanson is a rare sort of scholar, and we're lucky he happens to be a neuroanatomist. Everyone can benefit from this book, though the more familiar you are with neuroscience the more you will get out of it.

Larry Swanson is one of the great neuroanatomists of the 20th/21st century. Often dismissed as anal-retentives, anatomists have something of a bad name but this is an unfair criticism. Understanding the function of an organ or device begins with mapping out clearly what are its component parts. Granted, this can be done tedious and fastidiously, but what sets Swanson and other great neuroanatomists aside is an ability to abstract general principles of brain organisation from the confusing myriad of detailed and often conflicting observations collected over the centuries. Swanson sees clearly and far, and constantly looks for the forest instead of focusing on the trees.This book is a welcome extension to Larry Swanson's academic articles, acting as an update and a comprehensive overview of his thinking on what are the component parts of the brain. The clarity exuded by Swanson's thinking and his wonderful writing make this a pleasure to read.The book has a fair amount of technical detail and is not exactly an easy read for the non-expert. I wouldn't call this a popular science book. Neuroanatomy and neurobiology are complex subjects; the lay reader may get a lot out of this book if he/she is prepared to put in the effort. But bedtime reading it is not. As an academic, this book is one of the pillars of my thinking and will constitute mandatory reading for courses I teach. A classic.

Swanson is clearly a master of his subject and a master of the science of his subject. The bulk of the book succeeds at what it sets out to do which is provide a top level overview of brain architecture. The early chapters on invertebrate nervous systems are intriguing and leave one wanting to know more. The chapters on embryological development of vertebrate nervous sytems are well written and well supported with corresponding diagrams. The systems overview of the brain as a network of four subsystems, motor, internal state, cognitive and sensory all make perfect sense. The descriptions of the motor and internal state subsystems are perfectly adequate as introductory overviews. It is the chapter on the cognitive system, the cortex and the brain nuclei where things start to go disappointingly wrong. There comes a blizzard of neuroanatomical terms, many unintroduced, without anything like enough diagrams to give a structural conception of what is being described. This is clearly the most complex and difficult aspect of neuroscience, and the 'cutting edge' of neuroanatomy for which Swanson's passion is clearly apparent. But as an introductory overview it is entirely dsappointing as it is clear that he has tried to cram far too much detail into a book of the target level. Indeed I wonder if it is in fact possible to write an introductory overview of this aspect of brain anatomy and makes me wish that he'd put his effort into writing a more comprehensive book that was better layed out.