Neuroscience for Psychologists: An Introduction

This textbook is intended to give an introduction to neuroscience for students and researchers with no biomedical background. Primarily written for psychologists, this volume is a digest giving a rapid but solid overview for people who want to inform themselves about the core fields and core concepts in neuroscience but don’t need so many anatomical or biochemical details given in “classical” textbooks for future doctors or biologists. It does not require any previous knowledge in basic science, such as physics or chemistry. On the other hand, it contains chapters that do go beyond the issues dealt with in most neuroscience textbooks: One chapter about mathematical modelling in neuroscience and another about “tools of neuroscience” explaining important methods.

 

The book is divided in two parts. The first part presents core concepts in neuroscience:

• Electrical Signals in the Nervous System
• Basics of Neuropharmacology
• Neurotransmitters

 

The second part presents an overview of the neuroscience fields of special interest for psychology:

• Clinical Neuropharmacology
• Inputs, Outputs and Multisensory Processing
• Neural Plasticity in Humans
• Mathematical Modeling in Neuroscience 
• Subjective Experience and its Neural Basis 

The last chapter, “Tools of Neuroscience” presents important methodogical approaches in neuroscience with a special focus on brain imaging.

 

Neuroscience for Psychologists aims to fill a gap in the teaching literature by providing an introductory text for psychology students that can also be used in other social sciences courses, as well as a complement in courses of neurophysiology, neuropharmacology or similar in careers outside as well as inside biological or medical fields. Students of data sciences, chemistry and physics as well as engineering interested in neurosciencewill also profit from the text.

Marc Zeise is a German neurobiologist who has been working for four decades in investigation and teaching. Having studied biology in Munich and Tübingen he worked on colour processing in the amphibian retina in the Max-Planck-Institute of Biophysical Chemistry and in the Ruhr-University Bochum until its doctorate. He performed postdoctoral studies at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Brain Research and for Psychiatry in Frankfurt and Munich, respectively, elaborating cellular mechanisms of action of diverse neuroactive substances such as baclofen, NMDA, valproate, melatonin, neurosteroids and cytokines. In 1993 he went to Chile doing research on the effects of organophosphate pesticides and methylbromide on the Central Nervous System. Later, in 2004, he became a professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Santiago de Chile. There, he teaches Neuroscience courses and does research on the plastic/metaplastic effects of psychostimulants.