Pick up a book

Reading academic papers can be a bore. Trying to extract general themes from many of them can be time consuming and frankly you'd rather be down at the pub. Sadly, you are going to have to read them and make the links between them.

Happily, the whole process of reading papers can be made much easier by reading popular science books before hand. Unlike papers they have a commercial impetus to be interesting.

I also like books because they set out a map with territories into which you can see academic papers settling once you have read them. They often provide that crucial reverse zoom, where you can glean what the 'big picture' looks like, how it has been painted and where it could do with some touching up.

The first one to mention is by masterful 'populariser' and cognitive cowboy Stephen Pinker (who also has great hair). For all the criticisms you could level at How the Mind Works (the cheekily named The Mind Doesn't Work That Way by Jerry Fodor is a book-sized whinge about Pinker's ideas) it is the first eminently readable account of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience.

Pinker is superbly fun to read and should leave you with a new found panache for experimental psychology. I found it helped me think about the course on the most general level possible, setting up a framework in which I could think about everything else. (It also touches on pretty much every area of the course).

I would also suggest pages thirty-one through to fifty-eight of his other book The Blank Slate. Here Pinker discusses how four science samurais - cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics and evolutionary psychology - have joined forces in cognitive neuroscience.

I like to think of these as four of the table legs upon which any decent account of human behaviour should rest; they are to the mind and brain what Niko Tinbergen's 'big four' are to ethology (in fact, they probably overlap). If you can think at all of these levels about problems you will be a better psychologist. If you want to see Pinker talk about modern psychology, here's a vid.

Moving on from general books about the course to those general ones about individual areas, I start off by recommending Phantoms in the Brain by Ramachandran and Blakeslee for all those that have a neuro flavour, so second year Neuropsychology and third year Neuropyschiatry and Consciousness spring to mind. Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales is also great in giving the breakdowns in neural systems a human face. I also found Damasio's books (esp. Descartes' Error) to be useful.

I think the third year course on Vision has been put on pause this year (which is a shame because it is exciting and challenging), but second years should still be encountering the Benton/Scott-Samuel/Trosianko crack team. Something that might help you to get your head around this is by vision celebrity, Richard Gregory and his book Eye and Brain. For (much) hungrier people, Tom Troscianko et al's Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception will fill you up nicely.

Moving up to higher cognitive functions, there are several good books on Language. Pinker crops up again with The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, which despite being a bit dated now (e.g. the dissociation between Williams Syndrome and Specific Language Impairment is not a clean cut as he makes out) is well worth dipping into if not just to enjoy Pinker's verve. His Words and Rules will also set you up nicely for a big part of the Developmental Disorders of Communication course. Pinker's friend Jackendoff has also penned his own (better?) guide to language called Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.

For Developmental stuff, How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by researchers Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl was fun and helpful. Had a scoot around for some others on Amazon but could only find things for parents on how to hothouse their children. Ask Bruce/Norman/Chris for some suggestions if you want more.

For Memory, see ex-Bristol working memory maestro Alan Baddeley's Human Memory: Theory and Practice, Revised Edition or his other one, Your Memory: A User's Guide.

For Evolutionary Psychology, Dawkins' Selfish Gene is a must, equipping you with the foundation to think and write about this deceptively tricky area (evolutionary stuff is the easiest to think about and the hardest the write about). If you haven't read this yet, feel silly for a bit and then click here.

Second years should be happy enough with the sections in How the Mind Works for Evo. But third years will need better preparation for dealing with Darwin's 'other' theory of evolution: survival of the sexiest. I strongly suggest Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, which takes you on an explanatory journey from why we need to have sex in the first place through to the consequences this fact of biological parking has on human behaviour. For a more nuanced (and saucy) account than the simplistic male-polygamy/female-monogamy portrayal, dip into The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller or The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating by David Buss.

For second years, Social Cognition, particularly, automatic thinking, can be spiced up and clarified if you read the very short (but slightly glib), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. The review papers by Macrae and Bodenhausen and Bargh nail down the big concepts in a nice way. For mental control, this recent Google book covers the ground well.

And now for my favorite module in the degree - Consciousness. There are many, many books to read here. I want you to read all of them, but I know time and motivation will restrict you unless you have long summer holiday ahead of you and you want to do this course (i.e. second years).

So, the first I would point you to is a brief but thorough paraglide across the big areas called Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem by the late, great Jeffrey Gray. Google have procured a free copy here. The title is a reference to a paper by Chalmers that you should absolutely read if you do this course. In Gray's book, philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience dance their wonderful tango together and you should glean all you need to about the major issues.

For people who get really excited by Consciousness here are some fantastic books that will not only impress other travellers on trains with their cool titles but which will enrich you intellectually for the course and beyond. They include philosophical fizzler The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul (Dennett and Hofstadter), I Am a Strange Loop (Hofstadter's most recent), the rather arrogantly entitled Consciousness Explained (Dennett), The Mystery of Consciousness (Searle), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Chalmers), I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self (Llinas), Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (Edelman and Tononi) and the denser Rhythms of the Brain (Buzsaki).

Right, that's enough to be getting on with. I have omitted courses where papers will have to suffice and I have probably forgotten some courses too. Hopefully, this list will give second years a good summer holiday reading list and third years a list of books in which to dip should a general understanding be lacking or hazy.

All the links in this post take you to the Brain Milk Book Store, where you can buy them. I have also put a permanent widget up on the side which will take you to the store.