Foundations of Neural Development is an accessible textbook, written with a conversational style and topics appropriate for an undergraduate audience. Each chapter begins with a thought-provoking vignette, or a real-life story, that the subsequent material illuminates. The "Researchers at Work" feature, available in every chapter, describes a classic study in detail, taking the reader through the hypothesis, test, result, and conclusion of an experiment. Other features include a marginal glossary, review questions, and bulleted summary in each chapter.Chapters 1-7 unfold in the order of ontogeny, covering induction, the establishment of a body plan, neural migration, differentiation, axonal pathfinding, synapse formation, and apoptosis. Chapters 8-10 address activity-guided, experience-guided, and socially guided neural development-mechanisms that were crucial for the evolution of the human brain.
Lively and engaging, with the finest illustrations, this is the perfect book to help any undergraduate student understand how a single microscopic cell, a human zygote, can develop into the most complex machine on earth, the brain.
