Popular Neuroscience: Books for a Long Train Ride

Looking for reading material for a longish train trip I am about to take, I decided to hit to bookshelves of my Square's Barnes & Noble to see what popular neuroscience titles might be a good diversion (as well as potential supplementary 'lighter' references, should I re-teach an introductory course to neuroscience sometime over the next year).

I chose three.

The first is by Elkhonon Goldberg, a revision of an earlier work, which is titled "The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World" and is available in paperback by Oxford University Press. I first met the author when I was a graduate student, so I am looking forward to reading up on what he's been up to.

The second is about glial cells and is entitled, "The Root of Thought: Unlocking Glia" by Andrew Koob. Five years ago, if someone said there would be a popular offering about glia, I would have thought 'Yeah, right...' Though I do enjoy adding discussion about glia to my teaching, I never thought I'd see such a book, published by FT Press, on the shelves. I posted an entry about glial cells on the blog in August.

The final book is about empathy and "mirror neurons." Social cognition has become a popular topic over the past decade and I am looking forward to reading what Marco Iacoboni has written about this in his book, published by Picador.