"There has been a dramatic explosion of information in the field of neuroscience over the last few decades. This explosion of information has presented a great challenge to those of us who teach neuroscience in terms of synthesizing a coherent approach in which the diverse topics encompassed by neuroscience can be taught in a lucid and effective manner. We met this challenge by designing Essential Neuroscience, a book that considers all of the basic neuroscience topics to allow the students to focus on the essential concepts and facts intrinsic to any given topic without overwhelming them with distracting or confusing extraneous information"--Provided by publisher.