Personal study notes on the neurological foundations of the mind, written up as a single LaTeX document: From Potentials and Chemicals to the Mind.
The long-term aim of these notes is to build a working understanding of the mind from both neurological and psychological standpoints, starting from the physical substrate (ions, membranes, neurons, glia) and working upward toward cognition, behaviour, and personality.
The notes follow the structure of Ninja Nerd's Neurology lecture series on YouTube:
- Playlist: Ninja Nerd, Neurology
Ninja Nerd provides the scaffolding and the ordering of topics; the written notes are my own reworking of that material, written in a lecture-note style and supplemented where useful with additional explanation, clinical context, and connections to psychology.
The document currently covers the basics of neurology:
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Nervous System Structure, CNS and PNS anatomy, cerebrum, cerebellum, diencephalon, brainstem, the twelve cranial nerves, ventricles, spinal cord, and the autonomic nervous system.
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Neuron Structure, soma, dendrites, axon, internal machinery, axonal transport, synaptic vesicles, SNARE proteins, and neurotransmitters.
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Neuron Firing, resting potential, the Nernst equation, graded potentials, the action potential, synaptic release, reuptake, refractory periods, retrograde signalling by endocannabinoids, autoreceptors, and the drugs that mimic or block neurotransmitters at their receptors.
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Glial Cells, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, Schwann cells, myelin, ependymal cells, microglia, and their roles in health and disease.
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The Frontal Lobe, primary motor cortex, premotor and supplementary motor areas, frontal eye field, Broca's area, and the prefrontal cortex.
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The Parietal Lobe, primary somatosensory cortex, somatosensory association cortex, and the posterior association area.
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The Temporal Lobe, primary auditory cortex, auditory association cortex, primary olfactory cortex, olfactory association cortex, and Wernicke's area.
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The Occipital Lobe, primary visual cortex and the visual association cortex.
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The Insula, primary gustatory cortex, interoception and visceral sensation, and the anterior insula's role in emotion, disgust, and awareness.
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The Basal Ganglia, components and the cortex-striatum-thalamus loop, the direct and indirect pathways, dopamine and the D1 and D2 receptors, and the nigrostriatal modulation of movement.
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The Hypothalamus, structure and nuclei, its role as the output stage of the limbic system, control of the pituitary and the endocrine axes, command of the autonomic nervous system, and the pathways linking it to the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.
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The Thalamus, structure and the nuclear groups, the reticular nucleus as the gate, limbic involvement through the anterior and mediodorsal nuclei, the modality-specific sensory relays and how they are gated by attention and arousal, and the motor loops returning from the basal ganglia and cerebellum.
Further sections will be added as the lecture series progresses.
neurology.tex, the source document.neurology.pdf, the compiled PDF (rebuilt from the source).neurology.aux,neurology.log,neurology.out,neurology.toc,neurology.synctex.gz, LaTeX build artifacts.
The document is a standard article-class LaTeX file and can be built with any modern TeX distribution:
pdflatex neurology.tex
pdflatex neurology.tex
Two passes are needed to resolve the table of contents and cross-references.
Work in progress. Expect the document to grow and be revised as the lectures are worked through.