- #36
Bandersnatch
Science Advisor
- 3,510
- 3,035
Myself, I don't hate pop-sci with a passion.
I think Kaku's books are fine for your stated purpose of creating a mind map of concepts used in the areas that interest you. As long as you'll keep in mind that everything you read there might be inaccurate and shouldn't be relegated to the 'I know this' bucket in your memory, you should be fine.
I'm not sure if this is something that you'd consider, but you could always look up introductory courses on the net. A lot of universities provide such courses, or recordings of lectures, free of charge. Youtube itself has got a slew of those.
Ideally, what you want is a course for people who are not taking it as a part of their specialist career, but more like a peripheral knowledge from another field. For example, there's a course called 'Human Behavioural Biology' on Youtube, aimed at medical students rather than biologists. You'll get a nice, low-level, but broad introduction to the subject, including basics of neuroscience. And if the lecturer is a good conversationalist, you might get plenty of anecdotes about current and historical discoveries to look into.
I know there's a neuroscience course on EdX, and MIT Opencourseware has a number. I'm sure there's more.
The main drawback being that these are not books. But, usually there's also some reading recommended for such courses that you might look up, and some of them can be treated as a sort of an audiobook to listen to.
I think Kaku's books are fine for your stated purpose of creating a mind map of concepts used in the areas that interest you. As long as you'll keep in mind that everything you read there might be inaccurate and shouldn't be relegated to the 'I know this' bucket in your memory, you should be fine.
I'm not sure if this is something that you'd consider, but you could always look up introductory courses on the net. A lot of universities provide such courses, or recordings of lectures, free of charge. Youtube itself has got a slew of those.
Ideally, what you want is a course for people who are not taking it as a part of their specialist career, but more like a peripheral knowledge from another field. For example, there's a course called 'Human Behavioural Biology' on Youtube, aimed at medical students rather than biologists. You'll get a nice, low-level, but broad introduction to the subject, including basics of neuroscience. And if the lecturer is a good conversationalist, you might get plenty of anecdotes about current and historical discoveries to look into.
I know there's a neuroscience course on EdX, and MIT Opencourseware has a number. I'm sure there's more.
The main drawback being that these are not books. But, usually there's also some reading recommended for such courses that you might look up, and some of them can be treated as a sort of an audiobook to listen to.