June 18, 2025
From the very beginning, Mark Bear’s philosophy for the textbook “Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain” was to provide an accessible and exciting introduction to the field while still giving undergraduates a rigorous scientific foundation. Since its first print printing in 1995, the treasured 975-page tome has gone on to become the leading introductory neuroscience textbook, reaching thousands of students at hundreds of universities.
“We strive to present the hard science without making the science hard,” said Bear, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. The 5th edition of the book, published by Jones & Bartlett Learning, will hit stores July 14, in time for the next academic year of introductory neuroscience classes.
Bear said the book is conceived, written, and illustrated to instill students with the state of knowledge in the field without assuming prior sophistication in science. When he first started writing the book in the late 1980s (an effort soon joined by his co-authors and former Brown University colleagues Barry Connors and Michael Paradiso) there simply were no undergraduate neuroscience textbooks. Up until then, first as a graduate TA and then as a young professor, Bear taught Brown’s pioneering introductory neuroscience class with a spiral-bound stack of photocopied studies and other scrounged readings.
Don’t overwhelm
Because universities were only beginning to launch neuroscience classes and majors at the time, Bear recalls that it was hard to find a publisher. The demand was just too uncertain. With an unsure market, Bear said, the original publisher Williams & Wilkins wanted to keep costs down by printing only in black and white. But Bear and his co-authors insisted on color. Consistent with their philosophy for the book, they wanted students, even before they began reading, to be able to learn from attractive, high-quality illustrations.
“Rather than those that speak a thousand words, we wanted to create illustrations that each make a single point.” Bear said. “We don’t want to overwhelm students with a bunch of detail. If people want to know what’s in our book, just look at the pictures.”
Indeed, if the book had struck students as impenetrable and dull, Bear said, he and his co-authors would have squandered the advantage they had in presenting their subject: The inherently fascinating and exciting brain.
“Most good scientists are extremely enthusiastic about the science. It exciting. It’s fun. It turns them on,” Bear said. “We try to communicate the joy. We’re so lucky because the object of our affection is the brain.”
To help bring that joy and excitement across, another signature of the book throughout its 30-year-history has been the way it presents the process of discovery alongside the discoveries themselves, Bear said. While it’s instructive to provide students with the experimental evidence that supports the concepts they are learning, it would bog down the text to delineate the details of every experiment. Instead, Bear, Connors and Paradiso have chosen to highlight the process of discovery via one-page guest essays by prominent neuroscientists who share their discovery stories personally. Each edition has featured about 25 such “Path of Discovery” essays, so more than 100 scientists have participated including several Nobel prize winners. Among those is The Picower Institute’s founding director Susumu Tonegawa.
The new edition includes Path of Discovery essays by current Picower Institute director Li-Huei Tsai and Picower Institute colleague Emery N. Brown. Tsai recounts her discovery that sensory stimulation of 40Hz rhythms in the brain can trigger a health-promoting response among many different cell types. Brown writes about how various biological cycles and rhythms in the brain and body, such as the circadian rhythms and brain waves, help organize our daily lives.
Immense Impact
Jones & Bartlett reports that more than 470 colleges and universities in 48 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have used the fourth edition of the book. Various editions have also been translated into seven other languages including Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There are hundreds of reviews on Amazon.com with an average around 4.6 stars. One reviewer wrote about the fourth edition: “I never knew it was possible to love a textbook before!”
The reviews sometimes go beyond mere internet postings. Once, after Bear received an award in Brazil, he found himself swarmed at the podium by scores of students eager for him to sign their copies of the book. And earlier this year when Bear needed surgery, the anesthesiologist was excited to meet him.
“The anesthesiologist was like, ‘Are you the Mark Bear who wrote the textbook?’ and she was so excited, because she said, ‘This book changed my life’,” Bear recalled. “After I recovered, she showed up in the ICU for me to sign it. All of us authors have had this experience that there are people whose lives we’ve touched.”
While Bear is proud that so many students have benefitted from the book, he also notes that teaching and textbook writing have benefitted him as a scientist. They have helped him present his research more clearly, he says, and have given him a broad perspective on what’s truly important in the field.
“Experience teaching will influence the impact of your own science by making you more able to effectively communicate it.” Bear said. “And the teacher has a difficult job of surveying a field and saying, I’ve got to capture the important advances and set aside the less important stuff. It gives you a perspective that helps you to discriminate between more important and less important problems in your own research.”
Over the course of 30 years via their carefully crafted book, Bear, Connors and Paradiso have lent that perspective to generations of students. And the next generation will start when the new edition becomes available in July.
