As @radicalOH mentions, there are several timescales depending on whether you are talking about immediate, short-term, or long-term synaptic potentiation, each coordinated by a cascade of events (that have been extensively documented in you're interested in knowing more). To specifically address your question about how quickly learning happens in neurons... it's fast. Is it ~10ms? mmm, that seems incredibly fast, and I'm not sure I can provide any definitive answer. I think it heavily depends on what you're willing to interpret as 'learning' when examining events on the molecular level.…
Also relevant, though maybe deviating a bit from engineering: Principles of Neural Science by Kandel and Schwartz https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande...
This is a really cool post and I love seeing posts about human neurons on Hacker news. Especially this one talking about the different glial cells, as most people only think about the brain in terms of neuronal connections between synapses and think none of the housekeeping. I tried to find the other segments for this series and could only find the first four chapters, so I'm wondering if there are more. But for anyone really interested in neuroscience on a biological level, "Principles of Neural Science" by Kandel and Schwartz (also one of this article's references) is your bible.
Okay, that helps, thanks. For neuroscience first-year grad students, the gold standard is: http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/... The fourth edition does a good job at higher-level stuff. But be forewarned: It is biology intensive. For less biology and more cognitive neuroscience, you can try: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience-Second-Michael-... or http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience-Neuropsychology... I used the Gazzaniga when I taught Intro to Cognitive Neuroscience even as I wasn't super impressed (which is a common complaint -…
My undergrad neuroscience textbook was the classic "Principles Of Neural Science" by Kandell, Schwartz, and Jessell. http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/... If you're looking for something a bit more digestable, you could try "Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral, Cognitive, and Clinical Neuroscience", which is more appropriate for a survey level (100, 1000, depending on your school) course. http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Psychology-Introduction-Beh...
Happy to help. Focus on ions and channels if you're interested in neuron functions. That's a typical hangup for those new to biology. Some knowledge of the vascular system also helps. Otherwise, it mostly comes down to classifying cell types then brain and body regions.
I'd second principles of neural science, though that's with the expectation that the reader has the appropriate background in basic chemistry, biology, and maybe anatomy. Out of the dozens of books I have on neurosci, that's probably the single most comprehensive.
Thanks robg & toddml, I was particularly interested in Principles of Neural Science and it's good to see both of you endorsing it. I've already started teaching myself some first year biology (from a borrowed textbook), so I'm going for Principles.
Hmmm...it's hard to do entire fields justice, but here's an attempt. There are a couple of standard neurobiology textbooks, like Kandel, Jessel, and Schwartz's Principles of Neural Science, Purve et al.'s Neuroscience and Squire et al.'s Fundamental Neuroscience. These are huge books that cover a bit of everything, and you should know that they exist, but I wouldn't necessarily start there. If you're specifically interested in computation, I would start with David Marr's Vision. It's quite old, but worth reading for the general approach he takes to problem-solving. He proposes attacking a…