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There are a few truly landmark books in any science, a few works that virtually everyone in a field would unanimously agree are seminal, definitive, or a benchmark for the field. This is true even in neuroscience, where our fine-grained knowledge about the brain is expanding exponentially but where integration of knowledge and heuristic thinking about the brain inevitably lag behind the runaway overdose of exploding “facts” and findings.
It is particularly worth noting that there are also different kinds of seminal or landmark publications. First and most obviously, in the history of any science, it is the stunning empirical result that always garners the greatest attention—as it should. There are certainly several empirical findings that stand out in behavioral neuroscience, where an experimental or clinical result initiates a major paradigm shift or suddenly illuminates regions previously shrouded in ignorance and conceptual confusion. A famous example of this might be Dr. Alois Alzheimer's first clinical case description of a dementing disorder or the discovery that l-dopa helped to treat the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. There are also seminal monographs and books that aim to summarize many experimental or clinical findings by one investigator in the service of broad reformulations of basic theoretical assumptions. An example of this might be Luria's 1966 work, Higher Cortical Functions in Man, which was decades ahead of its time in unraveling the contributions of distributed cortical regions to cognitive and other higher brain functions in terms of Luria's functional network models. Other recent theoretical syntheses of this kind might certainly include Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience and Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens.
But there are other less appreciated kinds of seminal works, no less valuable, that attempt an overview