HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Bit late to the party, but this person is very much correct. I also do BMI work and optics is undoubtedly the future for neuroscience. The optics book you want to get is Hecht:

https://www.amazon.com/Optics-5th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0133977226

That's a good intro into real optics.

It's much more than the optics chapter you'll get in a physics textbook. It goes over the classical ray optics in good detail, does a great job with traditional matrices and that formulation of optics (the one that the design programs like Zemax use), goes well into the real meat-n-potatoes of wave optics (including birefringence, a huge part of biological optics), gives you a good accounting of how lenses and other optical devices are actually Fourier transformers, and also dives into the more esoteric optical devices (a must for practical neuro-optics).

It's an upper-division/graduate level book, fyi. So I'd back-load it in your study course. Though in terms of neuro-optics it's more of a keyhole book.

If you are particularly interested and really want to know what's actually going on with EM, then you need to go through Jackson:

https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Third-David...

This is the book on EM, but is very much physics graduate student level. And honestly, I don't think you's need it for BMI stuff. But if you don't go through it, you'll just be trusting other people when they say your ideas won't work and they can't really explain it to you. Just going through Jackson is a bit of a hazing experience and will earn respect.