The Cognitive Neurosciences

Ed Michael S Gazzaniga MIT Press, pounds sterling64.95, pp 1447 ISBN 0 262 07157 6 The performance artist Laurie Anderson referred to her father's death as being “like a library burning to the ground.” If the higher functions of human beings make up such a collection of texts then we are perhaps approaching some knowledge of their titles. More especially we are cognisant of the complexity that we face: an evolved network of interrelated systems capable of dynamic change; the coding of experience—memory; prefrontal systems which release us from the constraints of the immediate present, allowing us to reflect upon time future, past, and hypothetical; maps of cerebral activity which alter and adjust to the …