How Brains Make Up Their Minds: Walter J. Freeman. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2000,  xii + 171 pp., $17.50

This is a fascinating book. Walter Freeman has taken the most vexing problem in neuroscience today and has offered a compelling and well-reasoned explanation. How does a mind emerge from a brain? Schopenhauer called a version of this problem the universal knot, and there are thousands of years of discussion about how the mental relates to the physical, the age-old mind–body problem. Freeman's answer is based upon empirical research, and this makes this book far more compelling than mere conjecture. The author travels from the dynamics of olfaction in rabbits and cats to the neurodynamically generated global states we associate with emotion and consciousness, to create a coherent and scalable model of not only how brains work, but how brain functions become minds. But beware: modularism, naïve determinisms, and psychological or material reductionisms-essentialisms die a painful death in this book, and are replaced with neurodynamics, chaotic attractors, and the emergent-global properties that we think of as mentality. However, the psychoanalytic reader should not be concerned that psychic determinism is completely lost: While Freeman's model of the brain-mind supports the position of an endless contextualism that is often identified with postmodern sensibilities, there remains plenty of room for the engine house of an unconscious and the very necessary notions of transference, repetition compulsions, and defenses. It is just that all of our categories and tendencies are endlessly drenched in contextual updating, and those most pathological tend to resist this process the most. But this viewpoint should be familiar and congruent with most principles of psychopathology and psychoanalytic thought.

Freeman has devoted his life to neurobiological research, and is an emeritus professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a valued teacher and done research at Berkeley for more than 40 years. In this book, which builds upon more than