How do we think? What makes us beings that are endowed with conscience, capable of memory, of perceiving the surrounding world, of feeling passion? This book presents an ensemble of mechanisms that compose the human spirit and addresses the progress of the neuroscientific revolution: the biology of the brain and the study of its evolution are in the process of surrendering to us the key to conscience itself.

Gerald. M. Edleman, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, heads the Institute of Neurosciences at La Jolla, California.