Cortex end Mind by Joaquin Fuster is the best book in the field I have read since Higher Cortical Functions by Alexander Luria. It is a book of similar scope and ambition, but reflecting the Zeitgeist of the beginning of the twenty-first century, rather than that of the middle of the twentieth century. I cannot think of anything of this importance and conceptual clarity written in between. It is also a very European book, decidedly about the forest and not about the trees, and infused with the sort of intellectual romanticism that our prevailing empiricist mores tend to eschew with almost embarrassed incomprehension. As a student of Luria and a fellow European, I can relate to all of the above. The logic, the philosophy and the general intellectual bent behind the book resonate so closely with my own, that I felt that I could have written this book, but not nearly as well or with this degree of professional erudition. As in his previous books, Fuster's ability to inject a certain kind of elegance and verve in the discussion of even the most arcane technical matters makes Cortex and Mind not just an enlightening read but also an enjoyable one.

The scope of the book, and the mastery of a wide range of subjects, is nothing short of astounding. Fuster draws on the concepts and findings from neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, cognitive science, computational neuroscience and more. He is equally at home on all of these territories and interweaves them into a single coherent train of thought in a unique and creative way. Personally, I found Fuster's ability to integrate the ideas emanating from experimental and computational approaches particularly enticing.

The main point of the book is that cognition is supported by a vast neural network of immense complexity, which permits the formation of a large number of overlapping and interactive intricate circuits. Such large-scale circuits of sufficient degrees of complexity correspond to distinct mental representations. Fuster refers to them as cognits.

The opening chapters of the book deal with the neural network architectures and how these architectures embody mental representations, cognits. An important distinction is made between mental representations and the operations upon them. The subsequent chapters deal with the neural bases of perception, memory, attention, language and intelligence. The epilogue addresses the neurobiology of consciousness. It includes, among other things, a very cogent discussion of the relationship between consciousness and attention.

Cortex and Mind is valuable both for the advanced neuroscientific concepts it conveys and for the entrenched neuroscientific myths it dethrones. With great clarity, Fuster defines a certain sophisticated understanding of the brain's function, and with great civility, gentility even, he debunks some of the most enduring misconceptions in the field.

As a discipline, cognitive neuroscience has benefited mightily from advances proffered to us on a silver plate from elsewhere: neuroimaging from physics and chemistry, computational methods from mathematics and computer science. But conceptual breakthroughs of our own making have been preciously scarce and some of the constructs still in circulation today are so outdated, they border on atavistic. Here are a few examples of the myths that Fuster dispatches:

Even today, one hears ceaseless debates, whether Patient X suffers from a deficit of attention, or memory, or executive functions. When I try to explain to my students, and sometimes to my colleagues, that there are no intrinsic boundaries between these so-called “faculties”; that they are all figments of our imagination, useful maybe but figments nonetheless; that such debates are productive only to a point, beyond which you might as well start counting angels dancing on the head of a pin, my admonitions are met with impatience and suspicion. The same is true for the debates about what exactly a particular neuropsychological test measures, or which exactly DSM diagnosis should be affixed. For some reason, the understanding of where heuristic utility of finite taxonomies ends and they become self-defeating, is a difficult insight to develop. Fuster's book offers the most lucid and cogent explanation of these nuanced concepts to my knowledge to date.

Having described the general dynamics of large-scale neural circuits in the opening chapters, Fuster proceeds to show that perception, memory, attention, language, and intelligence all involve different activation patterns on the same distributed neuronal networks. Their neuroanatomical separateness is indeed a myth.

I am on record likening the recent (and mercifully waning) modularity fad in cognitive psychology with the scientific equivalent of a Visigoth invasion. As a guiding principle in understanding the functional organization of the neocortical association areas, modularity is not just wrong, it is intellectually offensive.

To this litany of myths debunked by Fuster with such force and conviction, I will add another one, about the phyletic memory for language. It concerns the debate, whether language is supported by the relatively general-purpose neural machinery of a certain level of complexity; or whether some, as yet to be characterized, genetically programmed language-specific neural machinery exists in the human brain, somewhat akin (in a broad sense) to the feature-specific cells in the visual cortex. The latter notion was originally advanced by Noam Chomsky and has gained considerable following. I have always felt that it flies in the face of my own general neurobiological intuitions.

Fuster examines this premise cautiously and skeptically; but then he steps back and declines to take a stand. I do not presume to read his mind, but if we agree on this issue as much as we agree on everything else, and if I read between the lines of his book accurately, then this will follow:

I believe that Cortex and Mind will become an instant classic in the mind–brain sciences, or at least it should. And it being under 300 pages in length is a good thing. It increases the likelihood that the book will actually be read and not merely acknowledged and shelved. Fuster's views are my views, and now a text finally exists, which will be a required reading for every future student of mine. This book should be read very closely by every practitioner and student of the mind-brain sciences in the broadest sense. They will both learn from it and enjoy it.