This is a concise but detailed book which covers a lot of ground. Mauro Maldonato is an academic psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a strong track record in motor control and decision-making. This book links abstract symbolic thought and decision-making to evolutionary origins in motor control. The text is generally accessible to inquisitive readers in addition to the target audience of neuroscientists, psychiatrists and philosophers of mind. A rich account of the history of consciousness, decision-making and motor action is presented that, importantly, goes beyond the English-language literature. The remit stretches from evolutionary perspectives to influential modern views of consciousness and even to the experience-dependent application of medical knowledge. The reader is not patronised, but drawn into the detail and complexity of theoretical and evidence-based understanding of the subject of the volitional and rational mind. The chapters serve as self-contained essays that share a common theme. This style, reviewing the topic broadly, provides a fresh contrast to recent monographs of consciousness, where the aim is often to convince the reader of the central merits of a single theory.
The study of consciousness is now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. Major advances in understanding the neurobiological origins of the human mind are anticipated over the next few decades, which will bring with them practical applications and interventions that will necessarily affect mental health and psychiatry. Present progress with technical and methodological aspects of consciousness science is accompanied by the development and refinement of theoretical models among which the notion of predictive coding and the Bayesian brain is beginning to dominate. The central premise of the predictive brain, first formulated by von Helmhotz, is that to make sense of the wealth of dynamic sensory information the brain must try to predict the source of sensory inputs. Friston and others present these concepts as driven by functional efficiency, a need to minimise ‘free energy’. Sensation is inference, wherein predictive codes represent hypotheses that are tested against incoming data, generating prediction errors. In this context actions become embodied means for active inference, enhancing the precision and accuracy of future predictions. Embodiment also applies to the concept of interoceptive predictive coding, relating to internal bodily control and viscerosensory information. This notion is emerging as a potent model for the neural mechanisms that underlie self-representation and emotion states and, by extension, disorders of selfhood and affect that have pervasive relevance to psychiatry. Professor Maldonado’s book provides a valuable framework to consider such elaborations of the predictive brain and represents a scholarly resource from an erudite perspective.
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