This book is part textbook, part coffee table decorum, and part lavish work of art, but the overriding scientific data and lively prose string all the parts into a reasonably cohesive whole that is well worth the price. Carter covers the functions of the brain more clearly than any other cognitive neuroscience book around, and since she doesn't push any specific theory, but simply reports what is known and what is not (almost always indicating a delineation between speculation and knowledge--such as in the chapter on consciousness), her book is refreshingly objective in a field too often dominated by competing theories and egoic arrogance.
Best of all, the book is profusely illustrated with enough truly artistic paintings, photos, and diagrams to almost override the text itself in terms of usefulness and information value. As an illustrated textbook on neuroanatomy and as a comprehensive primer on neuropsychology, you can do no better. This book accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, and for that I recommend it highly.
Unfortunately, like the vast majority of modern psychology and neuroscience texts, this book suffers from the gravest of metaphysical mistakes--namely the egregiously reductionistic approach known variously as scientific materialism, positivism, physicalism, scientism, and material monism. The first line of the book summary says it all: "Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts, moods, and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person's brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory." The fallacy in the first sentence should be obvious. There is absolutely no empirical device that reveals the specific content of thoughts, moods, or memories. No EEG, EOG, EMG, PET, CAT, or MRI will tell you what I'm thinking or feeling. They might tell you _that_ I'm thinking, but not _what_ I'm thinking. No empirical procedure can determine whether I'm thinking about picking up litter on Earth Day or planning a local bank heist. Thoughts, moods, and memories are _not_ revealed by a brain scan as clearly as an X-ray reveals bones. They aren't revealed at all! Thoughts, moods, and memories--unlike bones--are not physical, empirical quantities. They don't have simple location in the physical worldspace. What a brain scan detects, rather, is the objective _correlate_ of a subjective experience. A brain scan will show you what parts of the brain are involved in the experience of thinking and feeling; a brain scan will not, however, tell you the nature or content of those thoughts and feelings. What a brain scan reveals is electrochemical activity in a physical organ, not anything remotely resembling "thoughts" or "moods." To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals; quality is reduced to quantity; interior is reduced to exterior; subject is reduced to object; depth is reduced to surface; the heads side of the coin is reduced to the tails side; and what remains is a flat and faded one-dimensional cosmos, wherein mathematics and logic, spirituality and philosophy, art, morals, truth, and beauty are all reduced to physics and empiricism without remainder. The resultant world is, as Whitehead put it, "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." Scientific materialism is, therefore, the insane position of saying that empirical reality alone is the "true reality" (even though there is no empirical basis for such an assertion), and it is always self-contradictory. Carter's book expresses this viewpoint, and says, in effect, that all conscious experience is ultimately reducible to nothing but systems of biochemical activity within the physical brain and body. But if that is actually true, and that statement itself is a product of conscious experience, then it is self-denying, simply because it claims to be "true" at a level where truth and falsehood have no existence (there are no "true" biochemicals versus "false" biochemicals; there are simply biochemicals). Thus, the existence of the very idea of scientific materialism proves that scientific materialism is fundamentally incorrect.
That aside, Carter's book is still the best of its ilk in the entire field of cognitive science, and if you want an introductory text on the subject of neural functioning, beautifully illustrated and reasonably informed, this is the book you need to get. (For an explicitly nonreductionistic approach to consciousness research--but without the lavish layout and brain mappings--check out _Integral Psychology_ by Ken Wilber.)
