*Self Comes to Mind is an effort to answer two questions that have haunted philosophers, neurologists, cognitive scientists and psychologists for centuries: how do brains construct minds, and how do minds become conscious? *Damasio's approach to these issues encompasses the three traditional perspectives of neurobiology: the personal perspective on the individual conscious mind, the behavioral perspective, and the brain perspective. As much information as these three perspectives afford, there are significant gaps in our efforts to present a coherent and cohesive portrait of brain, mind, and behavior. In this book, Damasio adds a fourth perspective, one that requires a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told-that of evolution. *This perspective allows Damasio to trace the incremental modification of nervous systems and link it to the incremental emergence of behavior, mind and self; it allows him to identify mental events with certain kinds of brain events and most dramatically, allows him to construct a view from below, literally the view of a brain caught in the state of containing a conscious mind. This framework will reveal how our minds work-often without knowing or even controlling what we do-and allow us to glimpse the root of our fondest constructs: self, identity, personhood, and self-image.