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EVOLUTION, adaptation and reorganisation are the central concepts in psychologist Kurt Goldstein’s holistic theory of the human organism. Work with brain-damaged soldiers during the First World War led Goldstein to view people as systems in equilibrium rather than as compartmentalised machines. To understand recovery from brain damage, he believed, it was necessary to look beyond the damaged cerebral function and to see the whole system as adjusting to a new norm of behaviour. The Organism (Zone Books, pp 422, £24.25/$26.95) was first published in 1933, but Goldstein’s ideas remain influential – notably in Gerald Edelman’s recent model of the brain as an-evolving society of neurons.