Book excerpt: Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems 2008 (June 24-27, 2008; São Luís, Brazil) brought together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic, syntactic and computational methods both to understand the prodigious processing properties of biological systems and, specifically, of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance computational methods towards ever higher levels of cognitive competence. This book includes the papers presented at four major symposia: Part I - Cognitive Neuroscience Part II - Biologically Inspired Systems Part III - Neural Computation Part IV - Models of Consciousness.