How are the commands that the brain sends to the executive organs formed? For centuries, it was believed that nervous activity is reflex, that is, it obeys a simple and seemingly self-evident rule: a stimulus is a response. But attentive researchers have long questioned this rule. The reflex paradigm was especially damaged by ethologists (field zoologists), who connected the behavior of animals with spontaneous (spontaneous, endogenous) processes in the brain. Since the 1960s the postulates of ethology are confidently confirmed by testing by methods of cellular neurophysiology | neuroethology was born. The book by V. E. Dyakonova and D. A. Sakharov expresses a neuroethological view of the organization and functioning of the nervous system. The experience of their own research allows the authors to pay special attention to the central pattern generators - neural ensembles responsible for the endogenous generation of ordered behavioral acts. Are ideas about central generators applicable to the mechanisms of mental acts? The authors inevitably involve the reader in a discussion of the prospects of the post-reflex paradigm. The book is intended for specialists working in various fields of neuroscience. The exception is the texts of the third section, addressed to a less prepared reader - graduate students, students and, possibly, older students. The binding design is based on the portrait of René Descartes by W. Hall (engraving, 1833).The publisher's layout has been saved in a4.pdf format.