This interdisciplinary work will interest all students and researchers concerned with the question of how the human brain perceives and extracts meaning from the stimuli received from the environment.

I Basic Concepts.- The Function of Meaning in Cognitive Order Formation.- Some Basic Concepts of Synergetics with Respect to Mult ist ability in Perception, Phase Transitions and Formation of Meaning.- II Psychophysical and Phenomenological Approaches.- Multistability as a Research Tool in Experimental Phenomenology.- The Significance of Perceptual Multistability for Research on Cognitive Self-Organization.- Task, Intention, Context, Glofcality, Ambiguity: More of the Same.- Multistability - More than just a Freak Phenomenon.- Recognition of Dynamic Patterns by a Synergetic Computer.- III Attractors in Behavior.- Multistability and Metastability in Perceptual and Brain Dynamics.- Self-Organizational Processes in Animal Cognition.- Dynamic Models of Psychological Systems.- IV Semantic Ambiguity.- Ambiguity in Linguistic Meaning in Relation to Perceptual Multistability.- The Emergence of Meaning by Linguistic Problem Solving.- V Models of Multistability.- A Synergetic Model of Multistability in Perception.- Concepts for a Dynamic Theory of Perceptual Organization: An Example from Apparent Movement.- Artificial Neural Networks and Haken's Synergetic Computer: A Hybrid Approach for Solving Bistable Reversible Figures.- Multistability in Geometrical Imagination: A Network Study.- VI Brain Processes.- A Psychophysiological Interpretation of Theta and Delta Responses in Cognitive Event-Related Potential Paradigms.- Slow Positive Potentials in the EEG During Multistable Visual Perception.- Brain Electric Microstates, and Cognitive and Perceptual Modes.- The Creation of Perceptual Meanings in Cortex Through Chaotic Itinerancy and Sequential State Transitions Induced by Sensory Stimuli.- VII Symmetry Breaking in Nature.- Multistability in Molecules and Reactions.- Perceptionof Ambiguous Figures: A Qualitative Model Based on Synergetics and Quantum Mechanics.- Name Index.