Walter Jackson Freeman III (born January 30, 1927) is an American biologist, theoretical neuroscientist and philosopher who has conducted pioneering research in how brains generate meaning. His main body of research has been on the perception of rabbits using electroencephalography. Based on a theoretical framework of neurodynamics that includes chaos theory, he believed that the currency of brains is primarily meaning and only secondarily information. This contrasts with the symbolic representations emphasized by many traditional researchers in cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience who use neural network theories.
Born in Washington, DC, the son of Walter Jackson Freeman II, Freeman studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, electronics in the Navy in World War II, philosophy at the University of Chicago, medicine at Yale University, internal medicine at Johns Hopkins, and neuropsychiatry at UCLA. He has taught brain science in the University of California, Berkeley since 1959, where he is Professor of the Graduate School. He received his M.D. cum laude in 1954, the Bennett Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, the MERIT Award from NIMH in 1990, and the Pioneer Award from the Neural Networks Council of the IEEE in 1992. He was President of the International Neural Network Society in 1994, and is Life Fellow of the IEEE. He has authored over 450 articles and 4 books.
In a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter, 6(2) entitled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas", Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics.