The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

About this book

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams but evolving into something of quality such as a sentence to speak aloud. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you cant see it when you are awake just as you cant see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvins is a theory for what goes on hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile intelligence. As Piaget emphasized in 1929 intelligence is what we use when we dont know what to do when we have to grope rather than using a standard response. Calvin tackles a mechanism for doing this exploration and improvement offline as we think before we act or practice the art of good guessing. Surprisingly the subtitles mosaics of the mind is not a literary metaphor. For the first time it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be an appropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena that of hexagonal mosaics of electrical activity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain. This two-dimensional mosaic is predicted to grow and dissolve much as the sugar crystals do in the bottom of a supersaturated glass of iced tea. A Bradford Book