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

Bibliographic Collection: 
Anthropogeny
Publication Type: Book
Authors: Calvin, William H.
Year of Publication: 1998
Edition: 1st Ed.
Number of Pages: 256
Publisher: MIT Press
City: Cambridge
Publication Language: eng
ISBN Number: 0262531542
Keywords: Brain, Cerebral Cortex, Cognitive neuroscience, Consciousness., Memory, Natural selection, Thinking
Abstract:

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 can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's 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.Surprisingly, the subtitle's 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.

Label: 1996