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Feb 1998
ISBN 0262531542
264 pp.
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The Cerebral Code
William H. Calvin

"[A] wide-ranging and innovative theory linking the neural structure of the cortex to thought, language, and consciousness.... stunningly thought provoking."
-- Richard Cooper, The Times Higher Education Supplement

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.

More about the book

Table of Contents
 Prologue
1 The Representation Problem and the Copying Solution
2 Cloning in Cerebral Cortex
3 A Compressed Code Emerges
4 Managing the Cerebral Commons
5 Resonating with Your Chaotic Memories
6 Partitioning the Playfield
 Intermission Notes
7 The Brownian Notion
8 Convergence Zones with a Hint of Sex
9 Chimes on the Quarter Hour
10 The Making of Metaphor
11 Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
 Afterthoughts
 Glossary and Brief Tutorials
 Recommended Reading
 Notes
 The Author
 About the Artists
 Index
 
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