"[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.
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