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

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinianprocesses could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds, starting with shuffledmemories 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 itwhen 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 versatileintelligence.

As Piaget emphasized in 1929, intelligence is what we use when wedon't know what to do, when we have to grope rather than using a standard response. Calvin tackles amechanism for doing this exploration and improvement offline, as we think before we act or practicethe art of good guessing.

Surprisingly, the subtitle's mosaics of the mind is nota literary metaphor. For the first time, it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be anappropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena, that of hexagonal mosaics of electricalactivity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain. This two-dimensionalmosaic is predicted to grow and dissolve much as the sugar crystals do in the bottom of asupersaturated glass of iced tea.

A Bradford Book