Mental Model

• A stimulus is received. This can come from:
  • Outside, from the senses
  • Inside, as a bodily or emotional sensation
  • The mind itself, as a thought is held in attention and seeks associations
• The stimulus triggers a massive, apparently instantaneous, parallel search of the cortex to identify the stimulus and prepare an appropriate response:
  • This is the Bayesian predictive engine, which seeks to minimize surprise.
  • It returns - let's call them, after Jung, "symbols", that the brain determines are the most appropriate response, based on habit, on what has worked before
  • We can think of the webs of information stored in the cortex as the unconscious. It is like a sea where we are fishing, our stimulus is the bait, and the symbols emerging are like fish attracted to the bait
  • The surface of the sea is the partition between the unconscious and consciousness - and the specific point where the fish-symbols appear is like a spotlight of attention or awareness.
  • Often one symbol is dominant - a word, a feeling, an image, and provides just the right response needed. Think of a crossword clue where the answer just appears to you. Other times multiple symbols may have similar weights and require deliberation
• The winning symbol triggers a reaction:
  • You may respond in a conversation, put one foot in front of the other, grab a snack, move onto the next word in your novel, move your racquet to meet an incoming tennis ball
  • The system is very efficient. We are reacting dozens/hundreds/thousands (depending at which level of granularity we are looking?) of times every minute, often (mainly?) with very little deliberation.
  • But reflection is presumably a more recent acquisition. My cat reacts to me stroking her either with a purr or with a swipe of her claws and in neither case do I think she is deliberating. But I can react to the approach of a hand...

The difference between the cat and me is an ability to delay reaction, to direct attention onto the symbols returned by the unconscious. Rather than react immediately, I can hold the returned symbols in attention, in consciousness, and through this attention, I can summon other symbols, symbols that are associated with those in my attention. The result of this directed attention may be a more considered reaction. Or no reaction at all, as I reflect on what I am experiencing.

This ability, to pause, to hold stimuli in the mind's eye, allows us to construct much more elaborate theories about what is happening around us, stimulating us, but it is also a kind of curse, taking us out of the immediacy of the moment, separating the stimulus from our reaction and allowing it to pass through any number of labyrinthine symbolic paths.

It is this mechanism, this flickering spotlight, this shallow pool of reflection, that is, to my mind, consciousness, that allows us to reflect, to "know" things, and to have constructed our culture.

Spoken Language

These associations between symbols existed before speech, before language, but spoken language must be involved in the process of slowing down perception, of allowing reflection. Language allows us to assert connections, to compare and contrast symbols, to propose similarity or difference.

Spoken language allows us to speak to ourselves - an inner monologue that is not necessarily as cut and dried as interpersonal language. But it also allows us to speak to others, to share attention and to share concepts. By pointing to direct attention and be making a sound, we can both associate the sound to the object being pointed out and share that association with our interlocutors. Language separates the things of the world out, makes them identifiable. And it shares these separations, these identities with others. Our shared culture originates from this basic form of sharing.

Written Language

While spoken language comes naturally to infants who are exposed to speakers, written language is not a simple acquisition. The child has to learn that the shapes of the letters when arranged in certain patterns, are a visual representation of the sound that evokes the object.

Reading is a fundamentally weird, modern acquisition of humans. It is not essential for an infant to be able to insert themselves into our shared culture.