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...