Sublime

While reviewing material for this book, I realized that a unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain and vice versa. The action is at the interface of those layers. In one kind of vocabulary it is where downward causation meets upward causation. In another vo

These signals seem to be an ancient legacy of human evolution. They are a reading of basic brain functions, such as the arousal of the autonomic nervous system, the engagement of the attention and orienting brain centers, and the integration of the action sequencing system as well as the function of the more recently evolved mirror neuron system.

As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”

the Chomskyan theory of universal grammar.113 The belief that the structures of analytic language are hard-wired into our brains helps to perpetuate the idea that the brain is a cognitive machine, a computer that is fitted with a rule-based programme for structuring the world, rather than its being an inextricable part of an embodied, living organi

most mental functions require the cooperation of multiple cortical areas, and most cortical areas participate in multiple mental functions. This makes it problematic to use functional criteria to define cortical areas. The right strategy is to identify the areas by structural criteria and then understand how the interactions between areas give rise

Setting a course of action is automatic, deterministic, modularized, and driven not by one physical system at any one time but by hundreds, thousands, and perhaps millions. The course of action taken appears to us as a matter of choice, but the fact is, it is the result of a particular emergent mental state being selected by the complex interacting

The brain is largely devoted to monitoring the body, and most of its activity lies outside consciousness, reserving conscious thought for important higher-level activities.