two signals

Maybe when the brain decides to more our arm, say, it sends out TWO sets of signals. The first is the signal to the muscles to life the arm. The second, simultaneous signal would be to a part of the brain that would create the illusion of us having decided to move the arm. In this wey, we (our conscious selves) are the puppet of our brain (as is our body).

This explains for example the dual process of falling in love. The brain seeks a mate whose smells indicate a compatible immune system. At the same time, it creates on the feeling of being in love when we meet that special immune system.

free will as immmune-system booster

Human brains evolved a propensity for religion because humans who felt they lived in a meaningful, ordered world survived better. They were probably less stressed out.

What if consciousness and the illusion of free will evolved for similar reasons: to enhance well-being and reduce stress? We would be pretty stressed out if we had consciousness but it only served to let us witness the fixed choices our brain was making. Feelings of helplessness are very stress-inducing, so consciousness without the illusion of free will would not be an advantage. Consciousness and free will might have evolved hand in hand as those with a tendency to self-awareness and feelings of making their own choices survived better than those without these tendencies and feelings. They would survive better because the feeling of conscious free will reduced stress and boosted their immune system.

Perhaps consciousness evolved first as a result of language. Consciousness thus might have created advantages and problems. Maybe humans went through a phase where some of them had no feelings of free will (these presumably did not survive). Perhaps the free-will component is a recent evolutionary event. This is certain: ultimately the survivors were those who felt conscious free will. I can't think of a better reason for consciousness/free will than that of immune-system booster.

brain = internet

Why do we compare the human brain to a comupter when the human brain has 50 billion neurons and the entire internet has only 108 million web pages? Each human brain should be considered as the equivalent to an internet, or several internets. Consciousness thus resembles something like Google, getting a handle on all the postings of various neural groups.

ulysses

Ulysses can be read as an 18 part, homeric metaphor for brain function. Each chapter is a part of the brain. In parallel, all the chapters make a working brain. We read it sequentially, though. Or do we read it "re-entrantly", as Edelman would say???

michael jackson analogy

Consciousness is like Michael Jackson surrounded by his ever-changing entourage. Now that Michael is gone, the entourage keeps going somehow, and it's still his entourage! People in the entourage = neural circuits doing specific, mindless tasks.

dreams

If dreams are a harmless epi-phenomenon, maybe consciousness is too?

Are dreams meaningless because we are unconscious or are we unconscious because dreams are meaningless?

models tested

The brain is not the computer we think it is.

The blueprint evolves based on our experience.

There may be inborn "tentative models" and they test reality and are confirmed if they work.

The brain reaches outwards, in other words.

Neural circuits are chosen (like antibodies) during interactions with the world (testing; science).

Immune system: a whole bunch of antibodies, pre-made and ready to be selected to fit "lock" of invaders.

Likewise, neural circuitry exists, ready to be selected (or abandoned)) if they match or don't match experience.

Antibodies are not "representations" of the virus.

Antibodies can be re-used in a future attack. So can neural connections, in a future, similar situation.

Simple examples: reach and grab, put into mouth, fell. Body and brain reach out with experiments like a scientist. Testing reality. Truth/results encoded in neural connections. Trial and error.

Memory is the capacity to repeat a physical or mental act later, in a different context.

Memory allows repetition (of a successful mental or physical event).

brain as scientist

The brain is a scientist. Religion was a crude but initially successful hypothesis. It has since been surpassed. Divide the consciousness problem into smaller problems.

Neural sense of time...very weird.

advantage

Consciousness of "reality" is hugely advantageous, and so it evolved.

development

We need to stop obsessing about the paradox of consciousness and look at the development of the brain. Memory is clearly a function of the developing brain. Memory in fact IS the brain developing. Consciousness will be explained via unconsciousness (sleep: when there is no self and no time).

changeux

Brain development is crucial to our understanding of consciousness. "Epigenetic" is a key word for Changeux. The brain does not develop from a blueprint. Rather, it evolves in stages and experience and thought are crucial at each phase. The brain cannot evolve without thought and experience. Take language. There are windows of opportunity, which, if missed, do not reappear. Changeux sees the brain as reaching out to the world. Successful brains have been able to attain truth. At first, this happened through myth and religion. The brain is rewarded. But science is proving much more effective. Changeux is optimistic that evolution will favor scientific brains. Residual religious brains will be less competitive. His description of scientific thought as brain activity is mind-boggling. Neural darwinism, yes. But most important is his notion that experience and thought change the course of the brain's development. Brain differences no longer mean you were born this way or that. You become who you are and it shows in your brain.

consciousness lets us know when "now" is

We need consciousness in order to remember the past and imagine the future. If we did not have a sense of the present (that we have when waking) we would not be able to know "when" we are. Memories would seem like hallucinations, as would imagined events. Maybe this is what goes on in dreaming. Maybe being conscious requires a huge amount of energy so the brain stops doing it at night to save energy (and we begin to hallucinate = dreams).

brain not a sponge

Humphries, Proust and many others are reversing the way we see the brain. Rather than a passive receptor, we need to think of it as an active outreacher. The child's brain reaches out into the world to test it. The successfully fired neurons are strengthened, the less successful ones die out. Think of the brain as being like a squid with tentacles (neurons) reaching out into the world. For Humphries, the goes back to a simple organism recoiling from a threat. Proust describes how we create our loved ones in our mind then project out into the world. This is why someone "not our type" is perfect: we need to project their qualities.

it's me because it's continuous

Consciousness persists because of the constant flow of information from our body to our brain. The continuity of the input leads to the continuity of consciousness. Mirror neurons allow us to imagine how others feel, for a short period of time. Do mirror neurons also allow us to imagine how our own body feels? Does our brain simulate what it would feel like to be us? It's the continuity of the "me" simulation that allows us to know it's "me." Breathing, heartbeat, etc.

Compare Proust (III, 645) where his love for Albertine dies but not his love of his own life. He compares this to an old mistress we can't get rid of.

those are your feelings; these are mine

This sounds too obvious to be the solution to the "problem of consciousness," but wouldn't we need consciousness in order to distinguish between what other people are saying/feeling/expressing and what we ourselves are saying/feeling/expressing? Consciousness as a necessary adjunct to the brain's empathic/lie-detector function.

consciousness

Consciousness = prioritization

Workspace = locus of prioritized processing

mimicry

Mirror neurons are freaky. The same neurons fire when we move our arm as when we see someone else move their arm. Consciousness may be all about estimating what other people are feeling (to better deceive them, probably).

ulysses and consciousness

In Ulysses, Stephen ponders the nacheinander (one thing after another) and the nebeneinander (one thing next to another) of music and visual arts respectively.

I wrote:

The styles and narrators of Ulysses add some nebeneinander to the nacheinander of stream of consciousness.

Thoughts of Stephen, thoughts of Bloom = nacheinander (we experience one thing after another)

Style of one chapter clashes/contrasts with style of previous or next chapter: nebeneinander (one thing next to another)

Character and plot = nacheinander

Typographical tricks (headlines in Aeolus), narrative interruptions (Cyclops) = nebeneinander (narrative juxtaposed to something)

Joyce's challenge: to make his novel more than a novel, he had to do more than tell a story one thing after another (nacheinander). He also wanted us to be able to contemplate the parts of Ulysses nebeneinander.

Integritas = we hear the story of Ulysses as a stream of narrative fragments moving forward in time

Consonantia = we ponder the styles of Ulysses and how the chapters fit together

Claritas = drawn in by the narrative nacheinander and puzzled by the jarring styles' gnomonic juxtaposition nebeneinander, we experience the silent, luminous stasis of aesthetic apprehension, ineluctably.

There are parallels here to how the brain creates consciousness.

nacheinander = the formation of new memories through time

nebeneinander = selected memories in neuronal workspace of working memory are juxtaposed one next to another to create a conscious scene (Edelman's "remembered present"?)

But there is also the successive nacheinander of conscious states. The brain takes the nacheinander of sequential expreiences and makes it into a smoothly flowing series of nebeneinanders to create the nacheinander of consciousness.

The key to Joyce's aesthetic is stasis. It seems also to be the secret of consciousness: our brain seizes the flux of experience to create a conscious scene in the present. The succession of these scenes is what creates the "illusion" of consciousness.

workspace

The brain's workspace can be thought of as a neural "hypothesis" space, where hypotheses about reality, desires, plans, etc. can be entertained, modified, replaced.

memory and consciousness

Feelings are body movements: happy = towards, sad/pain = away.

Memories are results of the brain checking out reality and encoding its findings.

The brain is active. It has modules with agendas (language is an example).

Consciousness and memory use the same pathways.

memory formation and consciousness

If you're not conscious when it happens, you don't form memories of the event.

Is consciousness some kind of pre-sorting of material to thin it down? Consciousness seems to be a selection of key aspects, of salient features...is this due to limited storage space?

Memory formation and consciousness may be one and the same thing. Is this Edelman's "remembered present"? Memories seem to be salient features of a momnet selected and unified.

Is consciousness the first stage of forming a memory? A snapshot framed? A filter? The synthesis of a moment? Likes frames of a movie (NOT to be shown in the Cartesian theater!)

What if consciousness were a REPLAY of the previous moment. The first replay of a memory. First view of a memory.

Maybe everything we experience consciously HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. Consciousness as our first "view" of a momory.

Then we need to explain memory. Memory is experience encoded into neurons.

edelman/totoni on perception = memory

"The rapid reentrant interactions within the dynamic core thus give rise to a sort of temporal ongoing "bootstrap," according to which changes in the pattern of firing of neuronal groups involved in perceptual categorization can select one out of scores of specific activity patterns involving the entire core—and entire memory repertoire. This selection generates a large amount of information over a short time, hence creating a scene in the remembered present. The resulting integrated state of the core constitutes a memory and thereby the MEANING of the firing of neurons involved in perceptual categorization. Therefore, in categorizing incoming stimuli, the adult brain goes well beyond the information given, and within the dynamic core, conscious perception and memory should be considered to be two aspects of one and the same process" (p. 173).

edelman/totoni on the dynamic core

"If, as we have assumed, this blue-sensitive neuronal group is part of the dynamic core, a change in its firing will be capable of rapidly perturbing—thanks to ongoing reentrant interactions—the firing of many other neuronal groups throughout the core, including many neuronal groups situated in more anterior regions of the cortex. This perturbation will produce a switch from one integrated state of the entire core to the next" (p. 173).

The sensation of blue changes our entire conscious state. Every sensations does. Great complexity and great speed.

edelman/totoni on the dynamic core

"Through the process of reentry, however, a dynamic regime is established in which a perturbation in one group of neurons can rapidly affect the rest of the cluster" (p. 171).

These perturbations from outside the cluster (from outside consciousness) cause us to move from one conscious state to another. This is basically their explanation of how consciousness works.

edelman/totoni on visual stuff

"It is likely that normally the number of neuronal groups that respond to visual stimuli represents a large fraction of the neuronal groups participating in the dynamic core" (p. 169).

Visual neurons fire at high rates; neurons in the prefrontal cortex (thinking) have a more restricted range of firing. This is why the arrows for thought are shorter on p. 164.

edelman/totoni on qualia

Perceptions are informative because they "rule out a more or less equal number of conscious states and this is exactly the way in which the meaning of the selected state is defined" (p. 168).

edelman/totoni on qualia

"The pure sensation of red is a particular neural state identified by a point within the N-dimensional neural space defined by the integrated activity of all the groups of neurons that constitute the dynamic core" (p. 167).

"The quale of the pure sensation of red corresponds to the discrimination that has been made among billions of other states within the same neural reference space" (p. 167).

But you can't isolate the sensation of red like a grain of sand. It's part of a fabric.

"Every different conscious state deserves to be called a quale" (p. 168).

edelman/totoni on qualia

"A key implication of our hypothesis is that the legitimate neural reference space for conscious experience, any conscious experience, including that of color, if given not by the activity of any individual neuronal group...but by the activity of the entire dynamic core" (p. 164-5).

In other words, the sensation of red occurs not in a few neurons firing "red" but in the entire dynamic core (the re-entrant clusters firing in isolation and quasi-simultaneously). The sensation of red is inextricable from the conscious state that contains it.

edelman/totoni

The sensation of seeing red as a perturbation of the dynamic core that affects the rest of the cluster (p. 171).

edelman/totoni

The dynamic core is essentially separate from the rest of the brain...minimally connected, interacting minimally with it. This is odd. Does part of the brain secede? The dynamic core as a neural Old South or a neural Staten Island?

edelman/totoni

"Qualia are high-order discriminations among a large number of states of the dynamic core...they are both highly integrated and extraordinariy informative" (p. 155).

The sensation of redness as the sensation of NOT orange-indigo-violet-yellow-blue-green? The taste of strawberries as NOT the taste of everything else? What it's like to be a bat as NOT what it's like to be anything else?

That's their use of the concept of "information."

edelman/totoni

Consciousness as holding pattern in the brain: re-entrant interactions between groups is circular until it reaches a critical point? Sounds like a description of thinking!

edelman/totoni

Transmission of information = storage of information in the brain (p. 138).

edelman/totoni

Neural darwinism: most adaptive conscious states selected? or conscious states generated and success leads to selection? Darwinistic competition between conscious states where adaptive states win out (and re-enforce successful connections)? Dynamic core is fast (quasi-simlultaneous) and strong. Consciousness/dynamic core maximizes interactions between neuronal groups (simultaneous interactions). Dynamic core = perfect storm of neuronal interaction (their image is of a galaxy).

edelman/totoni

Consciousness arising from complexity: the greatest degree of complexity occurs when many specialized neural clusters are connected simultaneously. Each cluster is working on its own problem (color, shape, distance) and when they are all connected, the result is a pattern that very much makes a difference to the brain because it is differentiated. Contrast this with the diffuse way neurons fire in slow wave sleep: lots of individual neurons (not working in groups) firing simultaneously but with low complexity: in a way that does not make a difference to the brain because the pattern is too diffuse (p. 133-134).

3 main elements

It seems to me there are three main components to consciousness: visual (the world we see out there); auditory (thoughts = talking to oneself); and the sensation/movement of the body. It seems like part of the brain constructs the visual scene, part of the brain debates what to do about it and part of the brain moves the body around in the world. Then there is feedback from the body and the cycle starts all over again, incessantly.

edelman/totoni

One part brain often needs to synchronize a LIMITED number of perceptions so that another part of the brain can act on the "scene" thus created (p. 121)?

edelman/totoni

Consciousness: synchronization of brain areas in "real" time (or not so real: what they call "the remembered present").

edelman/totoni

Higher degrees of consciousness mean higher levels of salience, focus, intensity.

edelman/totoni

The more areas of the brain that are activated, the more the level of consciousness increases.

phone ringing

You know how you hear the phone you are calling ringing when you call? You're not really hearing the other person's phone ring. Your phone is making a ringing sound, and that sound does not even coincide (in time or in tone) with the ringing phone's ring. Metaphor for consciousness and brain processes.

cast-offs

What if consciousness is just a stream of no-longer-needed mental cast-offs? Tokens used by brain systems to made decisions and orchestrate actions, tokens that are of no further use. Burnt out light bulbs.

bottleneck

What if mind and consciousness are the result of processing bottlenecks in the brain? The honking of a traffic jam.

by-product

If mind and consciousness are mere by-products of massive parallel processing by brain regions, this would account for the disastrous track record of explanations of mind and consciousness.

warm-up comedians

Consciousness and mental images as the brain's way of occupying the body while it processes lots of information. A sort of warm-up comedian for the body while Johnny Carson prepares his material.

discontinuity???

"For the time being it is not unreasonable to conceive of the mind as emerging from the cooperation of many brain regions. This occurs when the sheer accumulation of details regarding the state of the body that is mapped in those regions reaches a 'critical pitch.' The knowledge gap we now recognize my turn out to be little more than a DISCONTINUITY in the complexity of the accumulated detail, and in the complexity of the interactions of the brain regions involved in the mapping" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 209).

Mind emerges when brain regions co-operate and detail reaches a "critical pitch."

But what on earth is a "discontinuity in the complexity"? Is this the idea that when a decision becomes sufficiently complex, the brain must resort to mental images to make processing possible? My idea is that the mental images are either a way of processing more information at higher speed or a kind of delay tactic that allows the brain more time. Are mental images useless by-products or crucial devices? That is a big question. I would suspect they are useless by-products.

timely fashion

"In brief, without mental images, the organism would not be able to perform IN TIMELY FASHION, the large-scale integration of information critical for survival, not to mention well-being. Moreover, without a sense of self and without the feelings that integrate it, such large-scale mental integrations of information would not be ORIENTED to the problems of life, namely, survival and the achievement of well-being" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 208) emphasis mine.

Mental images are needed to speed up processing of information. The sense of self is needed for orientation. Consciousness is a by-product of faster processing.

sense of self

"Now, we should consider what the sense of self brings to the process. The answer is an orientation" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 208).

looking for damasio

"But what exactly is the indispensable contribution that the conscious-mind level of biology brings to the organism?"

"perhaps the sheer complexity of sensory phenomena at the mental level permits easier integration across modalities, e.g., visual with auditory, visual and auditory with tactile, etc. In addition, the mental level also would permit the integration of actual images of every sensory stripe with pertinent images recalled from memory. Moreover, these abundant integrations would prove fertile ground for the image manipulation required for problem-solving and creativity in general. The answer, then, is that mental images would allow an ease of manipulation of information that the neural-map level (as described so far) would permit" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 207).

Is this like saying that it would be easier to make a presentation using a virtual reality simulation rather than long-winded descriptions of every aspect of a scene? Mental images summarize current information for faster processing in other brain regions? The image keeps getting updated as is passed around to different brain areas?

looking for damasio

"in the absense of consciousness in the comprehensive sense of the term—a process that includes both the movie-in-the-brain and the sense of self—we know for certain that life cannot be properly managed" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 207).

Damasio gives horrific examples of patients with brain damage who are perfectly intelligent but incapable of functioning in the world because they are disconnected from their feelings.

This is his idea that most of what the brain is working on is body stuff. The body stuff guides us from survival to planning ahead, even to social stuff.

looking for damasio

"The brain's body-furnished, body-minded mind is a servant of the whole body" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 206).

If mind is a servant of the body, then "mind" may only serve as the time-delay that the body and brain need to process complex decisions. The brain occupies the brain until the brain can process a complex decision. Or is this processing experienced as thinking? Passive/active: the brain processes decisions while giving another part of the brain the illusion that it is thinking things over. Two sides of one coin?

buying time

Consciousness and free will may be an illusion our body needs to hold us in limbo while the brain processes complex decisions. "Thinking" buys the body time to work out solutions. To make matters more confusing, the feeling of choice is made to co-incide with the brain's ordering a body action.

time delay

How to explain the fact that our conscious decision to move our arm happens quite a long time after the brain decides to move it? We have known this since the 1970s. I think this is central to the mind-body problem. Most people assume that consciousness is thus an after-effect, body english, or an illusion. Or they argue that the timing works out to give us the illusion of autonomy. I think we need to flip everything over. Maybe the illusion of autonomy and the fact that consciousness happens after the brain decides to move the arm are what enables the brain to make a better, slower, more complex decision, without turning us into klutzes or Hamlets.

looking for damasio

"We are so biologically similar among ourselves, however, that we consctruct similar neural patterns for the same thing. It should not be surprising that similar images arise out of those similar neural patterns. That is why we can accept, without protest, the conventional idea that each of us has formed in our minds the reflected picture of some particular thing. In reality we did not" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 200).

Last sentence sounds like Stephen Dedalus on aesthetics!

His idea is that we each see a unique world according to how our body responds to things. We all have a quite similar (though ultimately unique) response, similar enough for us to agree on one reality.

looking for damasio

Damasio writes, "body, brain, and mind are manifestations of a single organism" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 195).

I like the idea of consciousness as a kind of time delay that allows the body/brain more time to process complex decisions. A stretching out of the "present."

Could this time delay be achieved by brain areas circulating information, re-routing it and processing it at each stage until a critical mass is reached? Thinking as brain regions processing, modifying, forwarding (to multiple other areas), the action centers holding off until a neural "consensus" is formed (enough neurons firing to make a decision one way or another)?

solving the mind-body problem

Damasio claims it "requires a change in perspective." Looking for Spinoza, p. 191. I agree.

He writes that "the critical interface between body-proper activities and the mental patterns we call images consists of specific brain regions employing circuits of neurons to consctruct continual, dynamic neural patterns corresponding to different activities in the body—in effect, mapping those activities as they occur" (p. 195).

It's all parts of the body for Damasio. He's the only one I've read who points out that neurons are living things. This is very different from some kind of electrical cable.

It's all body. Or you could say our body is all brain. I think we are close to a solution if stop separating body and brain.
I guess you also need to unite thoughts and actions. There is no separation between the brain "deciding" to move a limb and the movement of the limb. The action is the whole body moving. The whole body feels and things and the whole body responds. Our body can look ahead and imagine consequences of actions. It can also respond instinctively. It might also be caught between the two (consciousness?). Consciousness as a lag time to allow for processing? A stretching out of time to allow for a more-than-instinctual reaction?

looking for damasio

According to Damasio, feelings offer "explicit and highlighted information as to the state of different components of the organism," a kind of executive summary of the body, from the point of view of the body's best interests. Looking for Spinoza, p. 178.

He also calls feelings "gossip from deep within." (p. 179) What is gossip? It's the highlight of the most vital information about people. It's the most important thing that happened that day, or week, or month. It's also usually pretty compact.

looking for damasio

"Only the "mental level" of biological operations permits the TIMELY integration of large sets of information necessary for problem-solving processes." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177 (emphasis mine).

Our bodies/brains are so complex they don't have TIME to "let instincts take care of things." The body/brain needs process info faster. Maybe the parallel processing offered by different brain areas was not even enough. Feelings and consciousness were needed to speed things up. Consciousness allows the brain to process huge amounts of info from memory and also from instinctual areas. Maybe consciousness is where higher mental processes duke it out with lower ones.

looking for damasio

"Feelings help us solve nonstandard problems involving creativity, judgment, and decision-making that require the display and manipulation of vast amounts of knowledge." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177.

Feelings are again a kind of summary of vast amounts of body information.

looking for damasio

"The maps work for problems of a certain degree of complexity and no more; when the problem gets too complicated—when it requires a mixture of automated responses and reasoning on accumulated knowledge—unconscious maps no longer help and feelings come in handy." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177.

Feelings seem to be a kind of shorthand for a huge mass of body monitoring information.

multiple brains

It might help understand how the brain works if we thought of it as 50 or 100 minibrains, interconnected in complex ways. The explanation of consciousness or working memory would then have something to do with selection, a paring down of the activity and information buzzing around these 100 brains. Consciousness as the brain's executive summary!

brain, emotion

The brain creates emotion (physical reactions of body to environment). The brain also registers these changes: that's what happens when we feel an emotion.

feedback loop

Consciousness is a kind of multisensory virtual reality played in one part of the brain so that other parts of the brain can watch it and react in various ways. These (unconscious?) reactions feed back into the virtual reality and modify it. Then it's played again and reacted to again, over and over. The updated version is what we experience as consciousness. The unconscious updating takes place without us noticing. We watch the consequences of our unconscious brain processes. We see these consequences as our thoughts and "decisions."

edelman, damasio

What I get from Edelman and Damasio is that the brain is about endless feedback loops. Feedback loops to the body, to other parts of the brain, to memory. Parts of the brain are constantly "getting feedback" and "re-assessing" the situation. When a threshhold is passed, actions or emotions are initiated. These set off more rounds of feedback and re-assessment.

go to the videotape

What happens in moment to moment consciousness is that a streamlined, simplified version of the current situation ("go to the videotape") is "played" in one part of the brain to be evaluated by other parts of the brain (various thermostats) that will go on to "make decisions" about emotions, actions, etc.

sorry, you're brain's a thermostat

From what I'm gathering, the brain is less of a computer than a very sophisticated, multi-level, multi-function thermostat with, at best, computer-assist through a database of past experiences.

damasio, looking for spinoza, p. 58

"Note that they select a preexisting lock, rather than instruct the brain on how to create one." In this way, the pathways of the emotions are pre-established in the brain. There are a restricted number of pathways open as a response to emotionally competent stimuli. Not to get too reductive, but it does seem as if a not unlimited number of stimuli travel down a not endless number of pathways in the brain on the way to creating a limited range of emotions.

space/time

Hypothetical space/time: reality reconstructed (pre-diegested) so the brain systems can act on it.

managing complexity

Consciousness = complexity simplified to a biologically manageable stream (one that can be managed by brain systems). External reality impiges on the senses which relay info to brain systems. The brain creates a reconstruction of reality in the form of a manageable stream of information (one that can be "digested" by brain systems already in place). These brain systems will then order actions based on the emotions evoked by this reconstruction and its effects.

consciousness explained

When it is, the answer will be counter-intuitive, much like Humphrey's solution.

brain/body

The brain tells the body what the senses are perceiving. The body's reaction (via brain processing and back to body) is emotion.

language

We tell ourselves things with words and we see how our body feels when it hears/experiences/imagines these scenarios.

ulysses / brain moods

The styles of Ulysses unconsciously mould our response to each chapter. We see the world through 18 different brain moods.

ulysses / styles

In James Joyce's Ulysses, the time of day and the "mode" of each chapter seem to affect how characters behave. The time of day and mode seem to affect how their brains respond. Likewise, for the reader, the styles of the chapter affect how we respond, affect our brains.