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?