All Life Is No More Than A

Each Cell Sends Electrical Pulses To Other Cells, Up To Hundreds Of Times Per Second. If You Represented Each Of These Trillions And Trillions Of Pulses In Your Brain By A Single Photon Of Light, The Combined Output Would Be Blinding.

We Open Our Eyes And We Think We're Seeing The Whole World Out There. But What Has Become Clear—and Really Just In The Last Few Centuries—is That When You Look At The Electro-magnetic Spectrum We Are Seeing Less Than 1/10 Billionth Of The Information That's Riding On There. So We Call That Visible Light. But Everything Else Passing Through Our Bodies Is Completely Invisible To Us. Even Though We Accept The Reality That's Presented To Us, We're Really Only Seeing A Little Window Of What's Happening.

The Continuous Networks Of Neural Circuitry Accomplish Their Functions Using Multiple, Independently Discovered Strategies. The Brain Lends Itself Well To The Complexity Of The World, But Poorly To Clear-cut Cartography.

Visual Cortex Is Fundamentally A Machine Whose Job Is To Generate A Model Of The World.

In The Traditionally Taught View Of Perception, Data From The Sensorium Pours Into The Brain, Works Its Way Up The Sensory Hierarchy, And Makes Itself Seen, Heard, Smelled, Tasted, Felt - "perceived." But A Closer Examination Of The Data Suggests This Is Incorrect. The Brain Is Properly Thought Of As A Mostly Closed System That Runs On Its Own Internally Generated Activity.