Worship room

. . When you think of a friend you lost or of a house you lived in, you conjure up a collection of images of those entities. They are less vivid than the real thing or a photograph. But recalled images can maintain the basic properties of the original, so much so that an ingenious cognitive neuroscientific, Steve Kosslyn, has been able to estimate the relative size of an object recalled and inspected in mind. Where are the images reconstructed so that we can study them in our reverie?

The traditional answers (although assumptions would be a better word) to this question get their inspiration from a conventional account of sensory perception. Accordingly, different early sensory cortices (largely in the back sections of the brain) bring forward the components of perceptual information by brain pathways to so-called multimodal cortices (largely in the front sections), which integrate them. Perceptions would operate on the basis of a cascade of processors going in one direction. The cascade would extract, step by step, more and more refined signals, first in the sensory cortices, those that receive signals from more than one modality (e.g., visual, auditory and somatic). The cascade would follow, in general, a caudo-rostal direction (back to front) and would culminate in the anterior temporal and frontal cortices, where the most integrated representations of the ongoing multisensory apprehension of reality are presumed to occur. ~ Page 146 ~ Self Comes to Mind - Antonio Damasio