Reality is just in the back of what you see. Your perception of the world isn’t all there is to see. Being here now is a relative perception. You are seeing only one option that is out there. Your brain’s perceptions are being processed through sensory information you are receiving from the world. We’re all hallucinating all the time. Reality is located outside of your event horizon. You see your brain constructing the world, a hallucinated reconstruction of reality.
How does the brain transform these inherently ambiguous sensory signals into a coherent perceptual world full of objects, people, and places?
Consciousness involves what you say, think, or do; it is a processing and storage system.
There’s a mind-independent reality out there. It controls our perception of hallucinations. We never experience sensory signals themselves; we only ever experience interpretations of them. Our senses provide transparent windows onto a mind-independent reality. You can only perceive mind-dependent objects. The rest of existence lies beyond what you can see. Some properties exist independently of human consciousness. We embed our perception within our conception of what we are experiencing. We don’t know what we don’t know. Our senses limit our perceptual experience. Everything that we see is mind-dependent. A knowledge structure interrupts our perceptions of reality with every sight we see and every breath we take. Your perception of the world is natural, but you attribute only a part of the whole. Some properties of reality lie beyond your ken.
: Your consciousness is your command-and-control center. A processing center for the experiences of your senses. It is your central processing base for all inputs and outputs: visuals, emotions, thoughts, experiences, etc. The brain assembles its perceptions from the top down using predictions about what it expects.
It accomplishes predictive coding by a hierarchy of four layers, each predicting the input it’s expecting from the layer below and sending an error signal upward if there’s a mismatch. The brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the body.
Information Processing is how individuals perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. Some neurons act as prediction units, and others act as error-correcting units. The results are emergent and energy-efficient. A neural network that minimizes energy usage. These networks can also predict unexpected events, which implements predictive processing.
Something anatomically suited is pyramidal neurons in the brain to predictive processing because they can separately integrate “bottom-up” signals from neighboring neurons and “top-down” signals from more distant ones.
Predictive processing provides a unifying framework to explain many phenomena.
Fundamental cognitive changes (input/output and storage):
Selective and divided attention. Processing speed. Organization of thinking. Memory. Metacognition. (Do a cost-benefit analysis, consider the options, & plan). Your watch can be focused, sustained, divided, or multitasking.
Memory is the set of processes used to encode (input information into the memory system). Two populations of neurons accomplish brain predictive coding, one that encodes the current best prediction about what is being perceived, and another signals errors in that prediction.
Store and retrieve information over different periods. Data passes through three distinct stages to be stored in long-term memory—sensory memory: storage of brief sensory events.
Working or short-term memory. A bridge between sensory information that is temporarily stored and long-term memory storage.
Long-term memory (LTM) is the persistent storage of information. Long-term memory is divided into explicit (declarative memories) and implicit (non-declarative memories, which are behavioral memories that are not part of our consciousness). Explicit or declarative memory has to do with the storage of facts and events that we have experienced.
Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory: it stores information about how to do things.
Stored in our semantic memory is knowledge about words, concepts, and language-based expertise and facts.
Episodic memory is information about events we have experienced. A component of episodic memory is autobiographical memory or our narrative.
The act of getting information out of memory storage and back into conscious awareness is retrieval.
Recognition happens when you identify information that you have previously learned.
Inductive Reasoning is bottom-up- processing.
Deductive Reasoning is top-down-processing,
Intuitive thought is automatic, unconscious, and fast.
Analytic thought is deliberate, conscious, and rational.
Critical thinking is a detailed examination of beliefs, courses of action, and evidence.
Metacognition refers to our knowledge about our thinking and our ability to use this awareness to regulate our cognitive processes.
