Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Thinking Machines 139shapes of the world in front of us, the sounds and smells we arebathed in, the pressures and aches of our skin, bone, and muscles.Second, portions of this information can fall under the spotlight ofattention, get rotated into and out of short-term memory, and feed ourdeliberative cogitation. Third, sensations and thoughts come with anemotional flavoring: pleasant or unpleasant, interesting or repellent,exciting or soothing. Finally, an executive, the "I," appears to makechoices and pull the levers of behavior. Each of these features discardssome information in the nervous system, defining the highwaysof access-consciousness. And each has a clear role in the adaptiveorganization of thought and perception to serve rational decision makingand action.Let's begin with the perceptual field. Jackendoff, after reviewing thelevels of mental representation used by various modules, asked whichlevel corresponds to the rich field of present-tense awareness. For example,visual processing runs from the rods and cones in the retina, throughintermediate levels representing edges, depths, and surfaces, to a recognitionof the objects in front of us. Language understanding proceedsfrom raw sound up through representations of syllables, words, andphrases, to an understanding of the content of the message.(Jackendoff observed that access-consciousness seems to tap theintermediate levels. People are unaware of the lowest levels of sensation.We do not spend our lives in Proustian contemplation of everycrumb of the madeleine and every nuance of the decoction of limeflowers. We literally cannot see the lightness of the coal in the sun, thedarkness of the snowball inside, the pale green-gray of the "black" areason the television screen, or the rubbery parallelograms that a movingsquare projects on our retinas. What we "see" is a highly processedproduct: the surfaces of objects, their intrinsic colors and textures, andtheir depths, slants, and tilts. In the sound wave arriving at our ears,syllables and words are warped and smeared together, but we don'ti hear that seamless acoustic ribbon; we "hear" a chain of well-demar-Icatedwords. Our immediate awareness does not exclusively tap theJtighest level of representation, either. The highest levels—the contentsof the world, or the gist of a message—tend to stick in long-term memorydays and years after an experience, but as the experience is unfolding,we are aware of the sights and sounds. We do not just abstractlythink "Face!" when we see a face; the shadings and contours are availablefor scrutiny.