Self Comes to Mind

turn form networks or systems. For more on neurons and brain organization, see Chapter 2 and the Appendix .
    Minds emerge when the activity of small circuits is organized across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns. The patterns represent things and events located outside the brain, either in the body or in the external world, but some patterns also represent the brain’s own processing of other patterns. The term map applies to all those representational patterns, some of which are coarse, while others are very refined, some concrete, others abstract. In brief, the brain maps the world around it and maps its own doings. Those maps are experienced as images in our minds, and the term image refers not just to the visual kind but to images of any sense origin such as auditory, visceral, tactile, and so forth.
    Let us now turn to the framework proper. Using the term theory to describe proposals for how the brain produces this or that phenomenon is somewhat out of place. Unless the scale is large enough, most theories are just hypotheses. What is being proposed in this book, however, is more than that, since it articulates several hypothetical components for one aspect or another of the phenomena I am addressing. What we hope to explain is too complex to be addressed by a single hypothesis and be accounted for by one mechanism. So I have settled for the term framework to designate the effort.
    In order to qualify for the lofty title, the ideas presented in the chapters ahead need to accomplish certain goals. Given that we wish to understand how the brain makes the mind conscious, and given that it is manifestly impossible to deal with all levels of brain function in assembling an explanation, the framework must specify the level at which the explanation applies. This is the large-scale systems level, the level at which macroscopic brain regions constituted by neuron circuits interact with other such regions to form systems. Of necessity, those systems are macroscopic, but the underlying microscopic anatomy is known in part, as are the general operating rules of the neurons that constitute them. The large-scale systems level is amenable to research via numerous techniques, old and new. They include the modern version of the lesion method (which relies on the study of neurological patients with focal brain damage investigated with structural neuroimaging and experimental cognitive and neuropsychological techniques); functional neuroimaging (based on magnetic resonance scanning, positron-emission tomography, magnetoencephalography, and assorted electrophysiological techniques); direct neurophysiological recording of neuron activity in the setting of neurosurgical treatments; and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
    The framework must interconnect behavior, mind, and brain events. On this second goal, the framework aligns behavior, mind, and brain closely; and because it relies on evolutionary biology, it places consciousness in a historical setting, a placement suitable to organisms undergoing evolutionary transformation by natural selection. Moreover, the maturation of neuron circuitries in each brain is also seen as subject to selection pressures resulting from the very activity of organisms and the processes of learning. The repertoires of neuron circuitries initially provided by the genome are changed accordingly. 16
    The framework indicates the placement of regions involved in mind-making, at whole-brain scale, and proposes how some brain regions might operate in concert to produce the self. It suggests how a brain architecture that features convergence and divergence of neuron circuitries plays a role in the high-order coordination of images and is essential for the construction of the self and of other aspects of mental function, namely memory, imagination, language, and creativity.
    The framework needs to break down the phenomenon of consciousness in components amenable to neuroscience research. The result is two researchable domains, namely, mind processes and self processes. Furthermore, it decomposes the self process into subtypes. The latter separation offers two advantages: presuming and investigating consciousness in species that are likely to have self processes albeit less elaborate; and creating a bridge between the high levels of self and the sociocultural space in which humans operate.
    Another goal: the framework must address the issue of how system macroevents are built from microevents.