Self Comes to Mind

nausea, we often experience it in relation to a region of the body—the stomach, for example. In spite of its vagueness, this interoceptive map is made to fit into the overall organism map.
MAPS OF THE EXTERNALLY DIRECTED SENSORY PORTAL
    I referred indirectly to the sensory portals in Chapter 4 , by describing the armature into which the sensory probes—the diamonds—are set. Here I place them at the service of the self. The representation of the varied sensory portals in the body—like the body regions encasing the eyes, ears, tongue, nose—is a separate and special case of a master organism map. I imagine that sensory portal maps “fit” into the framework of the master organism maps much as the master feeling system must, by means of time coordination rather than by actual map transfer. Where exactly some of these maps are is a matter of current investigation.
    Sensory portal maps play a dual role, first in the building of perspective (a major aspect of consciousness) and then in the construction of qualitative aspects of mind. One of the curious aspects of our awareness of an object is the exquisite relation we establish between the mental contents that describe the object and those that correspond to the body part engaged in the respective perception. We know that we see with our eyes, but we also feel ourselves seeing with our eyes . We know that we hear with our ears, not with our eyes or nose. We do feel sound in the external ear and tympanic membrane. We touch with our fingers and smell with our noses and so forth. This may sound trivial at first glance, but it is anything but. We know all of this “sense organ location” from a tender age, probably before we discover it by inference, connecting a certain perception with a particular movement, perhaps even before countless rhymes and songs instruct us, at school, on where the senses get their information. Nonetheless, this is an odd sort of knowledge. Consider that visual images come from the neurons in the retina, which are not presumed to tell us anything about the sector of the body where the retinas happen to be located—inside the eyeballs, which are inside the eye sockets, within a specific part of the face. How did we ever find out that the retinas are where they are? Of course, a child will have noted that vision goes away when the eyes are closed and that closing the ears reduces hearing. But that is hardly the point. The point is that we “feel” sound coming into the ears, and we “feel” that we are looking around and seeing with our eyes. A child in front of a mirror would confirm knowledge that would already have been acquired thanks to adjunct information originating from body structures “around” the retina. The ensemble of those body structures constitutes what I call a sensory portal . In the case of vision, the sensory portal includes not only the eye musculature with which we move the eyes but also the entire apparatus with which we focus on an object by adjusting the size of the lens; the apparatus of light-intensity adjustment that reduces or increases the diameter of the pupils (the camera shutters of our eyes); and, finally, the muscles around the eyes, those with which we can frown, or blink, or signify mirth. Eye movements and blinking play a critical role in the editing of our own visual images, and remarkably they also play a role in the effective and realistic editing of film images.
    Seeing consists of more than getting the appropriate light pattern on the retina. Seeing encompasses all these other co-responses, some of which are indispensable to generating a clear pattern in the retina, some of which are habitual accompaniments of the process of seeing, and some of which are already fast reactions to processing the pattern itself.
    The case for hearing is comparable. The vibration of the tympanic membrane and of a set of minuscule bones in the middle ear can be signaled to the brain in parallel with the sound itself, which occurs in the internal ear, at the level of the cochleas, where sound frequencies, time, and timbre are mapped.
    The complex operation of the sensory portals may contribute to the errors that children as well as adults can commit regarding the perception of an event—for example, reporting that a certain object was first seen and then heard, when the opposite happened. The phenomenon is known as source misattribution error.
    The unsung sensory portals play a crucial role in defining the