lambert@COD.NOSC.MIL (David R. Lambert) (10/25/88)
Discussion history (abbreviated; see AIList for detail & sources): >>> 1) What does the brain do between thoughts? >>> 2) ... there is no "between thoughts" except for sleep.... >>> 3) [Subjects] reported seeing "randomly" blinking lights blink IN RYTHM to a song. Possible concl: consciousness oscillates. >>> 4) Other possible concl: we unconsciously attach meaning to apparently randon patterns (e.g., notice those lit on the beat and disregard others. ... use of tapping, or rubbing motions to influence pace of communications.... P.S. I'd like to know what 'oscillating consciousness' is supposed to mean. As I recall, there are some nice psycholinguistic "click" experiments (I don't know the references--about 1973) which show that the perceived location of a click which actually occurs at a random time during a spoken sentence migrates to a semantic (or, perhaps, syntactic) boundary. Perhaps the brain is actually thinking (processing information) all/most/much of the time. But we PERCEIVE (or experimentally observe) the brain as thinking intermittently 1) because we notice only the RESULTS of this thinking, and 2) do so only when these results become available at natural (irregularly spaced) breakpoints in the processing. David R. Lambert lambert@nosc.mil