I just read Self Comes To Mind, a book by neurologist Antonio Damasio. It was a fascinating reading.  Be warned, though: you need to have some knowledge about the anatomy of the brain. Even if there is an appendix with some general description about a human brain’s structure, it is not really very complete. Damasio seems to repeat himself quite often. Even so, if you like reading about the brain, you might enjoy this book.

Damasio describes how the homeostasis of living creatures might have helped in developing a neural system. This system enabled animals to adapt in increasingly more sophisticated ways  to their surroundings. The author identifies three main components of the “self”: the proto-self, the core-self and the autobiographical self. He then describes how different regions of the brain are active in the different levels. Human consciousness ultimately appears when sensory experience, as mapped by our brains, interact with previously recorded experiences.

The critical part is when Damasio explains how the convergence-divergence zones act, the processes of forward and feed-backward transmission of information, how our most inner representations of the images interact and help further shape the incoming information. And this is something that kept reminding me of On Intelligence, a wonderful book by Jeff Hawkins about his theory of the mind and – lo and behold – how this theory can help in developing artificial intelligence.

Nr 2 are the colliculi superiores. Did you know what they are for?