It is often said that “the mind is what the brain does.” Modern neuroscience has indeed shown us that mental goings-on rely on and are in some sense entailed by neural goings-on. But the truth is that we have a poor handle on the nature of that relationship (View Highlight)
We don’t want to think about the photons hitting our retina, even though our neural systems are detecting and processing that information. That’s not the right level of information to link to stored knowledge of the world or to combine with data from other sensory modalities. What we need to think about are the objects in the world that these photons are bouncing off of before they reach our eyeballs. We, as behaving organisms, need to cognitively work with our perceptual inferences, not our sensory data. (View Highlight)
representación abstracción conducta
But the umwelt also crucially entails valence, salience and relevance — it is a self-centered map of things in the environment that the organism can detect and that it cares about. Perception in this view is not the neutral, passive acquisition of information. It is an active process of sense-making, which results in a highly filtered, value-laden, action-oriented landscape of affordances. If an organism is thinking at all, these are the things that it needs to think about. (View Highlight)
A nematode can’t be thinking about objects far away from it because it has no means to detect them. Its cognitive umwelt is consequently limited to the here and now. A lamprey can’t be thinking about types of objects because it doesn’t have enough levels of processing to abstract the requisite categorical relationships. And a human baby can’t think about next week because its cognitive horizon doesn’t extend that far. (View Highlight)
Interesante pensar el Umwelt desde el punto de vista psicoanalítico: algo que no eres capaz de representar porque está fuera de lo que actualmente es significativo y relevante para ti.
inconsciente psicoanálisis umwelt
High-level cognition is useful precisely because it ignores so much low-level detail — because of what’s not on your mind. (View Highlight)
Thus, only a subset of neural representations — the meaningful elements that are processed by various neural subsystems — rise to the level of mental representations — the elements of cognition. Moreover, only a subset of those mental objects — a varying subset, depending on circumstances — may be things that we need to think about consciously. It’s thus too vague and all-inclusive to simply say, “The mind is what the brain does.” Our mental goings-on are more likely entailed by a dynamically shifting, adaptively filtered subset of neural goings-on. (View Highlight)