Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

A CREATIVE COGNITION 219

because they have not acquired the deep structural par ameters that, in

the rest of us, tend to generate the illusory outputs.

COGNITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Like singers moving together in harmonies, this merging of structures
continues so long as there is mutual co- variation to pick up from them.
Th us, attractors in diff er ent sense modes will share a number of their par-
ameters or correlations. For example, the movements of a singer’s lips
will tend to be in sync with the sounds. So they will tend to become inte-
grated into more inclusive, multimodal attractors, furnishing further
powers of predictability.
In this way, information through one sense mode could readily dis-
ambiguate uncertain information through another, just as lip- readers
do. A sound heard by predator or prey can create a visual expectation of
what is in the bushes. Tactile impressions help us visualize the texture
of a familiar surface. Smells convey information about pos si ble tastes to
follow.
Th e attractors can sometimes fool us, as when the patter of the ven-
triloquist appears to come from the dummy’s mouth. Even young infants
learning a language will be perturbed by any sudden asy nchrony in sound
and lip movements (cunningly contrived by an experimenter on a com-
puter screen). All this is well attested in the multisensory cells and regions
of the ce re bral cortex. As Marc Ernst has said, the “strength of coupling”
of signals from diff er ent modalities “seems to depend on the natu ral sta-
tistical co- occurrence between signals,” and “perceptions are tuned to the
statistical regularities of an ever- changing environment.”^17
Th ose points seem more obvious when we remember the dynamic
aspects of experience. Objects are never experienced in perfectly static
poses but as events in spatial transformation over time. Whereas any par-
tic u lar view may be unfamiliar, it usually becomes recognizable through
the grammar in the networks.
In addition, of course, most objects are usually experienced as events
with other objects— birds with nests, bats with balls, people with tables and
chairs, and so on—in sequences of familiar spatiotemporal association.

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