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

216 A CREATIVE COGNITION

As a consequence of such dynamics, Freeman and colleagues suggest
that it is not external smells per se that animals respond to, at least di-
rectly. Instead they respond to internal activity patterns created by the
dynamics in the olfactory bulb. Th e nonlinear, chaotic dynamics of
the system seem to be an essential part of the pro cess. Th is is because
“neither linear operations nor point and limit cycle attractors can create
novel patterns... the perceptual message that is sent on into the fore-
brain is a construction, not the residue of a fi lter or a computational
algorithm.”^15
Freeman cites evidence that similar kinds of nonlinear dynamics hold
for visual, auditory, and somatosensory inputs. But the key point is that
such a construction is now a cognitive agent rather than a mere neural
one. Just as the combinations of atoms form a molecule with properties
not envisaged in the components and free to interact with other such
molecules, so this cognitive agent enters into a new emergent level of
regulations with other such agents, creating new properties of life in the
pro cess. It can do this because it is not a singular entity— a token, or
symbol— but a unique spatiotemporal output of an attractor basin and its
structural grammar.
As with the acoustic forms in speech, such forms can now interact
with other such constructs to form new levels of information with emer-
gent properties. Th at is how cognition emerges in the brain: to become
something diff er ent from the brain, while remaining attached to it. Let
us now consider how that new level works in broader perspective, again
using visual experience as an example. Th is perspective will be crucial
for understanding individual diff erences in cognition.

THE GRAMMAR OF COGNITION

Visual experience starts as objects traverse the visual fi eld and/or as we

move around them, handle them, and so on. In eff ect, this experience

consists of a rapidly changing mosaic of light energy on the ret i na: a cloud

of moving points exciting areas of photoreceptors in the ret ina in seem-

ingly disorderly succession (see chapter 6).

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