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At the beginning of this semester one of the questions I had regarding the brain was: how could an awareness of the self arise from chemicals and electric signals? I did not understand how psychological processes like consciousness and thought could arise from biological mechanisms. However, our discussion about efferent copies and corollary discharge has helped me to better understand this relationship between biology and psychology. It's fascinating that our brains are able to produce a copy of the efferent signals they send out and use this copy to determine if a signal is in reponse to an internal or external stimuli. And this ability to distinguish between self-produced signals and external signals is corollary discharge (I think..). This mechanism shows that these efferent signal copies help us to become aware of internal thoughts regarding self-awareness and how the self is separate from the external world. Moreover, efferent copies are used by our brains to predict the outcome or expected sensations of a given action that we engage in. This shows that these biological signals are also able trigger psychological processes such as the formulation of thoughts and expectations about the outcome of an action that the body engages in. Thus, while this mechanism does not directly answer how our brains produce internal thoughts, it shows that biology does play a big role in triggering and helping us become aware of these thoughts. And this gives us a greater understanding about how biology and psychology interact.