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Corollary discharge helps explain why neurons are connected in such complex patterns and how their communication creates behavior that is not exactly the same each time. If central pattern generators didn’t communicate with one another, they wouldn’t be all that useful, because they wouldn’t be able to adapt to changing circumstances. It also brings “thinking” into the equation, since internal actions affect outputs through corollary discharge. This leaves me wondering why some behaviors involve a connection to the I-Function and others don’t.  How does the I-Function seem to “get in the way” of patterns to which it isn’t connected, like riding a bicycle? How easy (or difficult) is to create new lines of communication between patterns? How do patterns and the lines of communication between them actually form?

On Tuesday we talked about the fact that everyone has difference experiences based on the same input signals, and that any single experience can never be the same for two people. In my opinion this gives more evidence for the idea that every one inhabits there our reality, their our universe, but that those realities must be similar to some degree, since it’s not the inputs that are different, just the internal signals that we use to interpret them. It’s sort of a frightening thought, that we (humans in general) don’t really have a common reference point of experience. No one will really ever understand what another person is experiencing, especially in terms of emotion. I suppose that’s why it’s so difficult to predict what any one person will do when presented with a difficult situation. On another note, if these internal signals were connected to the I-Function, would it then be possible to consciously change what we perceive as reality to some degree? We can change the input we are receiving, but maybe we can change how we experience it, effectively changing our reality and not anyone else’s.