"The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition associated with an object or event would correspond to the winning party, which would remain in power for some time and would attempt to influence and control future events. 'Attention' would correspond to the efforts of journalists, pollsters and others to focus on certain issues rather than others, and thus attempt to bias the electorate in their favor. Perhaps those large pyramidal cells in cortical layer 5 that project to the superior colliculus and the thalamus (both involved in attention) would correspond to electoral polls. These progress from early, tentative polls to later, rather more accurate ones as the election approaches. It is unlikely that all this happens in the brain in a fixed time sequence. The brain may resemble more the British system, in which the time between one election and the next can be irregular."
— Crick, Francis (1916-2004) and Christof Koch (b. 1956)
Metaphor
"The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition associated with an object or event would correspond to the winning party, which would remain in power for some time and would attempt to influence and control future events. 'Attention' would correspond to the efforts of journalists, pollsters and others to focus on certain issues rather than others, and thus attempt to bias the electorate in their favor. Perhaps those large pyramidal cells in cortical layer 5 that project to the superior colliculus and the thalamus (both involved in attention) would correspond to electoral polls. These progress from early, tentative polls to later, rather more accurate ones as the election approaches. It is unlikely that all this happens in the brain in a fixed time sequence. The brain may resemble more the British system, in which the time between one election and the next can be irregular."
Metaphor in Context
It may help to make a crude political analogy. The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition associated with an object or event would correspond to the winning party, which would remain in power for some time and would attempt to influence and control future events. 'Attention' would correspond to the efforts of journalists, pollsters and others to focus on certain issues rather than others, and thus attempt to bias the electorate in their favor. Perhaps those large pyramidal cells in cortical layer 5 that project to the superior colliculus and the thalamus (both involved in attention) would correspond to electoral polls. These progress from early, tentative polls to later, rather more accurate ones as the election approaches. It is unlikely that all this happens in the brain in a fixed time sequence. The brain may resemble more the British system, in which the time between one election and the next can be irregular. Such an analogy should not be pressed too far. Like all analogies, it should be regarded as a possible source of ideas, which of course will have to be confirmed by experiment.
(p. 121)
