" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."
— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)
Publisher
Harvester
Date
1979
Metaphor
" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."
Metaphor in Context
It may be that imagery is based on our ability to suppress motor activity […] If you imagine an orange, there may occur in your cortex a set of commands to pick it up, to smell it, to inspect it, and so on. Clearly these commands cannot be carried out, because the orange is not there. But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out. Depending on how far down the line this "faucet" is situated, the images may be more or less vivid and real seeming.
(p. 364)
(p. 364)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Derek Melser's The Act of Thinking (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 25.
Citation
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Harvester, 1979).
Date of Entry
04/17/2014
