The Cortex: Your Mental Pilot

The third, and evolutionarily highest, level of your brain’s hierarchy is the cerebral cortex. This region manages the more complex, abstract, relational, and consciously experienced mental processes. It interacts constantly and intimately with the other two levels, as previously described. As we’ve already noted, thinking is not merely a whole brain function—it’s a whole body function. Almost all of the body’s processes, and particularly those processes we refer to as thinking, intertwine closely with the other processes. To illustrate the closely integrated nature of these various brain and body elements, consider the experience of explaining a complicated idea in a conversation.You must begin by forming the concept in your mind; then you find the words to express it; then you switch on your speech apparatus; you modulate the pitch, rate, and volume of your voice to convey the nonverbal meaning; you may make facial expressions or hand gestures to punctuate your message; you study the other person’s reactions for cues that tell you how well you’re getting through; and you sense the emotional tone—the “feeling”—of the situation. Your own emotional and non-conscious responses register your reactions to the situation, and to whatever the other person may be saying. Another familiar experience of the close integration of these brain regions is the so-called “fight-or-flight” reaction, which mobilizes your body in response to a stressful event. The conscious mental activity triggers automatic routines in the limbic or mid-brain region, which in turn mobilize various primitive responses in the basal region. Your whole-body response to a sudden provocation, or to a chronic experience of stress, forms a well-orchestrated syndrome, in which many parts of your biocomputer participate. There is probably much more about the cortex that is yet to be learned than that which we know.We still understand very little about how the brain dreams or why it dreams.We still have no robust theory of how the brain stores its memories. And of course, the entire notion of consciousness remains largely a mystery to neuroscientists.