| It's probably more like a system which shares input at various stages of processing, and through both intentional and accidental means this information can return to other places in the network. In other words I don't think we discretely process each sensory input on its own before propagating the result, but instead we process things in tandem, sharing intermediate information and then eventually reconstruct it all as one experience. For example, just in a temporal sense your body receives and processes tons of sensory input coming in at various times but it "feels" like it happens all at once. When I slap your leg, you feel the impulse, see the action, and hear the impact all at once despite the wildly varying times it takes for these inputs to reach and be processed by your brain. But your brain doesn't just wait to "see" the slap until you actually feel it. Instead, your brain "error corrects" the past with new information. It's incorrect to view your consciousness as a singular state at any given time; rather, your experience exists in a fuzzy temporal location with no well-defined boundaries. It's hard to grok but here is another example: If you move your eyes quickly to another location [0], your brain "fakes" what you see, before replacing that information with real information. For this reason, if you sometimes look at a wall clock with a ticking (not continuous) second hand at just the right moment, the second hand seems to hover for a slight while longer before continuing its path around the clock. So I think your brain samples and holds previous sensory information for reuse. It could recall memories to help with this, but a much faster and reliable method for experiences like a saccade or a multi-sensory event would likely be to retain recent sensory phenomena in order to reuse it in the sensory pipeline. This network simultaneously enables internal simulation and thus dreaming. That is just personal theory and I would like to test it, but theoretically it makes sense to me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade |