[simonh]

Even within my immediate family we seem to have distinct differences in our conscious experience. My wife has very little visual or auditory experience of thought, no inner voice even when reading a book. While I mostly experience speaking as a continuous stream of words coming basically from my subconscious, with only a vague sense of what's coming up, one of my daughters says she is consciously aware of the exact words she is going to say several seconds in advance. It's like she has the ability to introspect her internal speech buffer, while I can't.

So while I'm sure there are a lot of custom tuned, problem specific hardware structures in our brain architecture, we do seem to learn how to actually use that hardware individually. As a result we seem to come up with a diverse range of different high level approaches.