Automatic brains - Interpretive minds

The involvement of specific brain areas in carrying out specific tasks has been increasingly well documented over the past decade. Many of these processes are highly automatic and take place outside of conscious awareness. Conscious experience, however, seems unitary and must involve integration between distributed processes. This article presents the argument that this integration occurs in a constructive and interpretive manner and that increasingly complex representations emerge from the integration of modular processes. At the highest levels of consciousness, a personal narrative is constructed. This narrative makes sense of the brain's own behavior and may underlie the sense of a unitary self. The challenge for the future is to identify the relationships between patterns of brain activity and conscious awareness and to delineate the neural mechanisms whereby the underlying distributed processes interact.