Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear
There&#x27;s an interesting sortof thought-trap when thinking about these things - which this article doesn&#x27;t fall into - but I&#x27;ll mention it anyway cos its fun. Dennett calls it the Cartesian Theatre - and the idea is that when thinking about how the brain works, we may mistakenly imagine that once the brain has (say) processed these timestamped sounds, it then puts them all back together somewhere to &#x27;play them back&#x27; to our consciousness. But thats a paradox because then you&#x27;d need another consciousness to interpret the reconstructed sound. Dennett likened it to imagining a little homunculus inside your brain that is watching a screen that plays back your conscious exprience. Of course it can&#x27;t work like that, because it becomes recursive.<p>So when the brain &#x27;time stamps&#x27; these sounds (as they put it) it (probably) doesn&#x27;t then need to ever put them back in the right order again. That bit of processing is done. A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no &#x27;one place&#x27; where things come back &#x27;together&#x27;. That also means there is no one instant in time where we become &#x27;conscious&#x27; of things. If its spread throughout the brain is must necessarily be smeared across a (fairly short) internal of time too.<p>I think these days with neural nets being better understood perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much.