Like other young researchers, I began my investigation of the brain without worrying much about whether this perception-action theoretical framework was right or wrong. “Where in the brain does perception occur?” “What initiates a finger movement before cells in the motor cortex fire?” I would always dispatch their queries with a simple answer: “That all happens in the neocortex.” Then I would skillfully change the subject or use a few obscure Latin terms that my students did not really understand but that seemed scientific enough so that my authoritative-sounding accounts temporarily satisfied them. Yet a minority-the clever ones-always asked a series of awkward questions. Most students were happy with my textbook explanations of the brain's input-output mechanisms. To initiate a movement, impulses from the motor cortex instruct the spinal cord neurons to produce muscular contraction. Sensory stimuli from the eyes, ears, and such are converted to electrical signals and then transmitted to the relevant parts of the sensory cortex that process these inputs and induce perception. As a young course instructor in seminars for medical students, I faithfully taught neurophysiology by the book, enthusiastically explaining how the brain perceives the world and controls the body.
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