The Case of the Missing Goal:
Do you always know what your goal is?
Check out this really trivial
example.
You walk into a room and stop. You realize that you have
no idea what you came for. You could start to worry about losing your memory.
But you know that most other people admit to the same experience.
Fortunately, you know what to do next. You walk back to
where you came from and go back to doing what you were doing. You remember, for
example, that you were about to cut something and saw no scissors. Then you
remembered that pair of scissors in the other room.
For the return match, you give your memory better cues.
Depending on your preferred brain modules, you may say to yourself "Scissors."
Or you call up an image of the scissors as you recall where they were in the
other room. Either way, you know your goal when you go to the room again.
You have just demonstrated, with no particular surprise,
that part of your brain can have a goal without telling other parts about it.
This multiprocessing is normal and efficient. Your
language channel was probably busy listening to TV or talking. Your visual
channel was watching your work. The back channel that keeps track of where your
things are can usually handle routine jobs by itself. If the scissors had been
in a nearby drawer, that back channel would have had your hand reach for it
without bothering the rest of your brain.
This example was trivial because you knew the right tool
to cure this kind of problem. You go back to where you were. See the same
signals you saw before. (Psychologists say "Recreate the stimulus
environment." Pompous makes advice more impressive.)
But you don't do the same thing you did before.
When you realize what your goal was, you take care to
call on other modules of your brain, particularly modules that don't
depend as much on the immediate cues.
What you've demonstrated is that you can use a tool to
help one part of your brain explain its goal to other modules. Mainly by
arranging for the right cues.
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