Internalization of Experience

Abstract

This chapter describes how perceptual and navigation functions can become disengaged from their dependence on the external world. The key physiological mechanism that allows this “internalization” process is the corollary discharge system, which can interpret the activity of action circuits even in the absence of overt movement and sensory feedback from muscles. Within such an internalized world, brain networks can anticipate the consequences of imagined actions without the need to act them out. Instead the outcomes can be tested against previously acquired knowledge, which creates new knowledge entirely through self-organized brain activity. Neuronal circuits can perform both input-dependent and input-disengaged operations. Even simple brains of small animals have elements of internal operations (“cognition”). As the complexity of neural networks increases in larger brains, the share and efficacy of internalized computation also increases and can predict consequences of the brain’s actions over longer time scales and in more complex environments.