Overview

An overview is provided of multiple book themes. A critical one is explaining how and where conscious states of seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing arise in our minds, why they are needed to choose effective actions, yet how unconscious states also critically influence behavior. Other themes include learning, expectation, attention, imagination, and creativity; differences between illusion and reality, and between conscious seeing and recognizing, as embodied within surface-shroud resonances and feature-category resonances, respectively; roles of visual boundaries and surfaces in understanding visual art, movies, and TV; different legacies of Helmholtz and Kanizsa towards understanding vision; how stable opaque percepts and bistable transparent percepts are explained by the same laws; how solving the stability-plasticity dilemma enables brains to learn quickly without catastrophically forgetting previously learned but still useful knowledge; how we correct errors, explore novel experiences, and develop individual selves and cumulative cultural accomplishments; how expected vs. unexpected events are regulated by interacting top-down and bottom-up processes, leading to either adaptive resonances that support fast and stable new learning, or hypothesis testing whereby to learn about novel experiences; how variations of the same cooperative and competitive processes shape intelligence in species, cellular tissues, economic markets, and political systems; how short-term memory, medium-term memory, and long-term memory regulate adaptation to changing environments on different time scales; how processes whereby we learn what events are causal also support irrational, superstitious, obsessional, self-punitive, and antisocial behaviors; how relaxation responses arise; and how future acoustic contexts can disambiguate conscious percepts of past auditory and speech sequences that are occluded by noise or multiple speakers.