Of all the important questions asked about the world, one that all-too-often surreptitiously slides beneath the bar is: how do we get along in the world? How do we thread our acts together into a common narrative that makes sense to us as individuals while at the same time allowing us to interact with others? It is a mystery, when we consider that with different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and more) coming at us, our brains have to process them at different speeds through different neural structures. To that must be added the significance of information streaming in from different locations, each person thus perceiving bits at a (slightly) different time from everyone else. If the mind didn’t sort all of that out, we would be part of a constant cacophony of incoherent sights, sounds, smells, thoughts and images.
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