030818 Brain specificity
Lets not get carried away in the specificity of function assigned to various brain areas. Theres a serious practical limit to what can be hard-wired in terms of responses to specific situations. Heres the problem: evolution can only provide the raw materials for dealing with reality. The same problems face all animals. You can build in a conspecific detector, but you cant build in a grandmother detector because evolution does not know what your grandmother looks like.
It makes me nervous as hell to read about executive processes. Maybe its because process to me is a term of art from computer science. And it seems to me that an executive process requires an executive, which seems to invoke Dennett’s “Cartesian observer”. Remember, the whole brain is a set of neural circuits with cycles and feedback.
When writers talk about a system that can activate or suppress motor activity, what I think about is the difference between mental imagery and acting out.