The Disencapsulated Mind: A Premotor Theory of Human Imagination

It is hypothesized that perceptual, motoric, and cognitive operations that were functionally distinct and modularly encapsulated in our pre-modern ancestors came to interact through a new type of cross-modular binding in our species. This demodularization allowed previously domain-dedicated, encapsulated motoric and sensory operators to operate on operands for which they had not evolved. Moreover, while such "promiscuous operators" could at times operate non-volitionally, at other times they could be governed by top-down volitional control. In particular, motoric operations that derive from the same circuits that compute motions of body parts through real space for purposes of object manipulation and bodily navigation now afforded mental manipulation by a virtual body in the absence of any physical hand or other effector movements. The creativity of human imagination and mental models is rooted in premotor simulation of sequential manipulations of objects and symbols in the mental workspace. More generally, demodularization had many cognitive consequences, one of which was that human consciousness became bifurcated into a standard chimp-like consciousness of the perceptual-somatic world, and a uniquely human consciousness of mental models about invisible causes of the apparent.