The Mechanism of Thought

A fast winners-take-all competition process, termed confabulation, is proposed as the fundamental mechanism of all aspects of cognition (vision, hearing, planning, language, initiation of thought and movement, etc.). Multiple, contemporaneous, mutually interacting confabulations -in which millions of items of relevant knowledge are applied in parallel -are typically employed in thinking. At the beginning of such a multiconfabulation, billions of distinct, potentially viable, conclusion sets are considered. At the end, only one remains. This fast, massively parallel application of relevant knowledge (an alien kind of information processing with no analogue in today´s computational intelligence, computational neurobiology, or computer science) is hypothesized to be the core explanation for the information processing effectiveness of thought. This paper presents a synopsis of this confabulation theory of human cortical and thalamic function.