Letters; February/March 2006; Scientific American Mind; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

Bleary-eyed editors can always get a pick-me-up from the mailbag. As usual, letters about Vol. 16, No. 3, offered insightful commentary. Bob Sitze, director of hunger education at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in Chicago, penned one of our favorites: "I have been a student of brain science for about 30 years now and as an educator and ecclesiologist (church guy) have found continual applications of neurological findings to the day-to-day workings of the people that I serve. I write and lecture on the subject (neuroecclesiology?) and gain courage from your magazine, if only to keep at this sometimes lonely subject. In the church, sadly, science is considered an unknown and unknowable body of knowledge." Keep the faith, Bob.

Christof Koch's analogy between visual consciousness and "The Movie in Your Head," while a distinct improvement on the famous "magic theater" metaphor dating back at least as far as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, is still rather unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Although the moving picture metaphor usefully postulates a frame-by-frame rather than a smoothly continuous "showing," it suffers from the implication that a preset sequence of stored images exists that is then projected.