I just woke up with the thought that the brain is like a net, as if the nueral network were literaly catching information out of the air. When we are born, thrust unexpectedly into the crazy world, we start frantically weaving this net, designing it as we go, to catch the few things that we're able to make sense of, to ignore all the rest. At first, this buisness of ignoring is the most important, since we're so overwhelmed with information. Then sometime around pueberty we have a working model of the world that mostly makes sense, even if it's woefully incomplete. We then spend the rest of our lives trying to unweave parts of or net, so that we can experience more directly more of the world we were so eager to filter out.