EC Neurology

Mental (or mental) renditions and representations in the brain occur according to the so-called "building block" principle: brain and mind are organized in modules and do indeed work modularly.

Jerry Fodor's [1] definition of ‘modularity’ is methodologically speaking dependent on using building-blocks: this structural property means that it belongs to and works via functional units that are:

• Operating relatively quickly,
• Autonomously, quasi automatically,
• Remain area-specific,
• Are informationally closed, and
• Are furthermore “binding”, i.e. would "necessarily" respond to each relevant stimulus. (This latter property is of course related to automaticity).

Modularity, according to Fodor's thesis, is characteristic for many of the brain processes, especially for the representation of the mental. This thesis has however been criticized many times.

Nevertheless, it can be said that serious - even intentional (i.e. content-oriented) - models of the representation of the mental, especially representations by schemas (“scheme-representations”), are modular or almost modular (quasi-modular or pseudo-modular).

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