>>12333859>As Llinás and Ribary (1994) proposed during the 1980s, all perception would seem to depend on gamma-band oscillations of approximately40 Hz in the thalamocortical system. Oscillations which, in the case of sense perception, are modulated by information from the sense organs, which means that that information does not bring us into direct contact with the outside world, but that it restricts the number of degrees of freedom the thalamocortical system has in creating its self-generated percepts. In other words, the thalamocortical system’s continuous and more or less freewheeling mediation of percepts is restrained by information from the senses, and thus forced to yield only a limited number of its potentially infinite perceptual products. If that hypothesis is true, or at least comes close to being true, it follows that perception is a closed, intrinsic functional state, irrespective
of whether we are dreaming, whether we are hallucinating or whether we are perceiving the world in an unclouded state of wakeful consciousness. It follows, in short, that all we ever perceive is the intrinsic products of our brain.
