Neural patterns, on the other hand, can be accessed only in a third-person perspective. If I had the chance of looking at my own neural patterns with the help of the most advanced technologies, I would still be looking at them from a third-person perspective. In short, the process we come to know as mind when mental images become ours as a result of consciousness is a continuous flow of images many of which turn out to be logically interrelated. The flow moves forward in time, speedily or slowly, orderly or jumpily, and on occasion it moves along not just one sequence but several. Sometimes the sequences are concurrent, sometimes convergent and divergent, sometimes they are superimposed.
Thought is an acceptable word to denote such flow of images.
The business of making images never stops while we are awake and it even continues during part of our sleep, when we dream. One might argue that images are the currency of out minds. The words I am using to bring these ideas to you are first formed, however briefly and sketchily, as auditory, visual, or somatosensory images of phonemes and morphemes, before I implement them on the page in their written version. In this perspective, any symbol you can think of is an image, and there may be little leftover mental residue that is not made of images. Even the feelings that make up the backdrop of each mental instant are images, in the sense articulated above, somatosensory images, that is, which mostly signal aspects of the body state.