The views of self-deception that Mele attacks are thoroughly metaphorical, and should never have purported to imply the existence of real internal acts of deception. Research on self-deception, including Mele's appealing account, could be enriched and constrained by a broader investigation of the prevalent use of metaphor in thinking and talking about the mind.

Random-excitation granule cells are likely to overwhelm spatiotemporal sequences described as “tidal waves” in Braitenberg et al.'s target article. A mechanism is proposed involving the Golgi cells to reinforce tidal waves against noise. The recurrent inhibition by the Golgi calls can recruit random excitations of granule cells in phase with sequences of mossy fiber input.

The strong coupling of binding to cross-correlations is methodologically problematic. A completely unstructured network of neurons can produce cross-correlations very similar to the measured ones, and yet they have little dynamic effect.

Farah argues that nonlocal models explain clinical data better. However, the locality assumption does not seem so implausible if different sorts of data are taken into account. In particular, priming experiments using evoked response potentials support modularity. I describe some ERP studies relevant to this issue.

How can self-deception avoid intention and conscious recognition? Nine processes of self-deception seem to involve biased links between plausible ideas. These processes allow self-deceivers to regard individual conclusions as fair and reasonable. Bias is only detected by comparing broad patterns, which individual self-deceivers will not do.

Phillips & Singer (P&S) extend ideas derived from the observation eight years ago that the coherence (synchronization) of cortical oscillations can be modulated by the structure of visual stimuli. As described in the target article, a large part of the continued interest in this finding is related to independent theoretical work suggesting that synchronized cell firing could help solve the problem of binding together within cortex neuronal activity associated with different attributes of visual stimuli. The authors present an abstract “proof of concept” model describing how their cortical processing scheme could work, but our biologically realistic models of cortical relationships suggest that the proposal is biologically implausible. Our realistic models lead to a very different interpretation of the significance of cortical oscillations.

The tidal-wave theory is inspired by the particular morphology of the cerebellar cortex. It elegantly attributes function to the anisotropy of the cerebellar wiring and the geometry of Purkinje cell dendrites. In this commentary, physiological considerations are used to elaborate temporal and spatial constraints of the tidal-wave theory. It is shown, first, that limitations of temporal precision in the cortical inputs to the mammalian cerebellum delimit the spatial resolution of an input sequence (i.e., the minimal distance along the parallel fibers which can detect sequential input) to the range of a millimeter at best. Second, temporal characteristics of Purkinje cell postsynaptic potentials are argued to predict a distance of at least several millimeters along the parallel fiber beam in order to generate a sequence in the cerebellar output. It is concluded that the implementation of tidal waves as a general principle of cerebellar function is questionable as there exist cerebelli too small to match these constraints.

The central claim of my original target article was a modest one (that modularity does not always hold) but it was misinterpreted as a much stronger one (that modularity never holds). Further confusions arose from multiple valid usages of the term “modularity” and the similarity of the terms “locality” and “localization.” Despite the limited nature of the claim, I maintain that it poses a stubborn problem for neuropsychology, not to be dispelled by new empirical methods or a priori reasoning.

A path space integral approach to modelling the job description of the cerebellum is proposed. This new approach incorporates the “tidal wave” equation into a kind of generalized Huygens's wave equation. The resulting exponential functional integral provides a mathematical expression of the inhibitory function by which the cerebellum “sculpts” the intended control signal from the background of neuronal excitation.

When Genotype × Environment (G × E) interactions are present, heritability estimates are not interpretable. Mealey cites abundant evidence for G × E interactions in the etiology of sociopathy, thereby completely undermining estimates of the heritability of sociopathy which form the foundation of her model. Without proper evidence for a genetic basis of sociopathy, Mealey's sociobiological model collapses under its own great weight.

Binding needs to be task dependent, and cannot usefully be driven by properties of the stimulus alone. However, task dependent binding can only take place after the patterns in a stimulus have been identified. Thus pattern recognition needs to be done prior to binding. Synchronisation may be a consequence of pattern recognition and can be used to localise the pattern and tag its attributes at different levels of information processing.

This commentary defends intentionalist accounts of self-deception against Mele by arguing that: (1) viewing self-deception on the model of other-deception is not as paradoxical as Mele makes out; (2) the paradoxes are not entailed by the view that self-deception is intentional; and (3) there are two problems for Mele's theory that only an intentionalist theory can solve.

This commentary reviews the basic physical principles underlying human single- and multi-joint arm movements. The potential role of the cerebellum in dealing with the physics of movement is discussed in the light of recent physiological findings and the theoretical model of cerebellar detection and generation of input and output sequences put forward by Braitenberg and colleagues.

Mele's analysis of self-deception is persuasive but it might also be useful to consider the varieties of self-deception that occur in real-world settings. Instances of self-deception can be classified along three dimensions: implicit versus explicit, motivated versus process-based, and public versus private. All three types of self-deception have implications for the scientific research enterprise.

Mealey's (1995a) psychological explanation of the sociopath's antisocial activity appeals to an incomplete or nonstandard theory of mind. This is not the only possible mechanism of mental state attribution. The simulation theory of mental state ascription offers a better hope of explaining the diverse elements of sociopathy reported by Mealey.

Our work supports synchronization for binding within Phillips & Singer's “contextual field” (CF) as well as the type of its lateral interaction they propose. Both firmly agree with our “association field” (AF) and its modulatory influences (Eckhorn et al. 1990). However, the CF connections seem to produce anticorrelation among assemblies representing unrelated structures, whereas experimental evidence indicates decoupling. Finally, it is unclear how the cortex can have access to the logistic function used in the “coherent infomax” approach.

Mealey's article on the sociobiology of sociopathy raises questions about the relationship between adaptiveness and abnormality. Although sociopathy may be adaptive, simply defining medical and psychiatric disorders in terms of evolutionary function is problematic. Rather, sociopathy may be characterized as a relatively atypical disorder, an entity to which it may be useful to extend the metaphors of the medical model.

Contextual signals might supervise the discovery of coherently varying information between cortical modules computing different functions of their receptive field input. This hypothesis is explored in two sets of computational experiments, one studying the effects on learning of long-range unidirectional contextual signals mediated by intervening processors, and the other showing contextually supervised discovery of a high-order variable in a multilayer network.

The simultaneous possession of conflicting beliefs is both possible and logical within current models of human cognition. Specifically, evidence of lateral inhibition and state-dependent memory suggests a means by which conflicting beliefs can coexist without requiring “mental exotica.” We suggest that paradoxical self-deception enables the self-deceiver to store important information for use at a later time.

We add evidence from functional imaging supporting the concept of activation of coronally oriented zones corresponding to parallel fibers. Braitenberg et al.'s suggestion that there is an operating mode of the cerebellum relies on the idea introduced by Eccles and refined by the concept of tidal waves which Heck found in vitro. Recent evidence from functional imaging has shown zones of activation in accordance with this model and hence provides support for Braitenberg et al.'s hypothesis from the intact and healthy human cerebellum. In a second section, we discuss vulnerability of the structures described by Braitenberg et al. with respect to slow and fast movements in the context of clinical symptoms in cerebellar disease.