adequate experience of reading English. But once we have mastered 

 that (or any other) language, correct pronunciation can be achieved 

 essentially as a reflex. Indeed, I am going to suggest that the evo- 

 lutionary advantage of possessing consciousness is that it enables 

 an individual to acquire and use novel context-specific reflexes with- 

 in its own lifetime. 



But what about those first two sentences, and our tallied Ns and 

 Fs? What were our scores? I will guess that most people found all 

 six Ns in the first sentence, or something close to that number. But 

 how many Fs were there in the second sentence? The majority of 

 people I've tried this test on managed to find only three, which was 

 indeed my own score. It usually comes as a great surprise to dis- 

 cover that there are actually six Fs! How could we have overseen 

 those three Fs in the three occurrences of the word of? It is not 

 because those words are small, because the same is true of the words 

 no, in and on, in the first sentence, and we did not miss the target 

 letter Ns in them. The reason for our oversight is more subtle, and 

 it is connected with the way the letters are pronounced. All six Ns 

 in that first sentence are pronounced in the same manner. To use the 

 term employed by the linguist, they all involve the same phoneme, 

 and articulation of any phoneme involves activation of the appro- 

 priate muscles of the tongue, lips and jaw. But the Fs in the three 

 occurrences of the word of are pronounced as if they were Vs, and 

 the phonemes for F and V are naturally different. This indicates that 

 our nervous systems surreptitiously invoked the appropriate pho- 

 neme when we consciously attended to our letter-detecting task, and 

 that our systems were thus duped by the duality of phonemes com- 

 monly associated with the written letter F. 



This is a profound issue. It indicates that conscious attention to 

 an observed stimulus, such as a written letter or word, has to activate 

 the part of the brain involved in the appropriate muscular move- 

 ments. It strongly suggests that conscious attention is an active pro- 

 cess, never a passive one, as assumed in the stimulus-response par- 

 adigm. That latter view merely sees the muscle-directing regions of 

 the brain as the possible recipients of the products of conscious 

 processes occurring earlier in the system, closer to the sensory input. 



8 



