An operator is selected by competition. The operator theory appears to draw on the theory of neuronal group selection developed in 1987 by Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, who proposed that for any brain activity, the ablest group of neurons is selected to do the task. There is an almost Darwinian competition—a neural Darwinism, to use Gerald Edelman’s phrase—going on all the time between operators to see which ones can most effectively process signals from a particular sense and in a particular circumstance.
