The act of perception involves three specialised systems within the brain coordinated by the central executive.

The visuospatial sketchpad interprets information from the eye to figure out what we are looking at. It also makes a guess as to what the thing would feel like, based on its appearance.

The phonological loop uses information from the ears to determine what we are hearing.

The episodic buffer works decides the order in which things have happened in and what is likely to happen next.

The central executive then tries to pull all this together to form a hypothesis of what's going on and decide whether we should do anything as a result.

What to learn more? Try asking Virtual Dan White.