A common theme is that tools for thinking allow you to restimulate your brain with its own output. Essentially creating a full outer loop from your sensory inp

A common theme is that tools for thinking allow you to restimulate your brain with its own output. Essentially creating a full outer loop from your sensory inputs to your motor outputs. I'm speculating now: There are probably smaller loops within the brain that allow you to ruminate on a topic to think through it, but those loops don't give you access to as many neurons or have the same fidelity between iterations. The alternative to this sort of self-stimulating recursion, is that everything we reason about can be done in one pass from sensor to motor, which I find unlikely. The idea of applying multiple passes of the same networks using memory to hand off between iterations also explains why memory and other aspects of intelligence are correlated in humans, when they needn't be. A machine has FLOPS independent of it's memory capacity for example.