The behaviourist credo that animals are devices for translating sensory input into appropriate responses dies hard. The thesis of this text is that the brain is innately constructed to initiate behaviours likely to promote the survival of the species, and to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those behaviours. Animals attend innately to vital stimuli and the more advanced animals learn to attend to related stimuli as well. Thus, the centrifugal attentional components of sensory systems are as important for learned behaviour as the more conventional paths. It is hypothesized that the basal ganglia are an important source of response plans and attentional signals. This reversal of traditional learning theory makes it possible to reexamine some long-standing psychological problems. A fundamental process - the association between brain activities representing external events - is poorly understood at the neural level. Most concepts have multiple associations but the concept is not unduly corrupted by them, and usually only a single appropriate association is aroused at a time. Furthermore, any arbitrary pair of concepts can be instantly associated, apparently requiring an impossibly high degree of neural interconnection. The author suggests a substitute for the reverberating closed neuronal loop as an explanation for the engram (active memory trace or working memory), which may go some way to resolving these difficulties.