  We discuss the two moments of human cognition, namely, apprehension (A),
whereby a coherent perception emerges from the recruitment of neuronal groups,
and judgment(B),that entails the comparison of two apprehensions acquired at
different times, coded in a suitable language and retrieved by memory. (B)
entails self-consciousness, in so far as the agent who expresses the judgment
must be aware that the two apprehensions are submitted to his/her own scrutiny
and that it is his/her task to extract a mutual relation. Since (B) lasts
around 3 seconds, the semantic value of the pieces under comparison must be
decided within that time. This implies a fast search of the memory contents. As
a fact, exploring human subjects with sequences of simple words, we find
evidence of a limited time window , corresponding to the memory retrieval of a
linguistic item in order to match it with the next one in a text flow (be it
literary, or musical,or figurative). While apprehension is globally explained
as a Bayes inference, judgment tresults from an inverse Bayes inference. As a
consequence, two hermeneutics emerge (called respectively circle and coil). The
first one acts in a pre-assigned space of features. The second one provides the
discovery of novel features, thus unveiling previously unknown aspects and
hence representing the road to reality.
