Each of those higher abstractions the brain is processing us because the neocort3x is a filtered hierarchy that communicates up and down at each layer. The result of the lower levels trigger and input into the level above it. The higher levels project an expectation of the next result to the layer below themselves. While the lowest level might be concerned with identifying edges of lines, the layer above it is identifying letters and above that words, sentences, concepts, meaning, how that is similar to other things, etc. Each of these layers is active at a moment in time, but the communcation interface between each layer is a sparse distributed representation.