Aycharaych's And Our Brains

Do brains generate consciousness or just transmit conscious processes originating elsewhere? (Where?)

In Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series, telepaths detect long wave radiation from nearby brains but a telepath must learn the internal mental language of any individual before he can "read" and understand that individual's thoughts. However, Aycharaych of Chereion is a unique universal telepath, able instantly to detect and understand the surface thoughts of any nearby individual of any species. Surely impossible? 

I hypothesize that:

an individual thinks and simultaneously understands his own thoughts;

Aycharaych's brain immediately reproduces both the thoughts and the understandings of them;

a moment later, Aycharaych remembers the understanding;

therefore, Aycharaych seems to have "read" the thoughts.

However, if consciousness and thoughts originate elsewhere, does Aycharaych somehow access the "elsewhere" (immaterial minds or a collective immaterial mind)?

I think that the immaterial "elsewhere" is an unnecessarily complicated explanation of consciousness and thought. We can see where consciousness originates even though we do not fully understand the process. I suggest that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. We can see that organismic sensitivity as such is unconscious but that, by a qualitative change, it might become conscious. Consciousness would then be selected because it is necessary for pleasure and pain which have survival value. At some crucial moment, a mobile marine organism not only needed sustenance but also felt hungry and therefore was motivated to move towards what it could eat. Or it felt uncomfortably hot and therefore moved away from dangerous heat. Or it felt uncomfortably cold and therefore moved towards life-sustaining heat. Etc.

An increase in organismic sensitivity generated sensation just as a difference of electromagnetic wavelength generates a different colour. We can see and detect qualitative differences without being able to understand them in purely quantitative terms. Therefore, we think that there is a mind-body problem.