It’s difficult to get our heads around the idea that each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious; it rubs up against ou… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

There obviously is a different feel to a wave of intense emotion versus an abstract thought, but each conscious form is an experience that gives us a unique perception of reality. The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story. The vast variety of conscious forms and the ubiquity of consciousness in the brain are best explained by a modular architecture of the brain. The conceptual challenge now is to understand how hundreds, if not thousands, of modules, embedded in a layered architecture — each layer of which can produce a form of consciousness — give us a single, unified life experience at any given moment that seems to flow flawlessly into the next across time.

Hence at any moment only part of the visual elements of a scene is available for conscious perception.

The psychology professor Richard Aslin once commented to me that he felt the idea of “consciousness” was a proxy for a whole host of variables correlated with our mental lives. We use “consciousness” as shorthand to easily describe the functions of a multitude of inborn, instinctual mechanisms such as language, perception, and emotion. It becomes evident that consciousness is best understood as a complex instinct as well. All of us come with a bucketful of instincts. Our incessant thought pattern jumps around. We have feelings about one idea, then its opposite, then our family, then an itch, then a favorite tune, then the upcoming meeting, then the grocery list, then the irritating colleague, then the Red Sox, then … It goes on and on until we learn, almost against our natural being, to have a linear thought.