Margaret Mead once remarked that she thought all Caltech men thought women had a staple in their belly button because the only time they viewed a wom… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Amid great anticipation, Giacomo slowly lowered the electrode into the callosum. As is commonly done in neurophysiology, the recording system was hooked up to a loudspeaker so that the rat-tat-tat of the neurons firing could be heard. We were ready to hear the Morse code of the brain.
Then it happened. The electrode pierced the callosum. Instead of the rat-tat-tat we expected, the loudspeaker boomed with the excruciatingly clear voice of Ringo Starr singing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” Giacomo looked up from the cat and calmly said, “Now that is what I call high-order information.” Some kind of electronic ground loop had been closed, and we were picking up the local radio station. We all laughed, though we knew this brain code thing was going to be a long haul.

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.

What if conscious experience is managed by each module? Lose a module to injury or stroke, and the consciousness that accompanies that module is gone, too. Remember: patients with hemi-neglect aren’t conscious of one-half of space because the module that processes that information is no longer working. Or, if the modules responsible for locating oneself in space are not being integrated properly, conscious experience is deeply affected, and one ends up with the feeling that someone else is there just over your shoulder. Or, take people with Urbach-Wiethe disease, which leads to deterioration of the amygdalae: they no longer experience the emotion of fear.