The unity of consciousness—our sense of self—is the

great

The unity of consciousness—our sense of self—is the

greatest remaining mystery of the brain. As a philosophical concept, consciousness continues to defy consensus, but most people who study it think of it as different states in different contexts, not as a unitary function of mind. One of the most surprising insights to Ku0059436 emerge from the modern study of states of consciousness is that Freud was right: unconscious mental processes pervade conscious thought; moreover, not all unconscious mental processes are the same. Freud (see Gay, 1995) initially defined the instinctual unconscious as a single entity consisting largely of the aggressive and erotic feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that lie outside consciousness

yet influence Z VAD FMK our behavior and our experience (for a modern discussion see Alberini et al., 2013). He later added the preconscious unconscious (now called the adaptive unconscious), which is part of the ego and processes information without our being aware of it. Thus Freud appreciated that a great portion of our higher cognitive processing occurs unconsciously, without awareness and without the capacity to reflect. When we look at a person’s face, we don’t consciously analyze its features and say, “Ah, yes, that’s so-and-so.” Recognition just comes to us. Similarly, we do not consciously form grammatical structures. It’s all done unconsciously—we just speak. Recently, several psychoanalysts (Shevrin and Fritzler, 1968) and neuroscientists (Edelman, 1989, Edelman, 2004, Koch, 2004, Damasio, 2012, Ramachandran, 2004, Shadlen and Kiani, 2011 and Dehaene, 2014) have attempted to define different states of consciousness operationally, to make them amenable to experimentation. One approach has been outlined by Shadlen and Kiani (2011), who argue that awareness and subjective aspects of perception and volition are interrelated. They advance the idea that the neural mechanisms that give rise to conscious states share features with the neural mechanisms that underlie simpler

forms of decision making, designed ADP ribosylation factor to engage with the environment. Dehaene, who uses brain imaging to study a mental process that parallels the adaptive unconscious, takes another approach. He distinguishes a minimum of three states of consciousness: (1) the state of wakefulness—awakening from sleep; (2) the state of attention—processing a specific piece of information without necessarily being aware of it, such as feeling hungry or seeing a friend; and (3) the state of perceptual awareness (authorship) and reportable consciousness—becoming aware of some of the information we pay attention to and being able to tell others about it (Dehaene, 2014). The second state—attention—is a transitional state between wakefulness and reportable consciousness. Dehaene holds that our experience of consciousness is based on these three independent but overlapping states.

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