Consciousness

Abstract

Progress is being made in understanding how brain mechanisms generate conscious experience. Simple conscious experiences such as sensations of colors, shapes, and sounds require only neural representations as patterns of firing that result from sensory inputs and internal processing. More complicated conscious experiences, such as awareness of reading in a chair in a room, require the amalgamation of sensations and images into more complex representations through binding into semantic pointers. Recursive binding—bindings of bindings of bindings—can produce the most complicated kinds of conscious experience of which humans are capable, taking people from feelings to awareness to self-awareness. Consciousness is limited because recursive binding and competition among the resulting semantic pointers depend on processing by many neurons.