[Acknowledgments]
Many  of the ideas and most of the work described here occureed at the Neurosciences Institute, whose fellos are dedicated to >>understanding how the brain gives rise to the mind.<<

[Preface]
... we develop ways to answer the following questions:
1. How does consciousness arise as a result of particular neuroal processes ...

our position -- that consciousness arises as a particular kind of brain process


William James said of attention at the turn of the century: "Everyone knows what attention is. It it s thaking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously posssible objects or trains of thought."

For Descartes, as for James more than two centuries later, to be conscious was synonymous with to think.

147
Do cortical neurons need to oscillate at 40 Hz or fire in bursts to contribute to conscious experience?

[Chapter 2
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Science has always tried to eliminate the subjective from its description of the world. But what if subjectivity itself is its subject?
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Consider this simple exaqmple: Why is it that when each of us performs certain discriminations, such ad between light and dark, each of us is conscious, but a similar discirminations performed by a simple physical device is apparently not associated with conscious experience?


246
Why should the simple differentiation between light and dark performed by the human being be associated with and, indeed, require consciousexperience, while that performed by the photodiode presumabley does not? Or consider a thermistor that can differentiate between hot and cold. Why should the thermistor remain a simple, dull physical device, incapable of generating any subjective or phenomenal quality, while when we perfor mthe same function we become conscious of cold, of hot, and possibly even of pain?


335
We know that the word mean can mean both average and lowly, yet at any given time we are conscious of only one of its meanings depending on the context.


584
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One striking consequence of reentry is the widespread synchronization of the activity of different groups of active neruons distributed across many different functionally specialized areas of the brain.


609
e point out that the neural substate of consciousness involves large populations of neurons -- especially those of the thalamocortical system -- that are widely distibuted in the brain. Conversely, no single area of the brain is responsible for conscious experience. We also show that as a task to be learned is practiced, its performance becomes more and more automatic: as this occurs and it fades from consciousness, the number of brain regions involved in performing the task becomes smaller.