We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness..

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated….

It's very interesting to think about the distinction with mind, which I just made in very general terms, but it can be made more profound when we thi….

You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is….

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, som….

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology.….

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mi….

For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the p….

We're seeing it the same way, we're hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating wi….

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right ….

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is go….

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it..

What happens [in a coma] is that you lose the grounding of the self, you no longer have access to any feeling of your own existence..

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it….

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is m….

Emotion is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variati….

Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and ….

Although when you look at people that say, from the same culture, roughly the same age, and not very difference intelligence, and you make a lot of d….

All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which some….

So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and tha….

But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construc….