Self Comes to Mind

criterion on which we can rate consciousness. It has to do with scope . Minimal scope allows a sensing of the self, say when one is drinking a cup of coffee at home, unconcerned with the provenance of either the cup or the coffee, or with what it will do to your heartbeat, or with what you have to do today. You are quietly present in the moment, that’s all. Now suppose you are sitting down for a similar cup of coffee at a restaurant to meet with your brother, who wishes to discuss your parents’ inheritance and what is to be done with your half sister, who has been acting strangely. You are still very present and in the moment, as they say in Hollywood, but now you are also transported, by turns, to many other places, with many other people besides your brother, and to situations that you have not experienced yet that are products of your informed and rich imagination. What your life has been, in bits and pieces, is available to you rapidly in recall, and bits and pieces of what your life may or not come to be, imagined earlier or imagined now, also come into the moment of experience. You are busily all over the place and at many epochs of your life, past and future. But you—the me in you, that is—never drops out of sight. All of these contents are inextricably tied to a singular reference. Even as you concentrate on some remote event, the connection remains. The center holds. This is big-scope consciousness, one of the grand achievements of the human brain and one of the defining traits of humanity. This is the kind of brain process that has brought us to where we are in civilization, for better and worse. This is the kind of consciousness illustrated by novels, films, and music and celebrated by philosophical reflection.
    I have given names to those two kinds of consciousness. The minimal-scope kind I call core consciousness, the sense of the here and now, unencumbered by much past and by little or no future. It revolves around a core self and is about personhood but not necessarily identity. The big-scope kind I call extended or autobiographical consciousness, given that it manifests itself most powerfully when a substantial part of one’s life comes into play and both the lived past and the anticipated future dominate the proceedings. It is about both personhood and identity. It is presided over by an autobiographical self.
    More often than not, when we think about consciousness, we have in mind the broad-scope consciousness associated with an autobiographical self. Here the conscious mind widens and encompasses actual as well as imaginary contents effortlessly. Hypotheses regarding how the brain produces conscious states need to take into account this high level of consciousness as much as the core level.
    Today I see the changes in consciousness scope as far more mercurial than I first envisioned them; that scope constantly shifts up or down a scale as if it moved on a gliding cursor. The upward or downward shift can occur within a given event, quite rapidly, as needed. This fluidity and dynamism regarding scope are not that different from the rapid shifting of intensity that is known to occur throughout the day and to which we already attended. When you are bored at a lecture, your consciousness is dulled and you may doze off and lose it. I sure hope it is not happening to you now.
    By far the most important point to be made is that the levels of consciousness fluctuate with the situation. For instance, when I took my eyes off the page to think, and the dolphins that were swimming by caught my attention, I was not engaging the full scope of my autobiographical self because there would be no need for it; it would have been a waste of brain-processing capacity, not to mention fuel, given the needs of the moment. Nor did I need an autobiographical self to cope with the thoughts that preceded my writing of the preceding sentences. However, when an interviewer sits across from me and wants to know why and how I became a neurologist and neuroscientist rather than an engineer or filmmaker, I do need to engage my autobiographical self. My brain honors that need.
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    The level of consciousness also shifts rapidly when one daydreams, something that is now fashionably called mind-wandering. It might as well be called self-wandering because daydreaming requires not merely a lateral wandering away from the contents of the activity at hand but a downshift to core self. The products of our “offline” imagination