Self Comes to Mind

effect, language would likely not have evolved in individuals devoid of core consciousness. Why would they have needed it? On the contrary, at the highest grades on the scale, autobiographical consciousness relies extensively on language.
What Consciousness Is Not
     
    Understanding the significance of consciousness, and the merits of its emergence in living beings, requires that we take a full measure of what came before, a sense of what living beings with normal brains and fully operational minds were capable of doing before their species came to have consciousness and before consciousness dominated mental life for those who had it. Watching the dissolution of consciousness in an epileptic patient or in someone in a vegetative state may give, to the unsuspecting observer, the erroneous notion that the processes that normally sit beneath consciousness are trivial or of limited effectiveness. But clearly the unconscious space of our own minds denies such an idea. I am referring here not just to the Freudian unconscious of famed (and infamous) tradition, identified with particular kinds of content, situation, and process. I am referring rather to the large unconscious that is made up of two ingredients: an active ingredient, constituted by all the images that are being formed on every topic and of every flavor, images that cannot possibly compete successfully for the favors of the self and therefore remain largely unknown; and a dormant ingredient, constituted by the repository of coded records from which explicit images can be formed.
    A typical cocktail party phenomenon reveals the presence of the nonconscious quite well. While you are engaged in conversation with your host, you are technically hearing other conversations, a fragment here, a fragment there, at the edges of the stream of consciousness—the main stream, that is. But hearing does not mean listening, necessarily, let alone listening attentively and connecting with what is heard. And so you overhear many things that do not demand the services of your self. Then all of a sudden something clicks, some fragment of conversation joins others, and a sensible pattern emerges regarding some of those things that you were overhearing so loosely. At that instant you form a meaning that does “attract” the self and now literally takes you away from your host’s last sentence. He notices your momentary distraction, by the way, and while fighting off the topic intruding into the river of your consciousness, you return to the gentleman’s last point and lamely, apologetically, say, “I’m sorry; say again?”
    As far as one can tell, the phenomenon is the consequence of several conditions. First, the brain constantly produces an overabundant quantity of images. What one sees, hears, and touches, along with what one constantly recalls—prompted by the new perceptual images as well as by no identifiable reason—is responsible for large numbers of explicit images, accompanied by an equally large retinue of other images relating to the state of one’s body as all this image-making unfolds.
    Second, the brain tends to organize this profusion of material much as a film editor would, by giving it some kind of coherent narrative structure in which certain actions are said to cause certain effects. This calls for selecting the right images and ordering them in a procession of time units and space frames. This is not an easy task, since not all images are equal, from the perspective of their owner. Some are more connected with one’s needs than others and are thus accompanied by different feelings. Images are differently valued. Incidentally, when I say “the brain tends to organize,” rather than “the self organizes,” I do so on purpose. On some occasions the editing goes on naturally, with minimal self-imposed guidance. One’s editing success, on such occasions, depends on how “well educated” our nonconscious processes have been by our own mature selves. I will return to this issue in the last chapter.
    Third, only a small number of images can be displayed clearly at any given time because the image-making space is so scarce: only so many images can be active and thus potentially attended at any given moment. What this really means is that the metaphoric “screens” in which your brain displays the selected and time-ordered images are quite limited. In today’s computer jargon, it means that the number of windows you can open on your screen is