You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

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 now.

There are ways in which you can make that distinction objective to a certain degree. For example, by looking at responses that could be generated in the brain to exactly the same stimulus and there could be differences there.

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 think that there are many species, many creatures on earth that are very likely to have a mind, but are very unlikely to have a consciousness in the sense that you and I have.

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 mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.