Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.

We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.

We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.

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.