I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.

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.

There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.

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

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.

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

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.