We often speak of a “stream of consciousness,” as if a river were continuously moving within us: an image appears, then a thought, then a memory, a sensation, the next thought. And somewhere, each moment of this inner film corresponds to a particular state of the brain.
It was largely on this idea that the modern science of consciousness was built.
But Francis Fallon and Michael Pitts propose looking at the familiar picture differently. In an article published on 28 September 2026 in The Transmitter, they ask a simple question: what if consciousness is not structured as a steady stream at all?
Let us imagine an experiment.
A person looks at a noisy image. For a few moments, a barely noticeable silhouette of a ghost appears amid the interference. At the same time, an EEG records the brain's activity.
The researchers see several bursts of activity following one another at intervals of hundreds of milliseconds. One arises very early, when the brain is only processing visual information. Another is linked to the fact that what has been seen already influences the person's subsequent choice. Yet another appears when the person confirms that they saw the ghost. A late signal accompanies their own account of what they saw.
And here the main question arises: at exactly what moment did the person become conscious of the ghost?
It seems enough to find the right neural signal — and there it is, the moment of the birth of conscious experience.
In practice, everything is more complicated.
An early signal may reflect the processing of the image even before conscious perception. A later one — the moment when information becomes available to other brain systems. And the latest signal may already be linked to preparing a response: the person is about to say “yes, I saw the ghost.”
It is precisely here that modern theories of consciousness diverge.
Some suggest that conscious experience appears fairly early, when sensory information undergoes repeated processing and integration. Others link consciousness to an additional stage — when information becomes widely available to the brain, or when the brain forms a representation of its own perception.
Fallon and Pitts propose yet another possibility.
Perhaps we are looking for a single moment where a whole process exists.
Conscious experience may be composed of several events distributed over time. Then early processing, the subsequent influence of information on behaviour, its availability for reflection, and the ability to tell about what was seen turn out to be parts of a single unfolding story.
And no single separate flash of brain activity by itself need any longer be that very mysterious “moment of consciousness.” The authors allow that several successive neural events may be necessary stages of a process, and no single stage on its own is sufficient.
This changes the question itself. Instead of: “Where and when does consciousness arise?”
one can ask: “How does the brain assemble conscious experience over time?”
The authors use a beautiful musical metaphor. Life unfolds in real time, while experience perhaps takes shape like ragtime — music with shifted accents, syncopations and uneven rhythms.
This comparison is especially interesting because the familiar image of the “stream of consciousness” was also once a metaphor. At the end of the nineteenth century, the psychologist and philosopher William James made it famous. Gradually the idea of a continuous inner stream entered culture and psychology so deeply that it became an almost self-evident model of human experience.
Modern neuroscience has inherited part of this picture. Researchers look for neural correlates of consciousness — the minimal neural mechanisms associated with a particular conscious experience. But if the experience itself is distributed in time and consists of several interacting processes, the search for a single neural “signature” may prove too narrow a task.
And then another view opens up before science.
Consciousness can be studied as a dynamic eventthat gradually takes shape out of perception, information processing, attention, memory, access to that information and the ability to act on its basis.
Not a single flash. Not a single point. But a pattern emerging in time.
And it is precisely in this pattern that one of the keys lies to understanding how the activity of the brain turns into the world we experience.
