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==Consciousness==

There is not nearly as much understood about consciousness as there is about attention. This is partly due to the more subtle feature of consciousness as possessing the subjective experiential component mentioned earlier. There have been important advances, using brain imaging, to determine brain regions in which the presence of activity is correlated with consciousness of a related stimulus having a representation coded there. These brain regions are denoted 'neural correlates of consciousness' and have been detected in increasing numbers of paradigms and in a variety of sites in the brain. This has immeasurably advanced this 'topographic' study of consciousness, but has been slower in granting any understanding of consciousness itself, especially in terms of its subjective character. Furthermore the problem of constructing an acceptable model of how consciousness might be created by brain activity, at the same level of detail as for the action of attention, appears to be very far from being resolved. 

Important advances in the analysis of brain sites coding for 'self' have also been made using brain imaging, which in general have emphasised the importance of cortical mid-line sites (especially congulate and posterior parietal) for the coding of representations of the traits of the self  

However the aspects of self being explored by these studies have correctly to be regarded as those of the 'reflective' self - that which possesses attributes that are available to all and sundry, as lists of character traits ('is short-tempered', 'is rather brusque'), of special marks of appearance ('has a beard') and so on. These are still not allowing us to track down something much deeper - the 'pre-reflective self' or the 'inner self'. It is this component of the self that stands to one side as the ever present 'I' in one's own experience, and has so far resisted being detected at all by any of the methods now being employed so successfully in analysing the brain by neuroscience. It is the pre-reflective self of the Western phenomeonologists (Zahavi, 1999) that is at issue here. This is also a component emphasised very effectively by Block (Block, 1995), as a companion to what he termed 'access consciousness' (which involves representations of stimuli able to be broadcast round a brain and used for reasoning and other purposes). Indeed the distinction which can be drawn with general support about components of consciousness is that there is a 'content' component, Block's A-consciousness, and an inner self or 'I', Block's P-consciousness and answering to Nagel's question of 'What is it like to be?' (Nagel, 1974). 

Whilst it is acceptable that A-consciousness is created by some competitive or threshold neural process involved in some way with attention, and with recurrence and other dynamic processes contributing, as suggested by (Lamme, Pollen and Grossberg), there is no similar set of models that could lead to such an understanding  of the pre-reflective self or P-consciousness. It appears as if the 'I' is opaque to all the methods of science. It is possible however that in attempting to disentangle the pre-reflective self at the heart of consciousness from attention (as a possible gateway to consciousness) that real progress could be made. This could allow a better understanding of how the inner and contentful selves (in Block's terms P and A consciousness) interact and function together. It is therefore important to turn to analyse those cases where attention and consciousness seem to come apart: in some of those case the inner self may be hived off or accessed altogether separately from that of content.