Consciousness may be the brain sharing information with itself

of electrical activity, dubbed “P3”. It looks as though different parts of the brain are rapidly sending long-distance messages back and forth, and synchronising views. To make sense of this sudden large-scale burst of activity, Dehaene takes the “global workspace” model of consciousness developed by psychologist Bernard Baars and boldly extends it, identifying consciousness as the process of brain-wide information sharing.
At any time, millions of shortlived mental representations of your world are being created by unconscious processing, he says. Consciousness selects one and makes it available to distributed, high-level decision systems through a brain-wide “broadcast”. The empirical facts of the brain activity we see, and the wiring of the regions which fire up, dovetail neatly with Dehaene’s compelling metaphors. In the prefrontal cortex there are neurons with very long axons that connect to hubs elsewhere in the brain and which also have huge webs of dendrites that connect with many thousands of other cells. These neurons seem purpose-built to broadcast rapidly to the rest of the brain, explaining why these parts of the cortex are the first to ignite whenever a piece of information enters our awareness. We know that much of our cortex performs very specific tasks, such as conceptualising.