" There obviously is a different feel to a wave of intense emotion versus an abstract thought, but each conscious form is an experience that gives us a unique perception of reality. The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story. The vast variety of conscious forms and the ubiquity of consciousness in the brain are best explained by a modular architecture of the brain. The conceptual challenge now is to understand how hundreds, if not thousands, of modules, embedded in a layered architecture—each layer of which can produce a form of consciousness—give us a single, unified life experience at any given moment that seems to flow flawlessly into the next across time. "

― Michael S. Gazzaniga , The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind