““Conscious access is also the gateway to more complex forms of conscious experience. In everyday language, we often conflate our Consciousness with our sense of self-how the brain creates a point of view, an "I" that looks at its surroundings from a specific vantage point. Consciousness can also be recursive: our "I" can look down at itself, comment on its own performance, and even know when it does not know something. The good news is that even these higher-order meanings of Consciousness are no longer inaccessible to experimentation. In our Laboratories we have learned to quantify what the "I" feels and reports, both about the external environment and about itself. We can even manipulate the sense of self so that people may have an out-of-body experience while they lie inside a magnetic resonance imager.””
