A Plastic Temporal Brain Code for Conscious State Generation

Figure 3

The conscious eigenstate as a function of biophysical and subjectively recalled time. Figure 3 illustrates how a conscious eigenstate of the brain may be conceived as part of a state vector as a function of biophysical time (T) and subjectively recalled time (τ). In our model, the duration of a conscious eigenstate would correspond to a given number of biophysical “time bins.” Biophysical time (t) is independent of the subjectively recalled duration of a given experience by a human individual and would correspond to the duration of the critical temporal activity pattern generated in dedicated long-distance resonant circuits to activate, maintain, and inactivate a conscious eigenstate. Our “time bin model” thus explains how the inner clocks of consciousness operate independently from subjective experience, where variations from “interesting” to “dull” may produce variable, subjectively recalled durations of events.