There's a debate that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits - like the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. Consciousness seems to work as continuous stream: one image or sound or smell or touch smoothly follows the other, providing us with a continuous image of the world around us. As far as we are concerned, it seems that sensory information is continuously translated into conscious perception: we see objects move smoothly, we hear sounds continuously, and we smell and feel without interruption. However, another school of thought argues that our brain collects sensory information only at discrete time-points, like a camera taking snapshots. Even though there is a growing body of evidence against "continuous" consciousness, it also looks like that the "discrete" theory of snapshots is too simple to be true. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-brain-consciousness-slices.html Paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002433
There is evidence of processes at the subconscious level which operate to present the conscious mind with knowledge of the environment. For example, the following recording was played for many people when Reagan was was an active politician at the national level. Almost all politically knowledgeable folks substituted Reagan for the cough & put the cough elsewhere. The recording was made by some clinical psychologists investigating the perception of conversational language. The above is very close to the actual recording, but my not infallible memory is likely to have resulted in some trivial errors. The clue to the identity of the alleged speaker comes at the end of the sentence, perhaps 200-500 milliseconds after the cough. The above experiment indicates that speech is processed at a subconscious level & a modified version is presented to the conscious mind 200-500 milliseconds later. Similar processing is not used for music. If an incorrect note is made in the recording of a melody, it is recognized as an error. Such subconscious processing is probably required in order to cope with accents & mispronunciations. More complex processing at the subconscious level is probably used to present the conscious mind with a consistent visual image of the environment from data collected over a period of 100-500 milliseconds.
