Consciousness and its correlates in awake condition, in different sleep stages and in epilepsy

Old ideas about attention and consciousness seemed to be irrelevant today. We re-evaluated them here in the light of recent neuroimaging data, data from pathological conditions where attentional mechanisms are impaired and the knowledge that activity following a stimulus spreads rapidly very widely. We present the case that the multiple systems both cortical and subcortical involved in attentional processes can best be studied using tomographic, millisecond by millisecond single trial analysis of magnetoencephalographic data.