Since the time of William James (1890), consciousness has been described as occurring in a stream. In 2013, Chomsky reminded an audience that consciousness is continuous and that it never seems to stop during wakefulness (Chomsky 2013). In all the years of giving lectures on cognition and language, he has never provided an explanation as to why this might be so. When declarative information is consolidated via the hippocampus in the neocortex, the neurons in the hippocampus transfer the information according to a stream or a replay of the same sequence that occurred during learning (Boyce et al. 2016; Girardeau et al. 2009; Louie and Wilson 2001; Wilson and McNaughton 1994). Once stored, the declarative information in the association areas of the neocortex is partitioned according to faces, places, and other sensory fragments, all imbedded within the context at the time of learning (Corkin 2002; Brecht and Freiwald 2012; Bruce et al. 1981; Freiwald and Tsao 2010; Lu and Golomb 2023; Ojemann 1991; Penfield and Robert 1966; Periera, Fedorenko et al. 2018; Rolls 2004; Schwarzlose, Kanwisher et al. 2005; Schwiedrzik, Freiwald et al. 2015; Scoville and Milner 1957; Squire et al. 2001). The order of streams of consciousness—which can lead to the execution of behaviors in a stream—is determined by the order imposed on the declarative information at the time of learning. Anyone who has prepared a university lecture will agree with this statement. And every time you deliver the lecture it will be modified according to feedback from the students to enhance communication. In short, minute details of a stream of consciousness is updated continuously, but the basic structure of the lecture will remain the same.

We would suggest that as one learns a new sequence of declarative information, declarative-conscious units (neurons) are activated in the order of memorization by the neocortex. Each declarative-conscious unit that is active during a stream of consciousness is connected to a global neocortical network that contains all the information pertaining to a stream. Indeed, every learned language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Hebrew, and so on) remains in a separate neocortical network (Ojemann 1983, 1991). If we could resurrect Wilder Penfield to continue his electrical stimulation experiments on the human neocortex (Penfield 1975; Penfield and Rasmussen 1952), we would have him stimulate a string of declarative-conscious units representing a particular stream of consciousness to see if subjects can accurately report on the stream. Two points need to be made here. First, each subject will have a unique collection of neurons found in different locations of the neocortex defining a specific stream, and once activated a subject will know that he/she did not generate the stream, but that it was produced outside a subject’s volition (Penfield 1975; see Footnote 1).

Now to address Chomsky’s comment on why consciousness is continuous and that it never seems to stop during wakefulness (Chomsky 2013). The neocortex has stored within it a lifetime of conscious streaming that is spontaneously generated throughout one’s life, and it is designed to be continuously active from a metabolic point of view, even when one is immobile (Herculano-Houzel 2011; see Footnote 2). The stream of consciousness produced must be related to what one is learning on a particular day (Hebb 1949, 1968), but two individuals confronted with the same problem will solve it differently, since each has a distinct neural constitution based on a differential history. That is why people like Einstein, Kasparov, Pelé, and Bolt are one of a kind, as are each of us.

Footnote 1: Rhesus monkeys discriminate between a phosphene generated by electrical activation of the visual cortex and the presentation of a visual target that similarly activates the neurons mediating the phosphene experience (Tehovnik and Slocum 2013). What this means is that when developing visual prosthetics for the blind, expect a period during which a patient will need to learn how to use the device. A patient with a new cochlear implant may require up to two years to re-learn a language, since the sounds induced by the electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve differ from the sound experienced by an intact auditory system.

Footnote 2: Motor neurons are only active when one is moving. Activity of the neocortex that is not directly related to motor activity (but related to conscious reflection) is a problem for brain machine interfaces as used to restore motor function to paralyzed patients. Nevertheless, during wakefulness (but not during sleep) there is a correlation between neural activity and muscle activity in M1 (Jackson et al. 2007), which explains why many brain-machine-interface studies implant M1 (Tehovnik et al. 2013).