The word “consciousness” was essentially taboo in cognitive science only a few years ago. Many now accept that there is no specific philosophical difficulty with investigating consciousness. Dr. Dehaene uses tools such as brain imaging to look at objective events that correlate with subjective perspective – his laboratory investigates signatures or correlates of conscious processing. They combine experimental paradigm with measurements of brain activity including fMRI, EEG, MEG, and intracranial recordings to define the time course of conscious processing and identify signatures of conscious access. In search of a theory for signatures of consciousness, Dr. Dehaene and colleagues propose the global neuronal workspace (GNW) hypothesis. This hypothesis explains consciousness by the fact that our brains are made up of specialized systems that process information non-consciously, and “what we subjectively experience as consciousness is the global availability of information — it’s the breaking of this modularity,” Dr. Dehaene proposes. He provides examples of clinical cases that rely imperatively on a better understanding of consciousness and improved methods to detect its presence or absence.