18. Rivalry

In Chapter 1 of the book Consciousness and the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene runs quickly through the history of his topic. Early on he discusses research done about 20 years ago on “binocular rivalry,” by Nikos Logothetis and his coworkers. He says something very strong about that work: “This was, literally, the first glimpse of a neuronal correlate of conscious experience.”

What was the glimpse? The experiments were very clever. It had been known since the 19th century that if entirely different...