Imagine that you are looking at a red cube, mysteriously left in the desert sand, with a butterfly fluttering above it. Your mind apprehends the cube in a flash. It performs this feat because the brain activates specialized cortical neurons that represent color and combines them with neurons that encode the percept of depth, as well as neurons that encode the orientation of the various lines that make up the cube. The minimal set of such neurons that causes the conscious percept is the neural correlate of consciousness for perceiving this alien object.
