Is the Brain's Awareness of the World All or Nothing?

We often think of consciousness as binary: you're either fully aware of something, or you're not. Yet according to a team of cognitive neuroscientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conscious awareness is gradual. A simple stimulus -- say, a red cube -- is processed by the brain in multiple separate subconscious streams, each encoding one aspect of the cube. The result? Even when some features -- a sharp edge -- remain subconscious, others -- the color red -- can drift into cons...