We still may be far away from advancing a neurobiological model of conscious mental states, which bypasses the shortcomes of reductionism or functionalism. Notwithstandingly some important steps have been done. The most important one refers to the idea that the study of the temporal dynamics of neuronal groups may give clues to the functional building blocks of subjective conscious experience. In the last 30 years Pöppel has been working with a model of the discrete temporal organization of mental activity, which pressupposes two oscillatory mechanisms of high and low frequency. The first one relates to the definition of events, and the second to the integration of these events into a psychological moment. Consciouness mechanisms correspond to the ones that make this succession of discrete temporal moments possible. The understanding of these periodic mechanisms in neuronal terms and of its relation to information procesing is just beginning.
Consciousness; Consciousness states; Temporal frequency; Mind; Neurobiology