What goes on in our heads when we have a thought? Why do the physical events that occur inside a fistful of gelatinous tissue give rise to the phantasmagoric world of conscious expe-rience, a world that contains everything we feel, everything we know, and everything we are? Scientists and philosophers have pondered these questions for cons, but until now their answers could never be grounded in observable scientific experiment. In A Universe of Consciousness, Edelman builds on the radical ideas he introduced in his monumental tril-ogy-Neural Darwinism, Topobiology, and The Remembered Present-to present for the first time an empirically supported full-scale theory of consciousness. Edelman and Tononi show how they use ingenious technology to detect minute brain currents and to identify the specific brain waves that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The results of this pioneering work challenge much of the conventional wisdom about consciousness: In support of Freud's theories, the authors show that the so-called unconscious occupies a much larger part of brain activity than previously thought. And in a radical departure from the concept of consciousness as a unified entity, they argue that each person has a unique "con-sciousness footprint," underscoring the centrality of human individuality.