Quasi-Continuous Unconscious Processing precedes Discrete Conscious Perception

Consciousness seems to be a smooth, continuous stream of percepts. We are aware of the world at each single moment of time. However, intriguing illusions suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, consciousness seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images. However, simple snapshot theories are at odds with the excellent temporal resolution of human vision. How can we perceive fast motion in the millisecond range when consciousness occurs only every half second? Here, we propose a novel conceptual 2-stage framework where features of objects, such as their motion and color, are quasi-continuously and unconsciously analyzed with high temporal resolution. Temporal features, such as motion and duration, are processed like any other feature (stage 1). When unconscious processing is ‘completed’, all features are simultaneously rendered conscious at discrete moments in time, sometimes even hundreds of milliseconds after stimuli were presented (stage 2). We show that this framework is supported by experiments using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and visual masking. Finally, we show conceptually why continuous consciousness is an untenable position.