( CNN ) -- How do living organisms become conscious of what is happening to them and around them ? How is it that I as well as you , reader of these words , can be conscious of our respective existences and of what is going on in our minds — in my case , ideas about how the brain generates consciousness , about the fact that I was asked to prepare this particular text for a specific deadline , along with the fact that I happen to be in Paris , at the moment , not Los Angeles , and that I am writing this on a cold January day . The biological mechanisms behind the phenomena of consciousness remain unclear although it is fair to say that recently our understanding has made remarkable progress . What are we are certain of understanding and where is it that our understanding fails ? On the side of understanding , we can point to the process of sensory representation as an important part of consciousness . Most of what we are conscious of ( conceivably all that we are conscious of ) consists of representations of objects and events in the sensory modalities in which our brains trade , for example , vision , hearing , touching , smelling , taste , sensing the state of our body 's interior . Mapping , in other words . Our brains , at all the levels of their organization , are inveterate makers of maps , simple and not so simple , and as far as I can gather , we only become conscious of the things and actions that the sensory systems help us map . We depend , for the business of consciousness , on constructing maps of the most varied features and events . We construct those maps in brain regions that serve as platforms for this natural process of cartography . These are regions where signals about topographic and topological relationships among components of objects and actions can be broken down and assembled in a manner that corresponds to the way in which they happen in the objects and actions themselves . But while mapped representations are a necessity for consciousness , as far as I can imagine , they are not sufficient for consciousness to occur . For example , several orders of computers aboard a Boeing 747 represent with great fidelity many parts of the airplane body — moving parts of the wings , undercarriage , rudder — not to mention outside temperature , wind speeds , levels of fuel , and so forth . And yet we do not expect even the most integrated computer among the 747 's computer family to be `` conscious '' of what goes on in the plane , except in a metaphorical sense . That top computer knows a lot about the plane 's behavior but it does not `` know , '' in the sense that the reader and I know , at this very moment , that we are alive and puzzling over the mysteries of consciousness . What is different about us ? Plenty , I would say . Beginning at the top of the scale of differences , the 747 lacks a self in the sense that you and I have one . I have proposed that selves are built from , but not limited to , myriad , integrated representations of the structure and operations of our bodies , and of the sum total of memories of what has happened to our own body in its history . The 747 does not have the equivalent of that part of a self for the very good reason that it does not need one to comply with the demands of its captain . But we do . There is an even deeper difference , however , that has to do with the issue of feeling . An integral part of the notion of self , beginning at the lowest level of self — the primordial self and present all the way up to the autobiographical self — is the fact that we feel the living body to which experiences are happening . We feel our body as it lives in the world and wanders in it . We experience everything we map through our senses because we feel the body that is the site of all the mappings . Or to put it more clearly , when we move about or see an object , or hear a voice , we feel the changes that such actions and perceptions caused in our organism . I believe to be conscious of our perceptions is to have ongoing representations of streams of events that affect our bodies , cause feelings , and become felt representations . Representing and feeling are dovetailed phenomena that sit at the rock bottom of experience . As we unravel the biological mechanisms behind feeling I suspect we will come to uncover their origins at the level of single neurons . Follow CNN Opinion on Twitter . Join the conversation on Facebook . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Antonio Damasio .
Antonio Damasio asks : How do we become conscious of the things around us ? In a TED Talk , he describes scientific findings about the nature of consciousness . Our minds make maps of all the things we see , hear and sense , he says . Damasio : We need more than the maps ; it takes a sense of self to be fully conscious .