Signatures of consciousness

Continuing this post, from the Introduction, section "signatures of conscious thoughts":

"These three ingredients—focusing on conscious access, manipulating conscious perception, and carefully recording introspection—have transformed the study of consciousness into a normal experimental science. We can probe the extent to which a picture that people claim not to have seen is in fact processed by the brain. As we will discover, a staggering amount of unconscious processing occurs beneath the surface of our conscious mind. Research using subliminal images has provided a strong platform to study the brain mechanisms of conscious experience. Modern brain imaging methods have given us a means of investigating how far an unconscious stimulus can travel in the brain, and exactly where it stops, thus defining what patterns of neural activity are exclusively associated with conscious processing."
"Although unconscious processing can be deep, conscious access adds an additional layer of functionality. The broadcasting function of consciousness allows us to perform uniquely powerful operations. The global neuronal workspace opens up an internal space for thought experiments, purely mental operations that can be detached from the external world. Thanks to it, we can keep important data in mind for an arbitrarily long duration. We can pass it on to any other arbitrary mental process, thus granting our brains the kind of flexibility that Descartes was looking for. Once information is conscious, it can enter into a long series of arbitrary operations—it is no longer processed in a reflexive manner but can be pondered and reoriented at will. And thanks to a connection to language areas, we can report it to others."