Have you ever been driving down the highway and suddenly noticed you have no memory of the last few kilometres? In his new book, author and co-host of Daily Planet on CTV's Discovery Channel Jay Ingram tries to figure out why things like that happen.

In Theatre of the Mind: Raising the Curtain on Consciousness, Ingram tries to unravel some of the mysteries of our minds. How is it that most of what goes on in our brains is actually unconscious? How much influence does our unconscious mind have on our conscious mind? What is consciousness?

One of the most fascinating aspects of our minds, Ingram told Canada AM, is our ability to dream. It's an area in which neurologists and psychologists alike remain baffled.

"Dreaming is fascinating because it's a different kind of consciousness. We all know that stories are absurd. When you wake up, they seem absurd and yet while you were dreaming, they seem to make perfect sense.

"So what scientists are interested in is: what with can we learn from our dreaming consciousness that tells us something about normal waking consciousness? It gets into why do we dream at all."

Ingram notes that one theory about dreaming is that it is actually a survival tool, that we can confront our fears in our dreams and then practise our responses.

"You get to rehearse your response to them without actually putting yourself at risk. So if you have a repeating nightmare of driving, this might be some sort of a preview of a situation you might get yourself in. And you can rehearse your responses without actually driving."

As Ingram noted in one of his previous books, The Burning House, what may be most fascinating about our minds is not so much about how much information our brains can process, but about how much it can filter out.

A great example of this is the example mentioned above: when we realize to our horror that we have driven 10 kilometres but have no recollection of the drive.

"What we're really not remembering is the driving. Because driving for most of us after you've been doing it for a long time is automatic. You don't need to be aware of it.

"I've actually tried the reverse, being conscious of driving on the highway and it's really boring!" he says. 

"You look at the rearview mirror errors, all three, and the car in front of you. You look at the shoulder, the white line and do that over and over again. Your awareness is not interested in that stuff. It's been learned. You had to be conscious to learn it but your mind goes on to other things. In that 10 km, you were listening to the radio or a CD or talking to a passenger or cell phone. So your consciousness always lights on things that you have to be aware of."

Excerpt of Theatre of the Mind: Raising the Curtain on Consciousness, by Jay Ingram

Imagine what it would be like to live in a completely different world, an alien place in which you couldn't even know your own mind, a place where, bombarded by sensory stimuli, your mind could extract only the merest hint of the total, and yet you somehow believed—or were made to believe—that you were all-seeing and all-knowing.

Imagine further that this was a world where you were, in effect, an automaton, a self-deluded one at that, that walked and talked and acted at the behest of a whole set of mental modules whose operations you knew nothing about. Imagine that one of those modules, entirely of its own volition, routinely took the sparse data available to it and concocted bizarre stories to explain what was happening.

Think of a world where an array of photons bombarding the retina becomes a three-dimensional space full of objects and textures, which can then be transformed to an internal image of the same scene, which later, when the brain is in a completely different chemical state, can be brought to mind once again, but this time in a wholly foreign setting.

The strangest thing about this world is that seemingly magical transformations take place: ideas, visions, hallucinations and memories are created by electricity and chemistry, crossing the boundary between the physical and the immaterial in a manner that defies logic and science. The mystery is deepened by the fact that tinkering with the chemistry, the electrical circuitry or even the physical substrate of the brain can dramatically change those thoughts and images, without shedding any light at all on how they are created.

Well, look no farther. This is exactly the world that you now inhabit. It is the world of the conscious mind, a world that is not at all what it seems. The science of consciousness has, in the last two decades, transformed our thinking about the brain and how it creates the world you experience.

There are actually several Theatres of the Mind. One is the little theatre in your head that seems to be the place where the events in your conscious mind run, like a never-ending film. It is the home of your mind's eye. It is a theatre with an audience of one: you. Only you can tell the rest of us what's playing.

It's one thing for us to feel that way, but sometimes that inner theatre concept worms its way into people's minds so thoroughly that even researchers seem to be envisioning it when they discuss consciousness. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent years skewering this idea of what he dismisses as the "Cartesian theatre." He argues that consciousness is not being processed, edited and presented to anyone/anything in the brain. There is no anyone/anything—consciousness is the end of the line.

He's been effective. Consciousness experts take pains to dissociate themselves from any notion of an inner theatre, but at the same time, one of the most popular theories of how consciousness works, called the "global workspace," is best viewed as— what else?—a theatre, with consciousness being played out on the stage. But it is being played for no one: it just is.

Illuminating the theatre of the mind has become, in the last few years, one of the most challenging and exciting areas of science. That is what this book is about.

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