[6] Buddhist teachings describe the continuous flow of the "stream of mental and material events" that include sensory experiences (i.e., seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touch sensations, or a thought relating to the past, present or the future) as well as various mental events that get generated, namely, feelings, perceptions and intentions/behaviour.
"The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.
"[15] However, the epistemological separation of two levels of analyses appears to be important in order to systematically understand the "stream of consciousness.
When timing is precisely controlled, as in the case of the audio and video tracks of the same movie, seriality appears to be compulsory for potentially conscious events presented within the same 100 ms interval.
[19] New work by Richard Robinson shows promise in establishing the brain functions involved in this model and may help shed light on how we understand signs or symbols and reference these to our semiotic registers.
[20] Daniel Kolak has argued extensively against the existence of a stream of consciousness, in the sense of someone having a continuous identity over time, in his book I am You.
Kolak instead advocates for Open Individualism, which is the view that everyone is in reality the same being, and that the "self" doesn't actually exist at all, similar to anattā in Buddhist philosophy.
[22] In literature, stream of consciousness writing is a literary device which seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences.
The term was first applied in a literary context, transferred from psychology, in The Egoist, April 1918, by May Sinclair, in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage.