Consciousness
All of our memory, inherited from evolution and available at birth or acquired through experience, in short, all our memory of things, or property of things, or persons and places, of events and relationships exists in dispositional form, waiting to become an explicit image or action. There are four components of consciousness identified by Prof. Antonio Damasio:
1. Core Consciousness
2. Extended Consciousness
3. Autobiographical Memory (the organized record of the main aspects of our biographies).
4. Dispositions (records which are dormant in our memory until activated by a similar or related experience).

Core consciousness is our sense of ourselves and things happening around us, but not a level of awareness. Core consciousness is selective, because we cannot pay attention to all the events surrounding us -- even at a subconscious level. Core consciousness is continuous from the time you wake up in the morning until you again go to sleep. Core consciousness is personal to you -- only you have access to the inside of your head (your mind and brain). Core consciousness is confined to the here and now -- there is no past or future.
Extended consciousness has core consciousness as a base, but it provides us with “awareness” of the fact that we are alive and acting on the stage of life; that we have had a past we can recall; and that we have a future we can contemplate. It takes hundreds or even thousands of microseconds for the machinery of the mind to transfer awareness of what is going on from core memory to extended consciousness. We do not know directly what has happened behind the scene in this complex process, and while this seems a very short time to us it is a long time for a neuron that is easily activated in a few milliseconds.
When we think of the greatness of consciousness, we have extended consciousness in mind. At its highest level extended consciousness is uniquely human. As Damasio says:
"You are the music while the music lasts."
If we continue with the analogy of music, we can say the individual notes of music being played by a single instrument are like the "pulses" of core consciousness. Each note last for only a split second, it has no past and no future, it exists for the brief moment of its playing. However, a collection of notes from an orchestra full of instruments is "heard" after a few microseconds of delay. We combine what we are hearing in the music with dispositions we have stored about this music (or similar music)and call forth emotional memories and/or motor memories (we may feel like dancing).
Our experience with an architectural setting has much the same scenario. We receive sensory signals from our eyes, ears, nose and sense of touch a few microseconds after they have been collected by core consciousness, they become an event in extended consciousness. We add dispositional memories of that place (or similar places). We may recognize the setting because we studied it in architectural history; and we may have emotional ties because we associate the place with special memories (Westminster Abbey with the funeral of Princess Di). Once the event has ended, it is restored in dispositional space with new data about our most recent experience.