 Unified consciousness of contents appears to be central to our kind of consciousness. For example, suppose that one is conscious of one’s computer and also of the car sitting in one’s driveway. If consciousness of these two items were not unified, an important, indeed probably the most important, way of comparing them would not be available. One could not answer questions such as, Is the car the same colour as the WordPerfect icon?, or even, Is the car to the left or to the right of the computer? That is what unified consciousness does for us: it allows us to make such comparisons. Since relating item to item in this and related ways is fundamental to our kind of cognition, unified consciousness is fundamental to our kind of cognition. As we will see in  Section 4.1,  there are disorders of consciousness in which this ability to compare seems to be lost. These disorders leave people with a massive cognitive impairment. 