Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was ones "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises  a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, ones sense of selfhood or soul explored by "looking within"; being a metaphorical "stream" of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain. Inter-disciplinary perspectives
Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger picture of the world. These questions remain central to both continental and analytic philosophy, in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, respectively. Consciousness has also become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience.
The ocular tilt reaction (OTR) comprises  skew deviation, head tilt and ocular torsion involving structures of the inner ear responsible for maintenance of balance of the body i.e. the semi-circular canals (SCC), utricle and saccule. Each anterior semi-circular canals has excitatory projections to the ipsilateral superior rectus muscle and its yoke i.e., the contralateral inferior oblique while simultaneously inhibiting the ipsilateral inferior rectus muscle and its yoke i.e. the contralateral superior oblique. Also, each posterior semi-circular canals has excitatory projections to the ipsilateral superior oblique and its yoke i.e. the contralateral inferior rectus, while simultaneously inhibiting the ipsilateral inferior oblique and its yoke i.e. the contralateral superior rectus. A head tilt causes stimulation of both anterior semi-circular canals and the posterior semi-circular canals resulting in excitation of ipsilateral intorters (superior oblique and superior rectus) and contralateral extorters (inferior oblique and inferior rectus) while their antagonists are simultaneously inhibited. The otoliths (utricle and saccule) probably follow a similar pathway. Normally, a body tilt (along with the initial head tilt) to the right causes a shift of the subjective visual vertical (SVV) to the left resulting in reflex, compensatory orientation of the head to left to realign the SVV to the true vertical. The initial head tilt to right will cause stimulation of the right utricle resulting in excitory signals to pass to the SR and SO (right eye), and IO and IR (left eye). Simultaneously, inhibitory signals pass to their antagonists.