Why is the red of a rose, for us, not merely information about the wavelength of light? Why can the smell of bread, just taken from the oven, suddenly call childhood to mind? Why can the mere sight of a lemon make the mouth water, while the memory of an unpleasant encounter makes the heartbeat accelerate? These questions lead to one of the most difficult problems in science: what is phenomenal consciousness, that is, the very experience of the world from within?
For centuries, this seemed an almost magical problem. Philosophers asked: how can matter feel? How can a system of nerve cells become pain, joy, scent, fear, or an image seen in imagination? Modern neuroscience, however, allows us to pose the question differently. We no longer need to ask how a ‘spirit’ acts upon the body. We can ask which physical processes in the brain and body are sufficient for phenomenal experiences to arise.
Motivated emotional mind model
One answer is proposed by the Motivated Emotional Mind, or MEM, model, developed in the works of Wiesław Galus and Janusz Starzyk published in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science (see Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind). Its central idea is simple, although it leads to far-reaching consequences: there is no feeling without sensors. Every experience, such as seeing a colour, hearing a melody, touching a slippery surface, feeling pain, hunger, fear, or pleasure, must be anchored in the activity of receptors and in the brain structures that recognise, remember, and later reconstruct these signals.
The easiest way to understand this is through vision. When we look at a cup of coffee, light reflected from its surface stimulates the receptors of the retina. The signal then travels through successive levels of the visual system. Yet the brain does not receive the world like a passive camera. It recognises patterns, compares them with previous experience, and distinguishes edges, shapes, colours, the location of objects, their meaning, and their possible consequences. A cup is therefore not merely a patch of colour. It is a vessel that can be grasped, drunk from, and that may be hot, fragile, or valuable.
In the MEM model, such multilayered representations are called semblions. They may be imagined as living, branching memory-perceptual pathways composed of many layers of neurons connected by axons, dendrites, and synapses. They link the lower sensory layers, where concrete impressions are encoded, with higher cognitive layers, where categories, meanings, and concepts emerge. Thus, when we see an apple, we do not see only a red, round surface. In an instant, memories of taste, smell, the weight in the hand, the crunch of a bite, and sometimes also emotions are awakened: appetite, pleasure, the memory of a garden, or childhood.
Phenomenal consciousness
This leads to the first important thesis of MEM: phenomenal consciousness is not an add-on to information processing. It is the lived dimension of that processing. The brain does not merely ‘know’ that something is red, slippery, hot, or painful. The organism feels it because the relevant receptor patterns are activated, recognised, and woven into an entire network of meanings, needs, and responses.
Consider the example of slipperiness. When we try to hold a wet bar of soap, an ice cube, or a jellyfish in our hands, we do not calculate the coefficient of friction. The skin, mechanoreceptors, proprioceptors, and vision provide information that the object is slipping from the fingers. The fingers tense more tightly, the hand changes position, the eyes follow the object’s movement, and the body anticipates the consequences of failure: the soap will fall, the ice will slide out of the hand, the jellyfish may sting. Over time, the brain learns to recognise the characteristic pattern of such activations. This very pattern is experienced as the quale of slipperiness. It is not an abstract definition. It is a bodily experience: ‘this is what something slippery feels like.’
This becomes even clearer in winter, when we learn to walk on ice. The first step on an icy pavement is not a lesson in physics, but a small drama of the body. The foot loses its grip, the muscles tense abruptly, the vestibular system reports a disturbance of balance, the heart quickens, and a brief wave of unease passes through the body. After several such experiences, the brain forms a special lesson: the shining surface of ice, the altered pressure of the foot, the shortened step, and the cautious balancing of the body are joined into one sensorimotor and emotional pattern. From then on, ice is no longer merely a ‘smooth surface’. It is something the body recognises as uncertain, risky, and demanding caution. The quale of slipperiness becomes intertwined with tension, the anticipation of falling, and the motivation to place the foot differently.
Secondary perception enables the visualization of memories, dreams and mental imaginations
The second key idea of MEM concerns secondary perception. The brain can not only receive sensory stimuli; it can also reconstruct earlier sensory states. When we recall the face of someone close to us, imagine a melody, or dream of a familiar place, we are not looking with our eyes at a real object. And yet we ‘see’, ‘hear’, or ‘feel’ something. According to MEM, this happens because higher brain areas send feedback signals down to lower sensory areas. An old pattern is partially reconstructed and then ‘read’ once again by the brain. We experience it as an image, a sound, a scent, a memory, or a daydream. That is why it is so difficult to call up a subtle image from childhood in a nightclub, where lights flash and music pounds. Current sensory stimuli compete with signals reconstructed from memory. Conversely, when we are deeply immersed in our memories, we may walk past a familiar person without noticing them. The mind has a limited stage. Whatever dominates activation becomes the content of experience.
Secondary perception also explains musical imagination. We can ‘hear’ a melody in the mind, although the room is silent. We can hum it inwardly without moving our lips. We can even compose by shifting inner sounds as if arranging blocks. In the MEM account, this is not a miraculous property of an immaterial soul, but a physical process of reactivating and recognising stored sensory-motor patterns.
Perceptual theory of emotions
Emotions are even more intriguing. We often say that fear, joy, or anger are ‘mental states’. MEM shows that they are deeply bodily. Fear is not only the thought: ‘something threatens me’. It is a racing heart, tense muscles, shallow breathing, cold hands, dilated pupils, and a tightening in the stomach. Joy, too, has a body: freer breathing, relaxation, a smile, the energy of movement. The organism constantly receives signals from within the body through interoceptors and proprioceptors. These signals inform the brain whether the organism’s balance is preserved or whether hunger, pain, fatigue, tension, danger, or relief has appeared.
One might say that interoception is an internal dispatch sent from the body to the brain: ‘energy is running low’, ‘I need food or water’, ‘something hurts’, ‘danger is near’, ‘it is safe to rest’. Deviations from biological balance are not neutral messages. They have tone, colour, and urgency. Hunger does not calmly say: ‘glucose levels have dropped’. Hunger pushes. Thirst presses. Pain alarms. Fear tells us to slow down or flee. Pleasure encourages us to repeat an action. In this way, needs become motivation, and motivation passes into planning, decision, and movement.
The psyche turns out not to be a cabinet of detached thoughts, but the movement of the whole organism, constantly asking: what is good for me, and what threatens me? In this sense, emotions are the way the body tells the brain what is good or bad for it. The MEM model, therefore, joins perception, feeling, and motivation. I see a dark silhouette in an alley; my brain recognises a possible threat; the body responds with tension; interoceptors report that state; and I feel fear. This is not a separate, mysterious ‘addition’ to cognition. It is part of a single circuit: stimulus, recognition, bodily response, feeling, decision, and finally reaction.
This is why a memory can hurt, and why imagining future success can improve the mood. When we recall a difficult conversation, the brain may again set the body in motion: tension, a faster heartbeat, a tightness in the stomach. When we imagine meeting someone we love, the body responds as well. In such cases, what we experience secondarily is not only images, but also affective states. Secondary perception acts here like an echo that does not merely repeat an old sound, but sets the instrument vibrating again. That instrument is the body.
The motivated emotional mind points the way toward endowing artificial minds with phenomenal consciousness. Such intentional minds would then gain the ability to experience qualia and other affective states. … This is a promising direction for transforming intelligent machines into moral beings, capable of coexisting within a biotope originally intended for us.
—Wiesław Galus
MEM - an integrated theory of the psyche of all intelligent beings
The MEM model therefore allows qualia, emotions, memory, imagination, and thought to be brought together within a single framework. Phenomenal consciousness is not, in this account, a misty mystery detached from biology. It is a dynamic process in which the brain and body form closed loops: they receive stimuli, recognise them, remember them, assign them value, reconstruct them, and experience them again.
This also matters for the discussion of artificial intelligence. Today’s language models can operate on information with remarkable efficiency: they can write texts, summarise, recognise images, and answer questions. But this does not mean that they feel redness, pain, hunger, or joy. In the light of MEM, computational power alone is not enough. For a system to possess phenomenal consciousness, it would have to be embodied, equipped with equivalents of receptors, mechanisms of interoception, memory representations of experience, and feedback mechanisms that activate sensory fields. It would have to do more than process data; it would have to feel its own state.
If the MEM model is correct, science has come close to a long-sought goal: a physical explanation of how phenomenal experiences arise. Redness, slipperiness, pain, a melody in imagination, and fear in the face of danger are no longer elusive shadows of the spirit. There are ways in which a living, embodied brain recognises the world, the body, and its own needs. Phenomenal consciousness turns out not to be something beyond biology, but the most intimate face of biological information processing.
Reference
Galus, W. L. (2026). The Concept of a Motivated Emotional Mind Explains Thinking Processes in Cognitive and Phenomenal Aspects. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 60(2), 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-026-09984-1
