When Do We Become Truly Conscious?

A better question and one that has to be answered before this is: 'What is Consciousness'. Recognising yourself in a mirror seems about as scientific as throwing someone in a pond to see if they are a witch.

It's quite hard to pin consciousness down in the brain. And what is this sleep thing anyway? Are you conscious when you sleep?

I wonder if the author was aware of Patient R before he wrote the article. Patient R is a man who had extensive brain damage to three areas of his brain considered critical for awareness, but who was still demonstrably self-aware. Patient R challenges the assumption that certain brain regions are necessary for awareness or even consciousness, and some see this as supporting the theory that awareness, consciousness, and other higher level mental processes are distributed throughout the brain instead of localized in specific regions.

If consciousness is a distributed phenomenon, how developed does the brain need to be before consciousness arises? Why does consciousness persist in the wake of traumatic brain injury, especially in exceptional cases of hydrocephalus?

We'd like to make it easy and say, "this region controls this, this region controls that, and tada, consciousness," but nature is just not that easy. If it was, the string theorists would have falsifiable predictions that would have been proven or disproven by now.