I recently started reading Dan Brown’s latest novel. As always, he skilfully blends science, mystery and big words about consciousness into something that reads as if this might just be true. One of those words is noetic: the idea that consciousness is more than mere brain activity, and perhaps even a force in its own right. Claims like that make for gripping reading. However, they also make me more alert. So what is actually happening in fundamental, scientific research on consciousness, without secret societies or hidden manuscripts?

Two recent scientific papers offer a much more sober answer—and, in fact, a more interesting one.

The first study, by Newen and Montemayor, starts from a simple but often neglected question: what does consciousness actually do, from an evolutionary perspective? They argue that we should not think of consciousness as a single thing, but as a layered phenomenon.

They distinguish a basic form of consciousness, which they call basic arousal, that functions as an alarm system: pain, hunger, and fear. This form is evolutionarily old and can even exist without a cortex. On top of that comes a second layer: alertness, which enables attention, learning and flexible behaviour. Only in a third step does self-consciousness emerge. According to the authors, this is not a separate “magical” form. It is ordinary alertness directed at oneself, with metacognition acting as its content. Their point is sharp: consciousness is functional, evolved and biologically explicable. The authors achieve this without stripping it of all mystery. But also without turning it into mysticism.

The second paper, an opinion piece on consciousness in birds, fits this picture surprisingly well. Maldarelli and Güntürkün show that birds display behaviours that strongly resemble conscious perception and even forms of self-awareness. This happens not despite, but precisely without a mammalian cortex. In experiments, activity in specific avian brain regions correlates with what a bird reports seeing. It does not correlate with what is objectively presented. That is exactly what we treat as a possible marker of consciousness in humans. Classic tests of self-awareness, such as the mirror test, also turn out to be too crude. Birds sometimes fail them, yet in ecologically realistic situations, they clearly demonstrate that they can distinguish themselves from others. The conclusion is not a spectacular revelation, but a quiet shift. Consciousness appears to be graded, context-dependent, and not tied to a single neural architecture.

Together, these two studies do something Dan Brown deliberately does not. They do not make consciousness mysterious by detaching it from biology. Instead, they make it more interesting by taking it seriously as an evolved function. No noetic forces, no hidden layers of reality. Instead, a complex, layered phenomenon that does more than we often assume. Perhaps less spectacular—but scientifically far more solid.