There are a number of events which take place for one to be “conscious”

Consciousness is a multifaceted construct and ranges from awareness of one’s perceptions and sensation to self-awareness. Among the several properties of consciousness, feature binding refers to how our brain integrates the different properties of an object into one coherent construct, which is subsequently used for interpretation of the environment (Singer 2001). Therefore, feature binding is an essential precondition and a critical component for the emergence of a conscious stimulus precept. Feature binding has been well studied in the visual domain (e.g. Kahneman et al. 1992), but the same mechanism has been reported in the auditory (e.g. Hall et al. 2000) and multimodal domains (e.g. Mayr et al.2011).

Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2018, Issue 1, 1 January 2018, niy002, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niy002  In this article, the researchers were trying to determine exactly how anesthesia effects the brain’s ability to understand a sound, or as they put it, “the present study assessed the effect of two anaesthetic agents (i.e. propofol and midazolam) on audio-spatial feature binding.”