Consciousness as a process: from the loneliness of William James to the buzzing and booming voices of contemporary science.

This Special Issue of IPBS brings the old metaphor of William James--consciousness as a "stream of thought"--to a contemporary critical inspection. It is demonstrated--based on materials of language (Panksepp 2008; Shanahan 2008), perception (Engelmann 2008) and dialogical self (Bertau 2008) that the classic river metaphor is an inadequate depiction of the multi-level psychological processes that are regulated by the affective systems of the brain and hierarchically integrated through dialogical and semiotic mechanisms.