By 'messages' we refer "not to individual spikes but rather to patterns of excitations - comprising spikes, their timing and their spread across the wider network." The animation at the top of this article offers a good example of a 'message' as the sequence of activations (signified by red coloured neurons) spreading out from the original signal. Characteristic input produces characteristic messages in a given connectome. "Message fingerprints—namely spiking patterns—showed up in specific neurons in a specific order, again and again." It's still early days - "we don't yet have an accepted definition of what constitutes a message." But I suggest that what's being called a 'message' here is sometimes a sensory experience - in other words, consciousness.
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