A long-standing objective in the study of consciousness is to characterize the neural signatures of perceived compared with unperceived sensory stimuli. In particular, the role of different cortical areas in generating consciousness is an active debate. Here the researchers combined electrophysiological and modeling studies to investigate the mechanistic role of individual connections between brain regions in the generation of the activity patterns observed during conscious report. They found that, while frontal areas initiate report-related activity, the parietal cortex acts as a gate to determine whether such activity will propagate back to the visual cortex. This division of labor between prefrontal and parietal cortices is unexplained by current theoretical models of consciousness and will impact mechanistic neural models of conscious report.