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Bernard J. Baars- Krasnow Seminar September 10, 2012

Bernard J. Baars, Ph.D.
Krasnow Institute Affiliate
and Former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology, The Neurosciences Institute

A global workspace is a hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling agents. In computational applications, global workspace (GW) architectures combine many distributed agents to help resolve ambiguous or poorly understood problems.

Conscious experiences may reflect a global workspace function in the brain.

In humans the cortico-thalamic (CT) complex underlies reportable conscious percepts, concepts, feelings of knowing, visual images and executive functions. GW dynamics suggests that conscious contents arise from a winner-take-all binding coalition among competing and cooperating signal streams emanating from a specific region of the core. A winning coalition can ignite a ~100 msglobal broadcast to widely distributed receiving networks. Global broadcasts are proposed to be embedded in goal-driven, unconscious, serial cognitive cycles, lasting ~600 ms, and engaging a frontal-basal-ganglia- thalamocortical loop. While sensory experiences are proposed to  bind and broadcast from posterior cortex, “fringe conscious” feelings of knowing (FOKs) are proposed to emerge from non-sensory cortex and linked thalamic nuclei.

The theory yields new, testable predictions.

Bernard Baars: How Consciousness Functions – Thinking Allowed DVD w/ Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Uploaded by  on Aug 20, 2010

NOTE: This is an excerpt from the full 90-minute DVD.
http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2bbaars.html

Consciousness was dismissed as a topic for scientific discussion in psychology for over fifty years. Now things have changed. Bernard J. Baars presents a model of consciousness as a global workspace and suggests that the contours of consciousness can be understood by contrasting conscious and unconscious events. Generally, the unconscious processes work far more efficiently that those that are conscious.

Baars points out that we are conscious only of the goals of our actions and not of the thousands of miniscule steps that are necessary for even the simplest of muscular movements. He describes the “self” as a concept that represents the continuity of all the conscious and unconscious processes of the mind.

Bernard J. Baars, Ph.D., is author of The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology and A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. He is also editor of Consciousness and Cognition, an academic journal, and a professor of psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California.

References and web links:

Baars BJ, Franklin S. An architectural model of conscious and unconscious brain functions: Global Workspace Theory and IDA. Neural Netw. 2007 Nov;20(9):955-61.

Baars, B.J., Edelman, D.E. Consciousness, biology and quantum hypotheses. Physics of Life Reviews, in press.

Edelman GM, Gally JA, Baars BJ. Biology of consciousness. Front Psychol. 2011;2:4. Epub 2011 Jan 25.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=baars%20bj

http://ccrg.cs.memphis.edu/papers.html

The most complete account of the brain basis of conscious experience is in Chapter 8, “Consciousness and Attention,” in Baars & Gage (2012) Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience: A Beginner’s Guide. Elsevier, Inc.