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Mission

Our mission is to accelerate the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, we generate useful public resources, drive technological and analytical advances, and discover fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments modeling and theory.

Background

Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute takes on large-scale initiatives designed to push brain research forward, enabling the global scientific community to more efficiently make discoveries that bring real-world utility.

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Mission

The Krasnow Institute seeks to expand understanding of mind, brain, and intelligence by conducting research at the intersection of the separate fields of cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and the computer-driven study of artificial intelligence and complex adaptive systems. These separate disciplines increasingly overlap and promise progressively deeper insight into human thought processes. The Institute also examines how new insights from cognitive science research can be applied for human benefit in the areas of mental health, neurological disease, education, and computer design.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjst9Zv-7zY

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

Uploaded by ThinkingAllowedTV on Aug 20, 2010

NOTE: This is an excerpt from the full 90-minute …