ON CONSCIOUSNESS: Science & Subjectivity - Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory

PRAISE for

ON CONSCIOUSNESS: Science & Subjectivity

The works of Bernard Baars collected here are among the foundational texts of the scientific study of consciousness. Their influence in cognitive science and philosophy of mind is enormous, and their impact on my own thinking has been profound.

Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics, Dept of Computing, Imperial College London; Senior Research Scientist, DeepMind

Bernie Baars started, almost single-handedly, the consciousness revolution in cognitive psychology over 30 years ago. In this book we can trace, through the republication of all the major original sources, the entire path from the first versions of his Global Workspace Theory, published over 30 years ago, to its current state and towards its future prospects as a unified theory of consciousness and the brain. Bernie Baars is a giant on whose shoulders the future science of consciousness will stand.

Antti Revonsuo, PhD, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Skövde, Sweden; Author of Inner Presence, Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon (MIT)

Eyebrows are no longer raised even among neuroscientists when the topic of consciousness is discussed, largely due to authors like Bernard Baars. Creator of the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) of consciousness, Baars explains his influential theory in exquisite detail in this new volume, along with many updates of his main writings. He takes a bird's eye view of the brain with many exciting insights of its complex workings. An enjoyable read by an expert authority.

György Buzsáki, Author of Rhythms of the Brain; The Brain from Inside Out (OUP)

"Global workspace theory has been a foundational concept in the modern science of consciousness and its more recent neural instantiation has enjoyed widespread and increasing support. However, it can be a challenge to navigate the complex literature on the topic. Bernard Baars, a pioneer in the field and originator of the theory, has addressed this problem with his most recent effort On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity. The book represents a landmark effort to comprehensively address, in an accessible way, the various dimensions of the global workspace, from its cognitive architecture to the living brain dynamics through which it is manifest. On Consciousness is an indispensable addition to the library of both students and experts who study consciousness."

GEORGE A. MASHOUR, MD, PHD, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR CONSCIOUSNESS SCIENCE; PROFESSOR OF ANESTHESIOLOGY, NEUROSURGERY, NEUROSCIENCE, AND PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR

Baars was just waaaay ahead of everyone else in approaching questions concerning consciousness as scientific questions. And he has done vastly more than metaphor-slinging philosophers to make progress on the topic. Baars’ preference for testable hypotheses as opposed to dead-end thought-experiments have made a major difference in shifting the topic to a secure knowledge base from which real progress can be made. His work is always insightful, careful, and trustworthy — virtues that have become increasingly elusive in philosophical approaches. This corpus is a stunning achievement.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND, PHD, UC PRESIDENT'S PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY EMERITA, UCSD; AUTHOR OF TOUCHING A NERVE: THE SELF AS BRAIN (W.W. NORTON)

"Consciousness will not become acceptable to science without three things: empirical evidence that overcomes the consciousness deniers, a satisfying account of subjectivity, and a global understanding of the mind's staggering complexity. Bernard Baars is perhaps our most important voice on all three fronts, and On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity raises a high bar for all future exploration in the field."

DEEPAK CHOPRA, MD, AUTHOR OF METAHUMAN (HARMONY)

"The sweep and readability of this book are remarkable. Ranging from cell physiology to cognitive states of mind, Baars shows himself to be a master of neurophenomenology from the ground up. Here he greatly expands his early notions of global workspace theory, as detailed first in his 1988 book, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, describing a kind of Cartesian inner theater where consciousness resides as both an observer and ruler, receiving and communicating out to the numerous unnamed action agencies of the brain.

On Consciousness treats us to a detailed exploration of the brain processes that under-gird our ordinary day to day, moment to moment, ongoing conscious experience. Baars is brilliantly well versed in past writers who have explored human experience, from Aristotle to Marcel Proust, and on to a wide range of contemporary neuroscientists. One has the feeling that the shadow of William James falls across every page. As with James, Baars writes in an effortless and deeply thoughtful voice, populated by the kinds of details and reflections that mark a scientist who has spent a lifetime becoming intimately familiar with his topic."

ALLAN LESLIE COMBS, PHD, DIRECTOR & PROFESSOR CIIS CENTER FOR CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES; PRESIDENT, SOCIETY FOR CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

No scholar understands consciousness as well as Bernard Baars, and few can express this understanding as lucidly. His Global Workspace Theory is practical and elegant, addressing both conscious and unconscious activity. If anyone thinks there is a hard problem" in this field, they need to read ON CONSCIOUSNESS before they make that assumption. This book is a magnificent achievement."

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PHD, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, SAYBROOK UNIVERSITY

"In the beginning the Universe was without form and void. That was the era of behaviorism, when Watson, Thorndike, and Skinner cast out from psychology the subjective realm of introspection and the human mind. Then, in 1988, a bright light shone as consciousness was reintroduced into psychology in the form of Bernard Baars' seminal work, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. That work introduced global workspace theory (GWT) as the fundamental unifier of conscious experience. In the ensuing thirty years, GWT (jocularly called fame in the brain by Daniel Dennett) has become famous in its own right by repeated empirical confirmation.

This volume admirably takes the reader from the early days of the initial introspective origins of GWT up to present day neurobiologic research detailing GWD (Global Workspace Dynamics.) In the 21st century, principles of consciousness will see an ever expanding explosion of not only academic research but commercial development as these mechanisms become incorporated into our self-driving cars, robots, and AI-based consultants.

Ultimately this research may also underpin a solid bioengineering basis for addressing devastating neuropsychiatric diseases. On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity, Bernard Baars' 2019 publication of his updated works on global workspace theory, provides a worthy introduction and guide to this crucial endeavor."

Robert L. Blum, MD, PhD, Stanford University, Affiliate: Center for Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology

Bernard Baars is the William James of consciousness studies in the 21st century. The field of consciousness studies has attracted a growing interdisciplinary audience, but scientific achievements have often been below the expectations and ambitions of the adventurers. Solid ground for this journey can be found in Bernard Baars’ work, because it takes into account recent developments of computer and cognitive sciences, neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics. The empirical basis of [Baars’] theoretical work is the best one can get from contemporary science, while leaving room for new developments likely to happen in the next decades.

Alfredo Pereira Jr., Author, Prof of Philosophy of Science, São Paulo State University (UNESP)

PRAISE for

A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

& In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind

A clear-eyed, open-minded analysis of the problems of consciousness, and a wide-ranging synthesis of a variety of approaches. For those who want to join the race to model consciousness, this is the starting line.

Daniel C. Dennett, author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

The powerful core of Baars’ model of consciousness is the global workspace, a kind of central bulletin board. It allows scores of specialized mental subsystems (expert but narrow) to contribute to the resolution of novel problems. Baars is careful and thoughtful, and shows constant concern for the testability of his ideas.

Dr. David Galin, Langley Porter Psychiatry Institute, Professor Emeritus, UCSF

The book includes numerous whimsical experiments ... in order to demonstrate points best appreciated experimentally. Anyone with a playful nature will find these illustrations captivating.

Contemporary Psychiatry

By contrasting well-established conscious phenomena with closely comparable unconscious ones, Baars (Wright Institute, Berkeley, Calif.) suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness and thus clarifies many issues connected with this great, confusing, and contentious nub of psychological science.

Booknews

With this model, the author sweeps through dozens of phenomena that are well known to students of sensation, perception, learning abstraction, language, thinking, and problem solving. In each case he interprets the model in terms of the global model workplace and thus produces an admirable piece of scholarship. The most enduring contribution of the book may be its challenge to cognitive scientists to return to their roots, to describe and explain consciousness. Without a decent theory of consciousness, cognitive science may be adrift. If that is so, then (this work) deserves to be read by many.

Contemporary Psychology

Baars’ book promises to be a milestone in creating a theoretical framework for future consciousness research. It will also be a benchmark against which future theories are tested.

Bruce Bridgeman, PhD, Psyche

An impressive tour, centered around the question of what we might be able to discover scientifically regarding the role played by conscious experience in the functioning of the mind.

Brian D. Josephson, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Quite simply, Bernard Baars has made the most important single contribution to consciousness studies since William James.

Bruce Mangan, PhD, Institute of Cognitive Studies, UC Berkeley

Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory

Cover image shows five cortico-thalamic projection systems, each one operating in similar ways, and each one projecting to different regions of cortex (Part IV, Figure 3. Bidirectional signaling in cortex.). Steriade (2006) has emphasized that the thalamus is not a true center of signaling, but rather that it is the cortex that resonates with closely related thalamic nuclei.

Thalamic nuclei essentially bounce back their cortical input signals to cortex, showing again that resonance is the working style of the great cortico-thalamic system.

Contents

Author’s Note

Cortex is the organ of mind.

PART I.

Consciousness Explored: Making sense of the evidence

Introduction

1. Conscious experiences

2. Unconscious states

3. General conclusions

4. Major features of conscious states and contents

5. Consciousness in philosophy and science

6. Consciousness in animals and machines

PART II.

A Scientific Approach to Consciousness

Introduction

1. You are conscious, and so am I.

2. Evidence.

3. A Working Theater of Consciousness.

PART III.

A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

Preface

One: An Introduction

1. What is to be explained? Some preliminaries

Two: The basic model

2. Model 1: Conscious representations are internally consistent and globally distributed

3. The neural basis of conscious experience

Three: The fundamental role of frames

4. Model 2: Unconscious frames shape conscious experience

5. Model 3: Conscious experience is informative — it always demands some degree of adaptation

Four: Goals and voluntary control

6. Model 4: Goal frames, spontaneous problem solving, and the stream of consciousness

7. Model 5: Volition as ideomotor control of thought and action

Five: Attention, self, and conscious self-monitoring

8. Model 6: Attention as control of access to consciousness

9. Model 7: Self as the dominant frame of experience and action

Six: Consciousness is functional

10. The functions of consciousness

Seven: Conclusion

11. A summary and some future directions

Glossary and guide to theoretical claims

Conscious Access Themes

PART IV

Global workspace dynamics (GWD): Cortical binding and propagation enables conscious contents

Introduction

1. Dynamic Global Workspace: A functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements

2. States and Contents

3. Sensory Percepts vs. Feelings of Knowing

4. Voluntary Reports of Conscious Events

5. The Hippocampus and Conscious Contents: A Novel Prediction

6. Summary

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by BERNARD J. BAARS

Notes

References

To the invisible college of consciousness science,

philosophy, and scholarship.

Author’s Note

Science is not done by isolated individuals working alone but rather by an invisible college, a dynamic network of individuals and groups. I therefore owe something of an apology for republishing my own work, when a complete account of the last thirty years would need an entire bookshelf, if not a small library. Looking back, I was lucky to be able to tackle some of the basic questions at a time when the behavioristic prohibition against subjectivity was fading, and a scattered group of scientists were returning to conscious cognition.

Empirical progress since the 1980s has been spectacular. It therefore seems timely to republish successive stages of evidence and theory of the brain’s global workspace. They cover thirty years during which consciousness re-emerged from decades of neglect. Evidence and ideas are still coming in, but our fundamental evidence is as solid as ever. In traditional scientific fashion, our basic evidence remains stable while ideas continue to evolve.

Global Workspace Theory is a broad framework for the role of conscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as I first suggested in 1983. The term global workspace comes from Artificial Intelligence, where it refers to a fleeting memory domain that allows for cooperative problem-solving by large collections of specialized programs.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) therefore assumes that the brain can be viewed as a society of mind. Our knowledge of the cortex, in particular, is consistent with the hypothesis that much of the brain consists of highly specialized regions. Detailed cortical processing of visual information, for example, is largely unconscious, but the outcome of visual processes is a conscious experience of objects and scenes. As predicted by GWT, there is evidence that visual contents evoked highly distributed activity in non-visual regions of the brain. In GWT this is called broadcasting of global messages to multiple target functions.

One advantage of this updated collection is its coherence and simplicity. Anyone interested in consciousness can use this book as a guide — always keeping in mind that no single source can cover everything.

My first book on GWT, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988) is now out of print, rare and expensive. To capitalize on current evidence in the 21st century, this volume is organized into four thematic sections, providing access both to a general and a technical audience.

These updated works trace the genesis of Global Workspace Theory through generations of scientific debate, and the continued rise of brain evidence and psychological understanding thanks to technological advances in neuroimaging.

Part I is a brief exploration of consciousness. This article, fully updated with additional content in this edition, was originally edited and published in Scholarpedia in 2015, the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia, by its Editor-in-Chief, Eugene M. Izhikevich.

Part II is an introduction to GWT with a scientific approach to consciousness using a theater metaphor. The previous edition was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1997. This 2018 fully updated edition reflects current empirical brain evidence to date, including new lab imaging, diagrams, and photographs. Scientific metaphors have a long history, and they are still important teaching and learning tools. But metaphors are not explanatory theories with testable hypotheses. That is left to the next two parts of this book.

Part III consists of my 1988 book originally published by Cambridge University Press, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, still the most detailed scholarly exposition of GWT. This 2018 fully updated edition reflects current scientific terminology, psychological understanding, and empirical brain evidence to date, along with updated lab imaging, diagrams, tables, illustrations, charts, and photographs.

Part IV concludes with the most recent statement of the theory, called Dynamic Global Workspace Theory, (D-GWT). An earlier version was published by the Open Access journal Frontiers in Psychology in 2013, by Baars, Franklin, and Ramsøy (2013) under the title Global workspace dynamics: Cortical binding and integration enables conscious contents. Dynamic GWT is a mind-brain theory, based on greatly expanded brain evidence. This 2018 edition is also fully and vividly updated to show the role of conscious and unconscious functioning in the brain.

New readers may want to read this collection in order, from introductory readings to D-GWT. Advanced readers may want to jump to the final article. As always, I am happy to receive comments from readers and fellow scholars.

This Nautilus Press edition of my main writings aims to present global workspace theory (GWT) from soup to nuts. GWT is a coherent effort to organize large and increasing bodies of scientific evidence about conscious brains, in a cogent conceptual framework. Like any early theory, GWT does not try to explain every fact. It tries to organize and generate testable hypotheses about the major known features of the subjective stream of thought.

In the usual run of scientific concepts, it makes sense to build from known to unknown, and early thinking often helps to pinpoint possible answers to new questions. Because separate empirical research efforts are adding their own findings every month and year, the body of evidence is also expanding.

Inductive science is a fairly messy affair, not nearly as tidy as the textbooks make it seem in retrospect. So we try to describe what we know to the best of our abilities, and balance skepticism with an open mind.

Speculative proposals usually fail to explain the known evidence, and some of them are circular or aim to account for the evidence by appealing to even more mysterious explananda. But there are a number of careful and evidence-based ideas that seem to be broadly compatible with GWT. At this early stage of thinking about a much-neglected topic, we are happy with a first explanatory framework. Competing views are welcome. Inductive science has to be clear and testable, and aim to deal with the known evidence.

Since its first appearance in the 1980s, GWT has been adopted and built upon by many others in the sciences. Mathematicians and artificial intelligence researchers have expanded it as a theory of human cognition, and some robotics and brain scientists have suggested plausible bridging evidence and theory. Meanwhile the author and various co-authors have focused on human conscious cognition, and now, with another vast tsunami of brain and biological evidence, we are surprised to find ourselves doing psychobiology.

The reason is that cortex turns out to be the organ of mind, as neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wrote about 100 years ago. Penfield’s claim was based on decades of waking (conscious) surgeries in severely epileptic patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada, a series of 1,200 waking surgeries at the end of that enormous effort. Penfield’s primary focus was always on the patients’ welfare, and his scientific publications were relatively short but enormously important. No one before this time had performed anywhere near this number of waking surgeries with articulate patients whose brains were being stimulated, especially on the surface of the available cortex, called the neocortex.

Nevertheless, Penfield’s surgical teams also learned a great deal about the more ancient paleocortex, which includes the olfactory-taste senses — which emerge in subjective consciousness in rich detail — as well as the double-horned hippocampus, usually avoided in surgery at that time, because there were no high-resolution brain imaging instruments. Penfield’s various surgical teams therefore caught a glimpse of the conscious human brain reporting its own experiences in as much detail as surgeons and patients had time to talk. Penfield and colleagues were therefore able to anticipate the next hundred years of holistic brain research, bridging the alleged divide between subjective mind and objective brain, so that both streams of data informed the other. This has become increasingly common today with the high technology of brain and body imaging, which continues to advance.

The evidence base for the science of conscious cognition has therefore enlarged enormously, with 20 thousand citations in the public databases for peer-reviewed journals. Topics like coma and recovery, sleep and waking, the epilepsies, and many specific visual experiences have been studied to a much greater extent.

The topic of conscious experience cannot be owned by any profession or science, and the contemplative traditions give endlessly rich information about subjectivity from quite a different angle. So do the humanities and the arts, which give us our common sense insights into conscious experiences. Since 1900 with Freud and Jung, unconscious influences on the conscious stream have come into focus, and by the 1970s experimental scientists began to include unconscious cognition as well.

GWT provides one useful simplifying framework for conscious and unconscious brain events, a set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. Our colleague and friend Stan Franklin and his many co-workers have built on GWT to sketch out a more general theory of cognition.

Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux in Paris have developed experimentally testable models and made further testable claims about the brain basis of visual consciousness. Many other scientists have made important contributions, and the notion of a global workspace that receives both competing and cooperating inputs while sending out an integrated interpretation of those inputs has entered the world of the web.

Allan Newell’s global workspace implementations from the 1970s have taken on a life of their own via Wikipedia and numerous commercial applications. In computational math, similar ideas have borne fruit in SuperTuring formalisms, and in field biology we now know of many organisms that use some form of crowd-sourcing or crowd-computing using a common domain of interaction. Beehives perform a kind of parallel computation, with each bee using its roughly one million neurons to work out its own needs in cooperation and competition with others. The entrance to a typical hive has a platform for inbound and outbound bees to dance and shed some pollen, to inform others about new sources of nectar and pollen.

The human cortex is an enormous parallel-interactive system, an idea that has reappeared in medicine since Aristotle and Plato. The School of Hippocrates made the brain basis of consciousness a basic article of faith. The key idea of central integration and wide broadcasting of sensory percepts and abstract ideas can be found in the earliest written sources we can still read in Sanskrit and Attic Greek.

The notion of parallel processing along with some computational bottleneck is therefore everywhere and nowhere. The great Yellow Fungus performs parallel computation. Watson and Crick’s Central DNA Dogma proclaims that every living cell in our body performs molecular computation using DNA and a host of other molecules.

More recently the fields of genomics tells us about striking similarities between humans and many other species. Epigenetics has shown that the DNA is just not a passive medium of inheritance. Small stretches of DNA open and close throughout the day and night, triggered by light, darkness, food, hunger, and the many different biocycles of our lives. This is another kind of massively parallel yet constantly interacting biological system.

None of these developments were known in the 1980s when GWT was first developed. In 2013 a detailed brain-based update was published, based on another few decades of research, along with many conversations with Gerald M. Edelman and his son David Edelman, Giulio Tononi, Francis Crick and Christof Koch, and others whose names appear in these pages.

The result is a kind of mosaic of too many patches of color to elaborate in detail. They are readily available on the web. The invisible college of consciousness science is not so invisible, if one simply explores the treasures of the worldwide web.

At the same time, it is very curious how the old taboos against subjective consciousness hang on in the minds of many. Distinguished scientists in other fields often believe we know nothing empirically about the conscious brain, a claim that can be readily falsified by a simple web search. Yet the old behaviorism still hangs on in millions of minds, or so it seems. A respected scientist recently asked, How do I know that I’m conscious? a question that also worried William James in 1904. A young philosopher recently told us that it’s obvious that we know nothing.

We keep being pushed beyond our self-imposed boundaries.

Today most neurobiologists take it for granted that sensory consciousness, at least, is not a sole human property. The similarities to other animal brains is simply too compelling, just as it’s biologically clear that plants, which have no neurons, cannot have our organ of mind, the double cortex.

The visible cortex, called the neocortex in biology, emerges with the first mammals about 200 MYA (millions of years ago). That mind-boggling fact is taught in undergraduate biology, but we rarely look at the obvious implications for the ethical treatment of animals, and of humans in utero, for example. Pain perception appears to be early and widespread. Brain scientists now focus on the cortex as the organ of mind, as Penfield wrote, but even cognitive neuroscience still keeps its behavioristic euphemisms for episodic memory, for example, when in practice all episodes we know of are conscious episodes.

The famous hippocampus is the ongoing record of conscious experiences during the waking state, and when we fall into deep sleep later on, the hippocampus transmits its novel memory traces all over the brain, including the neocortex. If we simply substitute the word experiential memory for episodic memory, a whole new world of consciousness opens up. Penfield’s surgical team observed striking evidence for experiential memories emerging from hippocampal stimulation, but that evidence is often dismissed, because Penfield felt obligated to protect the privacy of his 1,200 waking surgical patients. The famous patient Henri Molaison (HM) is the only one we know.

All the sciences begin with philosophy, and it is understandable that philosophers still see their field as the starting point for a scientific study of the topic. There is a great deal to be learned from the long history of ideas, including all of philosophy, but it is also true that empirical studies must go their own way eventually, for fear of being trapped in empty scholasticism. Yet the arts and humanities, the contemplative traditions, all have their own claims to the topic. Nobody owns the mind and its fabulous brain.

Socrates famously recommended total agnosticism as a good starting point for acquiring wisdom. He was right, but he also believed in learning, and his own students Plato and later Aristotle came close to sketching out much of the scholarly knowledge of the time. Similar scholarly cultures emerged in many other places, notably China, India, the Semitic world, and surely in hunter-foraging cultures around the world.

The itch to learn and understand more and more seems to be a human universal. We hope to share that itch with our readers; there is so much about conscious brains that we do not know…

Bernard J. Baars

Oceanside, CA, May 2018

I was probing a woman’s brain with an electrode when she said she heard a melody. I was so astonished I re-stimulated the same spot some 30 times.

Each time she heard the same melody…

—

Wilder Penfield, In Conversation with Denis Brian, Reported in Genius Talk, 1995

Cortex is the organ of mind.

The double-decker cortex, both the outer neocortex and the inner paleocortex, were proposed to be the organ of mind, as pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wrote, based on 1,200 open brain-surgeries in conscious epileptic patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute from the 1920s to the 1950s. Speculation along those lines goes back more than two thousand years to the School of Hippocrates of Cos. But proof positive has been extremely difficult to obtain, and it has taken long-term research programs with advanced brain imaging to settle the question.

This image shows the physical stimulation of the fovea, the functional center of the retina, roughly a 1000x1000 array of dense receptors (Part IV, Figure 1b). The retinal array is mirrored point-to-point in the visual thalamus (LGN), and again in the first visual projection region called V1. Critically, the connectivity of LGN and V1 is bi-directional, with any minicolumn in LGN linking to a minicolumn in V1, and vice versa. This would seem to risk an explosive feedback loop, but the waking cortex runs very well in the normal, healthy brain.

This puzzling wiring style led Gerald M. Edelman to propose that the cortex operates near criticality, so that it is ready for any sensory input or output. Perturbing the delicately oscillating cortex can ignite a rapid broadcast, corresponding reportable visual experiences. Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) suggests this core idea for visual consciousness.

Figure 1b. Image shows the physical stimulation of the fovea, the functional center of the retina, roughly a 1000x1000 array of dense receptors. The retinal array is mirrored point-to-point in the visual thalamus (LGN), and again in the first visual projection region called V1.

Consciousness is not some extra glow or aura caused by the activities of the mature cortex. Consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations.

So consciousness is fame in the brain, or cerebral celebrity. Those who claim they can imagine a being that has all these competitive activities in the cortex but is not conscious are mistaken. They can no more imagine this coherently than they can imagine a being that has all the powers of a living thing but is not alive.

—

Daniel C. Dennett, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University

PART I.

Consciousness Explored: Making sense of the evidence

Introduction

Why do some people deny consciousness?

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the what-it-is-like of experience.

— Galen Strawson, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin.

Debates about consciousness and personal identity can be found in our earliest writings, in languages like ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Field anthropologists have reported dozens of culturally universal beliefs about waking consciousness, dreams, and personal identity (Brown, 1991). Mental terms make up more than half of our natural language vocabularies. Even before the first millennium BCE we can read about conscious experiences, often in nightly dreams, or as a soul journey after death.

In a 4th century BCE treatise of the Hippocratic Corpus, perhaps the oldest medical textbook we have, is a clinical study of the epilepsies by the School of Hippocrates. It points unambiguously to a brain basis for conscious experiences:

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain alone, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant... I hold that the brain is the most powerful organ of the human body... wherefore I assert that the brain is the interpreter of consciousness… (School of Hippocrates: On the Sacred Disease.)

Like Hippocrates, modern scientists see two separate sources: The individual experiences of subjects as they describe them, and the marks of those experiences in the brain and behavior. Modern brain evidence goes back at least to Wilder Penfield in the 1950s and indeed to Santiago Ramón y Cajal circa 1900. Our psychological evidence can be traced to William James and his century in Europe and America.

Since the rise of neuroimaging our brain evidence has improved spectacularly, and the biological basis of subjectivity has now become a recognized goal in the sciences. Far from contradicting each other, public and private evidence is generally mutually supportive. The conscious sight of a red object has distinctive and increasingly clear bases in the brain. Thus the historic separation between psychology and brain physiology may be changing into a unified mind-brain science.

Even so, consciousness science still resembles sex in the Victorian age: We know it’s there, but we tend to evade it. Some scientists still wonder out loud if they themselves are really conscious. In Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc., philosopher Galen Strawson writes:

When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing. So when people say that consciousness is a mystery, they’re wrong — because we know what it is. It’s the most familiar thing there is — however hard it is to put into words.

…What people often mean when they say that consciousness is a mystery is that it’s mysterious how consciousness can be simply a matter of physical goings-on in the brain. But here, they make a Very Large Mistake, in Winnie-the-Pooh’s terminology—the mistake of thinking that we know enough about the physical components of the brain to have good reason to think that these components can’t, on their own, account for the existence of consciousness. We don’t.

Scientists cannot avoid the three fundamental questions of subjective experience, voluntary control and personal identity. Yet for seven decades in the 20th century the behavioristic movement mounted a remarkably successful campaign to exclude those questions as ‘unscientific.’ That taboo started to lift in the 1970s and 80s, but many of our technical terms still reflect the old biases.

The misnamed resting state is really the active Stream of Consciousness (SoC).

Scientists sometimes mis-use the term default state or resting state when subjects are asked to do nothing in particular. But good observers have known for thousands of years that we cannot really stop the flow of thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, and plans, whenever we are conscious, even without an experimental task. Social psychologists have known for decades that the spontaneous Stream of Consciousness (SoC) is not a zero activity state.

Rather, Jerome L. Singer and many others have shown that we spontaneously think about our current concerns, our worries and high priority plans, about our relationships problems, or upset at something that made us angry or embarrassed, or we are just struggling to stay awake. If we have no experimental task to perform, we often go into fantasy states, or even into drowsy twilight dreams, and a substantial percentage of the general population spends hours immersed in fantasies, always about personally important things, of course.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is indeed defined by spontaneous thought intrusions, especially unwanted and upsetting thoughts, which can happen even with apparently minor upsets. What seems minor to an outsider may be major to a human being in a brain recording machine. If neuroscientists asked their subjects to give simple thought reports at random times during the so-called resting state they would find out how active our conscious waking state really is. Trauma-related thoughts are surprisingly common in the general population, and the adolescent population is especially vulnerable to daily ups and downs of moods and worries about others. There is really a range of trauma intensity which does not have to involve major life events as judged by others. Feeling rejected by a social group can also lead to intrusive conscious thoughts.

The reason why the brain shows more activity during the default state than in experimental tasks (which are often extremely boring), is that the spontaneous SoC does much more important work for us than the usual experimental tasks. Counting backwards by threes from some arbitrary number is not a thrilling task, and most experiments are personally irrelevant to our subjects. Consciousness is a major biological function, and the chronobiological regulation of waking, dreaming and sleep suggests that even physically passive consciousness is highly functional.

Twenty years ago Cirelli and Tononi discovered more than 200 epigenetic correlates with the three basic brain states, suggesting vital biological functions for waking, sleep and dreaming. We mull things over consciously for good reasons, which is why the waking conscious state is such a large biological phenomenon. The particular reasons why we feel fear or anger at any given moment in the spontaneous SoC is often unknown. But careful thought monitoring studies show that our apparently random thoughts usually reflect major life issues, especially those that are unresolved.

The SoC has been discussed exquisitely by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William and Henri James, the phenomenologist, and, of course, the contemplative traditions in Asia and Europe and in hunter-forager tribes. The Andaman Islanders have the dream time, and dreaming (including lucid dreams and dream paralysis), routine topics in pre-settlement cultures. They occur spontaneously, no need even to teach people to do it, because some people discover it spontaneously.

Language is both conscious and nonconscious. Most brain functions seem to be unconscious, so that even the fleeting conscious present is embedded in multiple unconscious processing threads, which precede, interpenetrate, and follow any conscious event. The reader’s experience of these words is profoundly shaped by early experiences of learning to read, which also involved moments of focused consciousness. Research on the hippocampus suggests that conscious experiences are quickly converted into widespread synaptic changes in the brain, which serve to frame and contextualize later events. It seems that conscious and unconscious threads interweave without end. In contemporary science updating what we actually know is our responsibility, so that a change in misleading terms would be useful.

Table 1.0 Misleading and suggested terminology

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Conscious experiences

While conscious experience has been discussed throughout history, the late 19th century saw a rise in physicalistic reductionism, which, in its more extreme forms, declared consciousness and kindred terms to be unscientific. In the 1920s B.F. Skinner defined the goal of radical behaviorism as the complete elimination of mentalistic concepts from psychology — about two-thirds of English content words. Skinner’s influence dominated well into the 1970s, and during that time it was extremely difficult for scientists to openly study cs cognition, voluntary control, personal identity, and similar questions.

By the 1980s philosophers and scientists started to return to consciousness. Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and scientists like Francis Crick strongly supported a return to scientific research. Since the 1980s a large literature has grown, with thousands of findings about visual awareness, coma and wakefulness, direct brain recording of binocular rivalry, and much more. The PubMed database shows almost 20,000 articles for the keywords conscious brain.

Many scientific studies use experimental comparisons between similar cs and uncs events. This contrastive analysis approach has been very fruitful. Dozens of techniques now permit conscious—unconscious comparisons. Any method that permits such comparisons can enlarge our understanding. The resulting empirical harvest has been very large.

1.1 Ambiguities

Consciousness has several meanings.

It is used in biomedical science to refer to the state of waking consciousness, as assessed by responsiveness to questions, commands, and mild pain, by the classical scalp EEG of waking, and by the ability to describe oneself and current events. We will use terms like conscious state or waking state for this specific meaning.

However, in scientific work consciousness is also used to refer to the dimension of conscious vs. unconscious brain events — that is, as an experimental variable that allows us to study brain differences attributable to consciousness.

This usage is profoundly different from the first, since it involves a measurable dimension of variation. Yet consciousness as an empirical variable is still commonly confused with the waking state or with subjectivity. They are linked, but not the same.

Historically, many basic scientific concepts emerged from similar periods of ambiguity. In daily life, heat refers to boiling pots and summer days. But with the rise of thermodynamics at the end of the 19th century, the scientific term heat came to mean a dimension of temperature variation with a true zero point at 0 degrees Kelvin, reflecting a wide quantitative range of random molecular activity in physical systems.

Thus in thermodynamic theory, heat came to mean something very different from its everyday meaning.

Similarly, in scientific usage the topic of consciousness now often means an empirical dimension of variation in brain activity between matched conscious and unconscious events. When we talk about the topic of consciousness in science today, we do not mean subjectivity alone. Rather, we refer to the conscious-unconscious dimension, which includes subjective experiences, but always compared to close brain analogues that are not conscious.

A classical example is binocular rivalry, where mutually incompatible stimuli are presented to the two eyes, which cannot be fused into a single gestalt. Only one of the two rivaling stimuli can be conscious (reportable) at a time, though the other often evokes some degree of visual processing. The Nikos Logothetis laboratory at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, has used direct brain recording in macaques since the 1980s to trace both the conscious and unconscious processing stream. While many other methods are in use, the Max Planck group has performed the most coherent long-term research program of this kind.

Third and finally, the English language also uses "consciousness of something to refer to the specific contents of mental life, or what we will call conscious cognitions or conscious percepts." Given these ambiguities, it is essential to avoid vague language. Here we will use unambiguous expressions whenever possible.

Part I is about both conscious cognitions and the state of (waking) consciousness. While state variables are often studied separately from conscious contents, a complete account must include both.

(See thalamocortical system; and Part IV in which major features of conscious states and contents are detailed.)

1.1.1 Qualitative consciousness is sensory: Explicit consciousness is conceptual

The philosopher Ned Block makes a distinction between qualitative (sensory) consciousness and explicit propositions, which are not clearly experienced as having sensory qualities. These include beliefs about oneself and the world; reportable feelings of knowing (FOKs; see below); novel skills as opposed to overpracticed ones; and concepts that are abstract but still reportable.

Our many examples of language and semantic networks covers the domain of explicit propositions, which also fade from consciousness when they become completely predictable.

1.2 Conscious contents

In general, the reportable contents of consciousness include perceptual stimuli, which are qualitative in nature; inner speech, reportable dreams and visual imagery; the fleeting present and it’s fading traces in immediate memory; interoceptive feelings like pleasure, pain, anticipatory anxiety and excitement; the exteroceptive body senses, including external touch and pain; reportable emotions; autobiographical episodes as they are experienced and recalled; clear and immediate intentions, expectations and effortful voluntary control.

This basic list has not changed since Aristotle, and may be a cultural universal.

Feelings of knowing.

Perceptual consciousness shows multiple levels of highly discriminable details — tiny dots of light, contrast edges, inferred size constancy, object identity, etc. But feelings of knowing (FOKs) are classically said to be experienced as vague or fringe-like. FOKs include judgments (as opposed to percepts), feelings of familiarity, feelings of rightness and wrongness, and much more. William James made an empirically persuasive case for the vague in mental life in his Principles of Psychology (1890), and that evidence has only expanded since then. Bruce Mangan also includes intuitive feelings of beauty and goodness, which are highly reliable under experimental conditions. While the phenomenal experience of FOKs is vague, the actual cognitive processes involved can be very precise and complex. Introspection is not a reliable guide to the cognitive complexity of FOKs.

FOKs can be defined empirically as reportable experiences that are verifiable, and which are reported with high certainty, but with very little descriptive detail.

In the case of a clearly visible coffee cup, we have both high confidence and the ability to experience numerous details. In contrast, FOKs often show high confidence and accuracy with no subjective experience of details. The range of FOKs is very large indeed.

1.3 Observational definitions

Many scientists ask us What is the definition of consciousness? That is an ahistorical question, because none of the empirical sciences started with adequate definitions. Scientific concepts like heat, force and momentum evolved over long periods of time, inductively, step by step, based on useful and reliable observations. A failure to understand this plain and obvious point about the history of science makes it impossible to pursue a rational approach to the unknowns of biological consciousness. We cannot skip the long process of inductive information gathering and simply leap to an answer by faith.

As pointed out, the thermodynamic definition of heat only emerged in the late 19th century. Beginning with the Renaissance, scientists from Galileo to Fahrenheit developed increasingly precise ways to measure heat. But without 19th century discoveries in the physics of molecular motion and the Kelvin scale, a clear theoretical definition was out of reach.

This basic point about inductive science is often misunderstood. Empirical science commonly starts with observational definitions that seem roughly correct. Refined theory tends to come much later.

Part IV shows more than twenty reliable findings about the state of consciousness and its reportable contents. Each of these facts could be used as observational definitions. In practice, we generally start with a specific behavior — the ability to accurately report stimuli or evoked mental events under careful experimental conditions. (see 1.4 below)

Today we know many neural correlates of consciousness. None of them are complete, but they give useful starting points.

(Emerging theoretical definitions. Note that theoretical definitions of the conscious state and its contents have been proposed. See W.J. Freeman, M. Steriade, B.J. Baars, G. Tononi, G.M. Edelman, and others.)

1.4 Accurate report as an observable index

The most widely used behavioral index of conscious events is accurate, voluntary report under optimal conditions, such as minimal distraction and time delay. Reportability corresponds well with our everyday understanding. Indeed, the words accurately reportable can often be used instead of conscious. However, a purely behavioral index would cause us to miss something essential, the fact that accurate reports refer to a rich Umwelt of experiences that we all share.

In the sensory sciences accurate report has long been fruitful, beginning with Newton’s prism experiments, and still in general use today. The study of color perception would have been impossible without accurate report. Clinical examinations of vision and hearing continue to rely on accurate report.

Failures of accurate report are just as important, as in the case of various types of color blindness. People who lack one, two or three types of retinal color receptors selectively confuse three-color with two-color pictures, and two-color pictures with grayscale copies. Just as perceptual difference reports are fundamental in psychophysics, equivalence reports or confusability between two physically different but subjectively identical stimuli has long been important in perception and cognition.

1.4.1 Improving report measures

Observational definitions do not remain static. Improved measures often reveal unexpected facts, which may require a basic rethinking of the proposed concept. The history of science is filled with examples. Our understanding of conscious states and contents is evolving in precisely that way.

L. Jacoby and colleagues pioneered the use of process dissociation, as a measure of conscious control. In process dissociation, subjects are instructed to try to stop automatic (over-learned) mental events, such as word reading rather than color naming in the classical Stroop task. Since subjects are skilled readers, the novel task of color-naming requires voluntary effort, to overcome automatic habits of reading for sound and meaning. Such interference effects occur whenever an overlearned skill can be pitted against a new task. Errors and delays in performing the new task are thought to reflect a drop in consciously-mediated control. Process dissociation bears on a major theoretical question, the interplay of conscious experiences with voluntary control.

The most dramatic empirical improvements have come with the brain imaging revolution. Recording techniques continue to improve year by year, with significant advances in our understanding of the conscious brain.

1.5 Contrastive analysis

There are two ways to study conscious experiences experimentally. One is to compare them to each other, as in the sensory sciences. Content comparisons are used routinely in perception, recognition memory, mental imagery, short-term memory, and the like. A more recent approach is to compare conscious events with closely matched unconscious analogues. This approach dates back several decades, when researchers discovered convincing evidence for unconscious but intelligent brain events, including sensory processing, memory maintenance, automaticity of complex skills, etc.

A simple example is to say a word mentally, and then let it fade; for about ten seconds afterwards, it can still be recalled. (The reader is encouraged to try this several times.) Our ability to retrieve the word after fading suggests that an unconscious memory of the word must have been preserved. This informal experiment provides conscious/unconscious comparison conditions, even for a single word. Now we can try to answer the question, What is the brain effect of our being conscious of a word?

In effect, we have a controlled experiment using conscious access as an independent variable. Brain recordings show clear differences. Numerous experiments like this have been published, over a range of phenomena. They give the most relevant body of evidence about conscious experience as such.

For an anatomical example, the human cerebellum, which has about the same number of neurons as cortex, does not seem to support conscious contents directly. Patients with damage to the cerebellum are still conscious of the same range of contents as before.

However, very local damage to sensory cortex can produce very specific deficits in conscious experience, such as cortical color blindness and face blindness — the inability to recognize a visual pattern as a face, in spite of being able to name eyes, noses, mouths, chins, and so on. Specific kinds of cortical blindness can be localized to specific regions of cortex, notably V3/V4 for color perception, and area IT (inferotemporal) for face and object identity.

These phenomena have been replicated in the rhesus macaque, which has a strikingly similar visual brain to ours. Depending on the specific aspect of consciousness being studied, an experimental comparison may show two or more values; it is often maintained that conscious events have high underlying dimensionality. The classical dimensions of color perception are one example, but visual perception in the natural world must have much higher dimensionality.

These are testable questions.

1.6 A growing set of brain correlates

Part 4 (see below) shows 22 empirical correlates of conscious states and their specific contents. These continue to be refined, clarified and expanded.

Historically, scalp EEG of the waking state was described as irregular, low in amplitude, and fast. By irregular one meant something close to random. When scalp EEG was averaged over multiple samples it reliably added up to zero volts. Yet scalp EEG is still a useful first index for defining waking consciousness in medicine and physiology.

Nevertheless, direct cortical recording improves the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 1,000. These intracranial recordings reveal a very different picture of cortical signaling, between specific arrays of neurons signaling via neurons spike firing, or by population oscillations ranging from <.1 to 200 Hz.

Visual cortex has more than 40 visuotopical arrays, ranging from V1, which resembles a pixelated screen with high spatial resolution, to area IT (inferotemporal) with much less spatial resolution and much higher gestalt organization. In V1 the retinal input from a human face is simply a 2D distribution of colored and grayscale pixels. About forty maps later, in IT, that input is seen in terms of facial features — mouth, nose, eyes, ears, facial expressions and individual faces.

To a first approximation, the cortex is a vast collection of spatially organized neuronal arrays with six histologically different layers. Cortical arrays begin in sensory two-dimensional receptor arrays like the retina, and are ultimately converted to motor signals that trigger arrays of muscle cells. Signaling between arrays are often point to point so that a foveal neuron (x 1 , y 1) in the retina corresponds well to a similarly located thalamic neuron (x2 , y2) in LGN, followed by some 40 corresponding cells in cortical arrays V1 – V4 and ultimately areas IT and MTL. Each layered array sends axons to both higher and lower cells in other arrays. This bidirectional signaling gives rise to resonant excitatory activity, the typical signaling style of cortex.

The broad preservation of visuotopical and spatiotopical patterning across more than 40 visual maps is called labeled line coding. Signaling between these broadly similar arrays involves both neuronal spike firing and population oscillations, from <0.1 to 200 Hz. In general, cortical close-up recordings look radically different from traditional scalp EEG.

In retrospect, scalp EEG is misleading for detailed studies of cortex, since it suffers a thousand-fold loss of signal voltage compared to direct brain recordings. Direct recordings also solve potential artifacts of scalp EEG, such as scalp muscle activity, eye movement artifacts and poor source localizability. Such methods have yielded a harvest of new insights.

Independent variables are also much improved. Binocular rivalry is a classical method for comparing closely matched conscious vs un conscious retinal input. Thanks to three decades of rivalry studies in the macaque, we can now compare the fate of two visual input streams, one that is reportable, while the other is not. These studies show that the conscious stream shows significantly higher cortical activation, more oscillatory phase-linking, and wider spatial propagation than closely matched uncs stimuli. Conscious stimulus processing propagates not only within the visual cortex, but also to prefrontal and plausibly hippocampal regions. Direct brain recordings converge well with other techniques like fMRI, PET, MEG, etc. Compared to the conscious processing stream, matched unconscious events are not voluntarily reportable; they evoke less neuronal activity; show less oscillatory phase-linking; and tend to decay locally in visual cortex.

Several other experimental methods have been used, like visual backward masking, the attentional blink, inattentional blindness, and selective listening. There is reasonable agreement between stimulation and recording methods.

1.7 Cortex enables conscious experiences: The cortico-thalamic system

A large and coherent body of evidence now shows that cortex and its resonant satellite, the thalamus, jointly constitute the brain basis of conscious experiences. However, the states of waking, sleep and REM dreaming are switched on and off by basal brain nuclei that project neurochemicals to the cortex and thalamus.

This evidence comes from:

direct brain recordings of both reportable and unreportable input

Brain imaging studies including fMRI, MEG, PET, etc.

Various deficits in conscious perception and cognition,

Local brain stimulation and inhibition, either via the sensory pathways or by electrical, magnetic, cooling, chemical, and other precisely localized interventions.

Pathological conditions, as in silent (unconscious) ischemia compared to severe ischemic pain;

Comparisons between waking-state stimulation vs. Slow-wave (delta) sleep, coma and vegetative states, epileptiform loss of consciousness, syncope (fainting), and general anesthesia;

Direct recordings of the C-T oscillatory system in animals and humans. Recently voltage-sensitive study whole-cortex activity in rodents.

These methods show that the cortico-thalamic system underlies the states and contents of consciousness, in contrast to cerebellum, basal ganglia and other subcortical regions. However, to make that case clearly, we must consider a distinction between brain activities that show direct correspondence to conscious experiences, compared to those that do not correspond directly with reported experiences.

1.8 Direct correspondence with reported contents

A damaged brainstem reticular formation (BRF) can abolish the state of consciousness, and therefore its contents as well. But the BRF shows no correspondence to specific contents of consciousness — such as color perception, fine visual resolution, or visual scene comprehension.

In contrast, for vision we can observe specific cortical feature maps whose activities correspond well to conscious contents, as reported under optimal conditions. For vision, final gestalt formation may take place in medial temporal lobe.

In sum, many lines of evidence converge to show that cortex underlies specific conscious percepts, in resonance with corresponding thalamic nuclei.

There are a few qualifications:

Brain regions that do not show direct correspondence can still influence the C-T system, and therefore indirectly influence conscious contents. A classical example is the cerebellum, which constant interacts with the C-T system. But cerebellum does not have neuronal feature fields whose activity patterns correspond to reported experiences. The same point applies to basal ganglia, motor tracts, amygdala, etc. The amygdala responds to fearful visual pictures, but the interoceptive feeling of fear depends on the body maps of the anterior insular cortex. Similarly, the vestibular (balance) system does not emerge in consciousness directly, though it shapes visual, sensorimotor, and interoceptive experiences.

Neurological impairments like visual neglect show that visual maps of the parietal cortex do not yield reportable conscious events. However, these reaching maps do shape direct perception of visual feature maps in the ventral stream.

Paleocortex enables conscious olfaction and taste. It includes hippocampus and rhinal regions, and evolved before the mammalian neocortex and thalamus. It has somewhat different visible anatomy. However, paleocortex and neocortex have strong similarities and are highly integrated in mammals.

Feelings of knowing (FOKs) may reflect conscious gestalt formation in non-sensory cortex. A famous example is the tip of the tongue state, which shows BOLD activity in prefrontal cortex.

1.9 Consciously mediated cognition

Stan Franklin has proposed the term consciously mediated for cognitive processes that come in and out of consciousness. In perceptual experiments we commonly present isolated stimuli, but in natural conditions, conscious moments emerge as part of a stream of consciousness, a series of intertwining topical threads that come to consciousness only intermittently, much like an internet chat room. Overlearned processes tend to be unconscious, using highly practiced automatisms and memory traces. Conscious cognition is needed for unpredictable, novel, significant, or effortful aspects of thinking.

A well-studied example is unconscious amygdala activation in response to fearful pictures. A conscious picture of a snake may trigger unconscious fear-related activity in amygdala, with very widespread activation of emotional, neurohormonal, and social-cognitive processing, while the conscious feeling of fears appears to require activation of the anterior insula. The conscious feeling of fear can then evoke a wide variety of other unconscious and conscious brain events, including fight and flight, but also rational planning.

Experimental evidence for the stream of consciousness comes from thought-monitoring studies, beginning with Jerome Singer and John Antrobus some fifty years ago. These methods have been important in understanding clinical conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

1.10 Voluntary control

Conscious events can evoke voluntary actions on request, notably accurate event reporting, memory storage, sensorimotor control, mental problem solving, and emotional reactions. Voluntary control governs a remarkably wide range of motor and neural activities. Recent intracranial recordings in waking patients shows that even single temporal lobe neurons can be controlled, on request, using conscious feedback from a firing cortical neuron. How the brain selects one among 86 billion neurons to control, given consistent conscious feedback, is not known.

While these indirect effects of conscious moments are obviously important, our focus here is on the direct brain basis for conscious experiences, when a correspondence can be shown between neuronal feature maps and accurate report.

(See Global Workspace, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Adaptive Resonance Theory and Neural Darwinism.)

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Unconscious states

It is surprisingly difficult to prove the complete absence of consciousness. Sleep can vary in arousability from moment to moment, much like vegetative states and general anesthesia. Some mentation is often reported even when subjects are awoken from slow-wave sleep. Coma scientists have made major progress in assessing different degrees of consciousness after brain damage, showing that waking-like functions can be preserved in behavioral coma.

One class of behaviorally inert patients are conscious but paralyzed, a condition called locked-in syndrome. Some locked-in patients have been trained to use voluntary eye fixations on a computer keyboard, allowing them to spell out messages in a nearly normal way. Since any voluntary response can be used, eye fixations can be as good as finger pointing or verbal report.

Even slow-wave sleep may not be entirely unconscious. Deep sleep is characterized by massive, spatially synchronized delta waves, <2 Hz, in the cortex and thalamus. The trough of each delta wave involves widespread pausing of neuronal firing, while the peak shows a waking-style range of oscillations