Consciousness
Introduction
Though consciousness is central to human experience, it has been little studied in psychology. It
was an important part of psychological inquiry in the 19 th century, but languished for most of the
20th century with the insistence on quantitative methods and replicability. In the United States, the
influential behaviorist movement explicitly rejected study of internal states, basing its psychology
on relating stimulus to response. New methods in both neurophysiology and cognitive psychology
have reopened the study of consciousness, however, relating it to essential functions of human
cognition. If we assume that consciousness is a complex enough phenemonon that genes are
required to support it, we can conclude from evolutionary theory that consciousness has a
function. Since it is universal to all people, like eyes or hearts, the neurological machinery that
supports it must rely on genes that are selected for. In contrast, a genetically supported trait that
is not useful tends to disappear. Fish trapped in dark caves, for instance, lose their eyes over
many generations because mutations in the genes supporting eyes are no longer selected
against. If the still-unknown array of genes supporting consciousness is maintained, there must
be some essential capabilities that consciousness bestows. Evolutionary theory does not tell us
what those capabilities are, however. That is the subject of recent and current research.
General Introductions
There are no general college-level textbooks devoted exclusively to consciousness. The closest
approximation is a brief book by Friedenberg ((2013), though it emphasizes consciousness and
attention as applied to vision. Several books, however, include good introductions to a wide
variety of approaches. Uncovering the mechanisms of consciousness has been identified as one
of the most important problems in science (Crick, 1995), yet consciousness has proved
paradoxically difficult to define. The common definition invokes awareness, which merely adds a
near-synonym without defining either term. Baars & Gage (2010) prominently include
consciousness among the core issues in cognitive neuroscience. Banks et al. (2009) provide a
definitive group of chapters by leading scholars on their approaches to consciousness. Block
(2004) defines several levels or kinds of consciousness. Another approach is through language; if
one can talk about a perception or experience, or at least attempt to do so, then that event is
couscious; otherwise it is not. This approach is related to memory, where consciousness is
defined as that which can be recalled. David Eagleman (2011) covers it all, basing his approach
not on the conscious but on the unconscious that defines most of what the brain does. The sense
of agency, that we are in conscious control of our actions, is tested to the extreme by Wegner
(2002). Many of these sources also address the so-called mind/brain problem, the relationship
between a mind that seems personal and a brain that operates by the biological principles of
neurophysiology. Mind, though, is what the brain does, just as digestion is what the stomach
does. Opening up the stomach does not reveal digestion any more than opening up the brain
reveals mind. Mind is a verb, something the brain does. It won’t be found sitting in some brain
module.
Baars, B. & Gage, N. (Eds.), 2010. Cognition, Brain and Consciousness, 3rd Ed. New York:
Elsevier.
Written primarily as an introduction to cognitive neuroscience, the book reflects the authors’
expertise in consciousness but does not require a neuroscience background.
Banks, W., Baars, B., Banaji, M., Bridgeman, B., Gallagher, S., Rees, G., Schooler, J. and
Wegner, D. 2009. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Consciousness. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
A collection of articles by leading scholars on what consciousness is and what functions it might
fulfill.
Block, N. 2004. "Consciousness" in R. Gregory ed. Oxford Companion to the Mind, 2nd
edition.
Block, a philosopher, reviews what consciousness means in several schools of thought, including
the ideas of modern philosophers of mind.
Crick, F. 1995. The astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul. New York:
Touchstone.
In one of the contributions that revived the scientific study of consciousness, Crick’s Nobel prize
gave the field legitimacy.
Eagleman, D. 2011. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon Books.
The brain is conceived as a cluster of semi-autonomous agents, most of them operating
unconsciously, each with a specialized job. It asks among other things whether we are
responsible for our actions if those actions are largely driven by unconscious brain mechanisms.
A compelling read, with lot of surprises. Highly recommended.
Friedenberg, J. 2013. Visual attention and consciousness. New York: Psychology Press.
The first two chapters treat general problems of consciousness, and the last chapter reviews
some of the major theories. The remainder of the book applies these ideas to the visual system.
Wegner, D. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
This is a terriifying book. In the laboratory Wegner and colleagues can make people produce
actions without being aware that they are producing them, or experience actions that they think
they are producing although they are not. Unconscious processing dominates the work of the
brain, and people have little knowledge of what is happening there.
Phenomenology
What distinguishes consciousness? What are the phenomena to be explained? The sources in
this section are the work of philosophers of mind endeavoring to explain what consciousness is
like and how it affects mental life. Churchland (2002) gives a philosopher’s introduction to the
approaches of a number of schools of thought. A lot of these, though, rely on introspection,
thinking about one’s own thinking, which has proved to be disappointing as a source of
information about brain function precisely because so much of that function is unconscious. The
technique has proved notoriously unreliable in psychology, where ideas that seemed obvious
have been proved to be wrong, and vice versa, but it is still occasionally invoked in nonexperimental contexts. Nagel’s (1974) classic paper introduces the feeling of ‘what it is like’,
which has been influential in subsequent philosophical studies. Chalmers (1996) points out the
distinctiveness of the problem of accounting for consciousness, not measurable by normal
behavioral methods. Blackmore (2011) goes a little further by including some neurological
insights.
Blackmore, S. 2011. Consciousness: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
An engagingly well-written exploration of where cosciousness comes from and what it might do
for us.
Chalmers, D. J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a fundamental Theory. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, a philosopher, introduces study of the physiology of behavior and action as the ‘easy
problem’, while consciousness is the ‘hard problem’. The distinction frames much subsequent
work, though if the ‘easy’ problem were really easy it would have been solved it long ago, and
that solution will go a long way toward addressing the ‘hard’ problem.
Churchland, P. S. 2002. Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT
Press.
Churchland distinguishes several aspects of consciousness, each with a distinct phenomenology
and function. Several distinct approaches to the mind/brain relationship are also discussed.
Nagel, T. 1974. What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435 – 450.
Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat, for example, using ‘what it is like’ to begin identifying what
distinguishes consciousness from other mental functions.
Methods of Research
Because there are no obvious objective tests of the private experience of consciousness, as
there are for instance for perception, many indirect methods have been employed. Since
introspection, thinking about one’s own mental processes, has not proved adequate, an array of
other approaches has been employed, each with its strengths and limitations.
Brain Pathology
Since humans cannot be used in invasive neurophysiological studies, brain damage from strokes
or trauma presents natural experiments that provide much of what we know about human brain
organization. Milner and Goodale (1995), a neurologist and a cognitive psychologist, examine the
famous case of a patient who lost her ability to perceive with vision, but retained the ability to
perform some tasks requiring visually guided action. Weiskrantz (1997) coined the term
‘blindsight’, the ability of humans and monkeys to perform some visual tasks in visual fields
rendered blind by removal of the primary visual cortex. In many cases the deficit is restricted to
one part of the visual field, so that the subject can serve as his/her own control. In his 1998 book
he describes generalizations that can be drawn from this line of research. Kentridge et al. (2004)
show that attention can alter properties of blindsight, helping to distinguish attention from
consciousness. Damasio, a leading neurologist and neurological theorist, uses data from braindamaged patients to examine the relation of self to mind.
Damasio, A. R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Examines neurological cases to show relationships of body sense and emotional capability in
forming the conscious mind.
Damasio, A. R. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Consciousness in this analysis arises from the mind applying thought processes to its own
existence.
Kentridge, R. W., Heywood, C. A. & Weiskrantz, L. 2004. Spatial attention speeds
discrimination without awareness in blindsight. Neuropsychologia, 42, 831-835.
The effect of attention on reaction time, even for stimuli picked up without awareness, shows
attentional effects in unconscious processing and demonstrates the distinction between attention
and consciousness.
Milner, A. D. & Goodale, M. A. 1995. The Visual Brain in Action. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Thorough description of a neurological patient who has lost the ability to perceive, but can still
control visually guided behavior. The patient nearly died in a case of carbon monoxide poisining,
and awoke perceptually blind, with no conscious vision but retaining some motor-oriented visual
abilities. The book is the most thorough source for the two-visual-systems theory that separates
perception from action.
Weiskrantz, L. 1998. Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
The case of a patient who after loss of part of the visual system loses the ability to experience
vision, but not the ability to perform some visual tasks.
Weiskrantz, L. 1997. Consciousness lost and found. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Reviews several decades of research on monkeys and humans, demonstrating that monkeys
retain some visual capabiities after removal of part or all of the primary visual cortex. Humans
who have had strokes in the same area are shown to be even more reliant on the cortex.
Neural Correlates
One method seeks changes in the brain that occur at the transition from unconscious to
conscious processing.
Bird, C. M., Castelli, F., Malik, O., Frith, U. & Husain, M. 2004. The impact of extensive
medial frontal lobe damage on “theory of mind” and cognition. Brain, 127, 914-928.
Identifies the medial region of the frontal lobe as key in interpreting the mental states of others,
and in turn the mental states of the self.
Koch, C. 2004. The Quest for Consciousness. Englewood, Co.: Roberts & Company.
The book concentrates on neural mechanisms of perception and attention, and includes a wide
range of physiological information relevant to consciousness. A wide-ranging general
introduction.
Godwin, C. A., Gazzaley, A., & Morsella, E. in press. Homing in on the brain mechanisms
linked to consciousness: The buffer of the perception-and-action interface. In A. Pereira
and D. Lehmann (Eds.), The unity of mind, brain and world: Current perspectives on a
science of consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
A theory is introduced with neural evidence basing conscious states on preparation for motor
action. In the process a function for consciousness is proposed.
Morsella, E., Krieger, S. C., & Bargh, J. A. 2010. Minimal neuroanatomy for a conscious
brain: Homing in on the networks constituting consciousness. Neural Networks, 23, 14 –
15.
Contrasts brain areas that function without consciousness and those that affect conscious
awareness.
Pollen, D. A. 1995. Cortical areas in visual awareness. Nature, 377, 293-294.
Contrasts responses of visual system neurons with awareness of visual events. Many areas of
the visual brain function in a mode inaccessible to consciousness.
Carlson, T., Rauschenberger, R., & Verstraten, F.A.J. 2007. No representation without
awareness in the lateral occipital complex. Psychological Science, 18, 298-302.
Proposes the lateral occipital complex, a part of the visual system, as a seat of visual awareness.
Method of Contrasts
This approach aims to contrast conscious and unconscious brain functions in contexts that are
otherwise as similar as possible, thereby revealing the extra neurological contribution of
conscious processing.
Baars, B. 1988. A Cognitive theory of Consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
One of the first books treating consciousness with modern scientific methods, it contrasts
conscious and unconscious brain functions in the in the context of the ‘global workspace’ theory.
Consciousness in this view serves to allow brain modules access to one another and to behavior.
Baars, B. 1997. In the Theater of Consciousness. New York: Oxford university Press.
Elaborates the global workspace theory, one of the most influential approaches to the neural
substrate of consciousness, with data and thinking produced since the appearance of the earlier
Baars book.
Sleep
As the only sustained unconscious period in normal individuals, sleep presents a natural
experiment in the functions of consciousness. Dement (1974), the founder of the Stanford sleep
laboratory, describes significant discoveries in sleep research. Jouvet (2001) reviews work on
dreaming as a distinct mode of consciousness.
Dement, W. 1974. Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep. San Francisco: Freeman and
Company.
A popular-level classic of sleep research, describing the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM)
sleep among other phenomena such as the stages of sleep. It helped to establish sleep as a
significant area of scientific inquiry.
Jouvet, M. 2001. The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
The author coined the term ‘paradoxical sleep’ to describe REM sleep, the paradox being an EEG
that looks like the intense brain activity of alert waking. He discusses possible functions of sleep
and dreaming, which remain uncertain.
Attention
Attention and consciousness were once thought to be two sides of the same coin, but recent
research has shown them to be distinguishable, as Kanai et al. (2006) demonstrate. Libet et al.
(1983) caused a sensation when he demonstrated neurological events preceding a ‘free-will’
intention to move. Later, Libet (1985) reviews implications of that study and the reactions to it.
Haggard & Cole (2007) elaborate on his result, analyzing components of the response. Haggard
et al. (2002) extend the method to analysis of action.
Haggard, P., Aschersleben, G., Gehrke, J. & Prinz, W. 2002. Action, binding and
awareness. In B. hommel & W. Prinz (Eds.), Attention and Performance XIX: Common
Mechanisms in Perception and Action. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
An international team examines the relationship between action and awareness, concluding
among other things that the planning of action is conscious, while its execution often is not.
Haggard, P. & Cole, J. 2007. Intention, attention and the temporal experience of action.
Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 211-220.
Following up on the Libet et al. (1983) study, psychophysical methods are used to examine the
relationships of stimulus event, the intention to respond, and the actual response (pressing a
key). The experiment controls for attention to the stimulus.
Kanai, R., Tsuchiya, N., & Verstraten, F. A. J. 2006. The scope and limits of top-down
attention in unconscious visual processing. Current Biology, 16, 2332-2336.
Psychophysical methods show that considerable processing, even for attention, can occur
without consciousness.
Libet, B. 1985. Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary
action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529-566.
Libet reviews the reactions to his finding that what seem like willed actions are preceded by
unconscious but measurable brain events. The article is accompanied by comments from leading
researchers and Libet’s reply to them.
Libet, B., Gleason, C., Wright, W. & Pearl, D. 1983. Time of conscious intention to act in
relation to onset of cerebral activities (readiness potential: the unconscious initiation of a
freely voluntary act. Brain, 106, 623-642.
Describes a groundbreaking study in which a cortical potential begins to appear up to half a
second before a person is aware of the intention to move. What seemed conscious and willed is
preceded by unconscious neurological processes. The study has spawned a small industry of
follow-up studies amplifying on the surprising result.
Perception
One of the hallmarks of consciousness is that it underlies perception. We are conscious of what
we perceive, but some sensory processing can proceed without consciousness. Breitmeyer’s
definitive book (1984) reviews conditions in which large, prominent targets can be rendered
invisible by masking with other stimuli. Bridgeman (1992) defines the conditions under which
vision is accompanied by consciousness and conditions not requiring consciousness. Lathrop &
Bridgeman (2011) give a dramatic example of that contrast.
Breitmeyer, B. 1984. Visual Masking: an Integrative approach. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
The authoritative examination of visual stimuli that reach the retina but are not consciously
perceived. Those masked stimuli can still affect behavior, though.
Bridgeman, B. 1992. Conscious vs. unconscious processes: The case of vision. Theory &
Psychology, 2, 73-88.
Shows that most eye movements are generated and controlled unconsciously; also differentiates
two functions of vision, perception on one hand and controlling visually guided behavior on the
other.
Lathrop, B. & Bridgeman, B. 2011. Perception in the Absence of Attention: Evidence of
Perceptual Processing in the Roelofs Effect During Inattentional Blindness. Perception, 40,
1104-19.
An empirical demonstration that visual processing of position information can take place without
awareness. The perceived location of a target is changed without perception of the frame that
induces the change. Subjects can still point accurately to the target, however, despite its illusory
perceived position, demonstrating a mismatch between consciously reported position and motororiented action.
Language
There seems to be a privileged relationship between language and consciousness, because we
are always aware of what we are saying. The systems that generate speech, however, remain
unconscious and somewhat obscure, linking a lexicon and grammatical conventions to thoughts
quickly and effortlessly. Psycholinguist Wim Levelt (1989) examines this process. Bridgeman
(1992) proposes a role for recursive processing as a key human innovation that makes human
thinking much more powerful than that of other animals. Vygotskii (1962) and Luria (1981)
represent the Russian tradition of exploiting natural experiments in child development and
neurological cases respectively.
Bridgeman, B. 1992. On the origin of consciousness and language. Psycoloquy (refereed
electronic journal) psycoloquy.92.consciousness.1.bridgeman.
Shows how hearing one’s own speech allows ideas to take a second pass through the brain,
amplifying the power of human thinking. Consciousness allows a person to act on the world,
rather than waiting to respond to external stimuli. The paper is followed by comments from a
number of experts.
Levelt, W. J. M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
One of the world’s leading psycholinguists demonstrates the special relationship between
awareness and speech, with all of the steps in between.
Luria, A. R. (1981) Language and Cognition. translated by J. V. Wertsch (Ed.). New York:
Wiley.
A neurologist’s view of the close relationship of language to cognition, gained largely from study
of a large group of brain-damaged patients.
Vygotskii, L. S. (1962) Thought and language. translated by E.Hanfmann and G. Vakar
(Eds.). Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press.
In this classic written several decades earlier in Russian, Vygotskii (there are other
transliterations of his name from the Cyrilic) shows with ingenious experiments how language
comes to dominate thinking in the course of child development.
The Split-Brain Preparation
For several decades neurosurgeons have occasionally severed the corpus callosum, the bundle
of fibers that connects the left and right halves of the brain, to relieve otherwise intractable
epilepsy. The side effects seemed to be minimal until Sperry (1966) discovered that the patients
were aware only of stimuli that entered one hemisphere. The brain split also affected motor
activity, for instance where the hand controlled by the reading hemisphere picks up a book while
the hand controlled by the other hemisphere tries to put it down. Sperry’s seminal discovery
spawned a research specialty investigating split brains in animals and humans. Gazzaniga (1970;
1995), a student of Sperry’s, summarizes subsequent work defining the deficit and its origins. To
study the effects of a severed corpus callosum more closely, researchers began investigating
monkeys whose hemispheres had been isolated surgically.
Gazzaniga, M. 1970. The Bisected Brain. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Interprets classical studies by Sperry, Gazzaniga and others in humans and monkeys defining the
different specializations of left and right cortical hemispheres. Consciousness is located in the
‘dominant’ hemisphere, the left in most people. The test, though, is that the dominant hemisphere
controls speech, so we hear only from that hemisphere in split-brain patients. In normal people, te
two hemispheres are tightly and intimately connected.
Gazzaniga, M. 1995. Principles of human brain organization derived from split-brain
studies. Neuron, 14, 217-228.
Reviews further work on the specializations of the two brain hemispheres derived from studies of
animals and split-brain patients, finding a conscious hemisphere that emphasizes language and
sequential organization, and an unconscious non-dominant hemisphere that does more holistic
processing. The differences appear in only a few cortical areas.
Sperry, R. 1966. Brain bisection and consciousness. In J. Eccles (Ed.), Brain and
Conscious Experience. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Nobel laureate Roger Sperry describes experiments that restrict stimulation to one side of the
brain or the other in split-brain patients, finding consciousness in only one hemisphere, termed
the dominant hemisphere. The work revolutionized study of the neurological basis of
consciousness.
Memory
In one dominant interpretation, consciousness is nothing more or less than the operation of a
particular kind of working memory. The test for conscious awareness is often a memory test,
asking whether a person remembers what has just transpired. Grossberg (1999) reviews these
links with an eye to the contrast between consciousness of sensory stimulation and lack of
consciousness of the mechanisms of motor execution. A motor learning system probably
centered in the cerebellum handles unconscious learning for instance of how to ride a bicycle.
Milner et al. (1998) describe the role of episodic memory, mostly from intensive study of a patient
who lost the ability to form new long-term memories due to an operation that removed his
hippocampus on both sides. Baddeley (2007) reviews his influential discoveries during a lifetime
of work on memory, differentiating a number of memory systems, their functions, and their
interactions. In another memory-related line of research, Reber (1967) discovered that learning
without awareness was possible even for verbal learning. This paper founded a line of research
by many workers, investigating possible complications in the design and interpretation of the
work. Recent research (Moore et al., 2012) takes advantage of this tradition, using a similar
method to investigate the sense of agency, the sense that an action is purposeful.
Baddeley, A.D. 2007. Working Memory, Thought and Action. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Baddeley describes the episodic buffer, the phonological loop, and other components of working
memory that were previously lumped together as short-term memory. A ‘central executive’
manages the whole system.
Grossberg, S. 1999. The link between brain learning, attention, and consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 1 – 44.
Learning and memory are seen as keys to consciousness, driving attention and motivating
behavior.
Milner, B., Squire, L. R. & Kandel, E. R. 1998. Cognitive neuroscience and the study of
memory. Neuron, 20, 445-468.
Demonstrates with data from neurological patients that ability to form new long-term memories is
not essential for consciousness.
Moore, J. W., Middleton, D., Haggard, P. & Fletcher, P. C. 2012. Exploring implicit and
explicit aspects of sense of agency. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 1748-1753.
This brief paper directly pits explicit and implicit learning against one another, finding separate
mechanisms for the two kinds of learning that interact with one another in the short term.
Reber, A. 1967. Implicit learning of artificial grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 6, 855-863.
Subjects could learn grammatical rules of an artificial grammar from examples, and use them to
judge whether new strings of symbols fit the rules, all without reaizing that they had learned the
rules. They were also unable to desctibe the rules when asked.
Sperling, G. 1960. The information available in brief presentation. Psychological
Monographs, 74, Whole No. 498.
The discovery of a high-capacity sensory memory that lasts less than half a second and operates
unconsciously, but feeds longer-term memory systems. It is tightly connected to a particular
sense modality and preserves information without interpreting it.
Neurophysiological Models
The global workspace theory of Baars (2005) was one of the first and still one of the most
influential theories of the brain mechanisms of consciousness. Functions of consciousness are
examined by Pribram (1990) and by Morsella (2005), both taking a modular approach. Gazzaniga
and Miller (2009) take the extreme view of the limited role of consciousness in the brain. Finally,
Pereira et al. (2010) put it all together by summarizing and comparing various theories.
Baars, B. J. 2005. Global workspace theory of consciousness: Toward a cognitive
neuroscience of human experience. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 45 – 53.
Describes recent work on one of the leading theories of consciousness, as allowing access to
wide regions of the brain with varying functions.
Gazzaniga, M. & Miller, M. B. 2009. The left hemisphere does not miss the right
hemisphere. In S. Saureys & G. Tononi (Eds.), The Neurobiology of consciousness Pp.
261-270. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
This chapter represents the most extreme view of the limitations of consciousness. The only
conscious part of the brain is an area in the left prefrontal cortex whose job is to observe the
unconsciously directed behavior of the owner of the brain, as though by a third party, and tell a
story about that behavior. The story is then used by unconscious parts of the brain to plan future
behavior. Everything else is unconscious.
Morsella, E. 2005. The function of phenomenal states: Supramodular interaction theory.
Psychological Review, 112, 1000 – 1021.
A neurologically based analysis of a modular structure of the brain, and modular interactions in
the brain.
Pereira, J. R. A., Edwards, J. C. W., Lehmann, D., Nunn, C., Trehub, A. & Velmans, M.
2010. Understanding consciousness: A collaborative attempt to elucidate contemporary
theories. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17, 213-19.
An even-handed review of both conceptual and scientific theories, illustrating lack of consensus
among those studying consciousness.
Pribram, K. H. 1990. Introduction: Brain and consciousness. In E. R. John (Ed.), Machinery
of the Mind. Cambridge, Ma.: Birkhaeuser.
Consciousness is related to planning, resulting in reflective self-awareness that is traced back
through von Uexkull in the early 20th century to Brentano in the 19th. Consciousness allows the
organism to operate in the world despite the immediate demands of the environment, rather than
because of those demands.
Social Models
An important set of approaches consider cnsciousness to arise from the evolutionary pressure for
humans and other organisms to understand the intentions of others and to anticipate their
actions. The resulting capability is turned back on the self, resulting in self-awareness.
Baumeister and Masicampo (2010) propose a function of consciousness in social interactions;
Graziano and Kastner (2011) take the idea further, proposing that the same mental machinery is
used in detecting the mental states and intentions of others (‘theory of mind’) and in detecting our
own mental states and intentions (consciousness). Minsky (1985), a computer scientist,
independently proposes a mind made up of a cluster of specialized modules.
Baumeister, R. F. & Masicampo, E. J. 2010. Conscious thought is for facilitating social and
cultural interactions: How mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface.
Psychological Review, 117, 945-971.
Anticipates the theory of Graziano & Kastner, below, proposing a practical function for
consciousness.
Graziano, M. S. A. and Kastner, S. 2011. Human consciousness and its relationship to
social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis. Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 98-113.
A brilliant analysis starting with awareness as a perceptual reconstruction of attention. The
mental machinery that evolved to resolve other people’s awareness is turned back on ourselves
to compute information about our own awareness.
Minsky, M. 1985. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Demonstrates how the mind can be analyzed as a large group of semi-independent modules,
most of them operating unconsciously. Society is used as a metaphor for brain organization.