UPDATED WORKS ON GLOBAL WORKSPACE THEORY: 1988 - 2013
A coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) is the most current version of GWT - attempting to take into account the complexities of the living brain. These updated works trace the beginnings of GWT/GWD through the continued rise of brain evidence and psychological understanding.
GWT provides a widely used framework for conscious and unconscious brain events, a set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been.
How can we understand the evidence?
The best answer today is a ‘global workspace architecture,’ first developed by cognitive modeling groups led by Alan Newell and Herbert A. Simon. 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. Some brain implications of the theory have been explored.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?” Global Workspace (GW) theory provides the most widely used framework to date for our rapidly accumulating body of evidence. It is consistent with our current knowledge, and can be enriched to include other aspects of human experience.
Stan Franklin - LIDA: Cognitive Architecture's Computational Implementation of GWT
Our colleague and friend Stan Franklin and his many co-workers have built on GWT to sketch out a more general theory of cognition.
Dehaene-Changeux Model (DCM): Global Neuronal Workspace is Part of GWT
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.
Global Workspace Theory from soup to nuts.
Global Workspace Theory is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as I first suggested in 1983.
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.