The new identification of the global workspace results from the intersection of key causal brain regions involved in orchestrating the performance of seven cognitive tasks and the resting state. Credit: Universitat Pompeu Fabra — Barcelona
An important new article by Professors Gustavo Deco, Diego Vidaurre, and Morton L. Kringelbach has advanced the debate about consciousness considered as a kind of “theater” or “global workspace.”
The idea that the stream of consciousness involved global integration and spreading of perceived information was advanced by Baars in the 1980s, based on a large body of psychological evidence. The brain imaging revolution doubled or tripled that mountain of evidence, but the question remained, “What kind of brain activity could carry out a global workspace (GW) function?”.
Now, easily we may think that the thalamus, that rests in the center of each hemisphere like an egg in a bird’s nest, would be the center of everything. But evolution decided otherwise.
Thanks to a global collaboration between the Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK and the Center for Music in the Brain, University of Aarhus, Professors Deco, Vidaurre and Kringelbach chose to look at the strength of connectivity between neurons in the cortex, and then focus on the most heavily traveled parts of the cortex, called the “functional rich club” of cells and links.
This interesting brain interpretation of the GW as the “rich club” of best-connected nodes in the connectome is like a downtown in a city, where connecting people, houses, and streets is easy. This important paper is very well written, and the evidence is knockout.
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Source: Deco, G., Vidaurre, D. & Kringelbach, M.L. Revisiting the global workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organization of the human brain. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01003-6
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?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
