“So, I want to just return to the Global Workspace Theory. You’re
telling me about the context in which it arose, which was in a time when people were beginning to imagine that the brain might work something like a computer. And what I’m hearing you say is that in some ways, this constrained our imaginations about how our brains might really be working.”
— Ginger Campbell, MD
In October, my colleague Dr. David Edelman and I were guests on a popular podcast, BRAIN SCIENCE With Ginger Campbell, MD.
Our wide-ranging discussion covered a variety of neuroscience topics but focused primarily on the origins of Global Workspace Theory (GWT) which is a model of consciousness I developed in the 1980s. The central idea of GWT is that conscious cognitive content is globally available for diverse cognitive processes including attention, evaluation, memory, and verbal report.
BRAIN SCIENCE With Ginger Campbell, MD was launched in 2006 by Dr. Ginger Campbell, an experienced emergency physician with a passion for exploring how recent discoveries in neuroscience are revealing how our brains make us who we are. This podcast is for non-scientists, scientists, and everyone in between and Dr. Edelman and I were both thrilled to have been invited on to Dr. Campbell’s show!
“The idea of a theater containing an audience of very specialized folks that have specialized different sort of knowledge sources and at some point, there’s a global signal that triggers some sort of reentrant mapping, that triggers some sort of a temporal synchrony of these things, and there’s sort of a resonance. And that resonance is sort of the processional fabric of awaking consciousness.”
— Dr. David Edelman
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.
