The Parts of a Theater: Major features of conscious cognition can be approached with a theater metaphor, an ancient but still useful idea.

States of consciousness are switched on and off by small nuclei at the bottom of the brain, including chronobiological timing nuclei like the suprachiasmatic nuclei, located immediately above the crossing (chiasma) between the two optic nerves, where they “decussate” (split) into the lateral half-retinas, which send their optical projections to the same-sided thalami and hemispheres, while the nasal half-retinas cross over the midline to the opposite hemisphere.

This pattern of cross wiring between left and right sensory and motor channels is pervasive, and is thought to go back to a major evolutionary change associated with vertebrate land-dwelling quadruped locomotion, followed by upright bipedalism and forward rotation of the head in ancestral primates. Cross wiring is therefore an example of the ultra-conservation of major features of the body and nervous system. Both the evolution and ontogeny of the brain, beginning in utero, exert major influences on the mature brain.

At the bottom of the image three graphs show the classical scalp EEG signatures of waking, Slow Wave Sleep (Non-REM), and REM dreaming. However direct electrical recording from the living brain shows far more spatial and temporal specificity than traditional scalp EEG.

The Parts of a Theater

1. The stage of working memory. Here is a little demonstration to help focus again on the facts. Try to stop your inner speech for ten seconds (timing yourself by looking at a clock). I find it impossible to do for more than five seconds or so. It is the simplest possible demonstration, but it shows how dependent we are on the flow of inner speech, which is one dimension of our working memory.

Now think about traveling from home to work, remembering to stop off at the supermarket on the way home… can you see it? It is difficult not to see concrete spatial descriptions. That is the domain of working imagery. Over the last few decades we have gathered a body of solid evidence about the verbal and visual components of working memory, but one thing has not changed: both components are remarkably limited in their capacity to retain information.

As we pointed out above, we can still retrieve words and images from working memory (WM) after they have faded, for some seconds. Thus WM is mostly in the dark at any single time. Yet we need to be aware of the active elements in working memory, including sensory input, rehearsed and imagined items, items we act on voluntarily (by rehearsing a phone number, for instance), and those we plan to act on. We may say that WM input, output, and manipulated items in WM apparently need to be conscious.

2. The bright spotlight of attention. We can shift at will among the numbers we are keeping in working memory. In imagining the supermarket on the way home, we can focus at will on the various items for sale, the apples or the soap. The contents of consciousness can be guided, both voluntarily and spontaneously, like a bright spot on the stage of working memory. As we showed before, WM is not entirely conscious. We can add this feature to our theater metaphor. Let’s say that the theater has a powerful spotlight of attention, and only events in the bright spot on stage are strictly conscious.

3. The actors competing for the bright spot. All working memories show competition between different actors, the potential thoughts, images or sensations that try to reach the stage (Figure 2). The more conscious involvement is required for any actor, the more it will compete against the others.

This image of an actor trying to gain access to the spotlight of attention is too simple, of course. Sensory systems have a vast range of contents, from a single star on a dark night to a fast-moving ball game in a crowded stadium. There is much evidence to show that the actors can be decomposed into single sensory neurons, and recomposed into complex multimodal events involving millions of sensory cells.

Metaphors have their limits, and this is clearly one of them.

4. Contextual frames shape scenes. Any experience is shaped by unconscious frames (contexts), just as events on stage are shaped by directors and stage hands behind the scenes. Much attentional selection is spontaneous and unconscious, as if commands from behind the scenes influence the direction of the spotlight.

All perceptual systems are shaped by unconscious factors; our visual perception of depth is shaped by the unconscious assumption that light comes from above. Lighting someone’s face from below can make it unrecognizable. Above we have shown the difference in our understanding of the word set when it is preceded by put vs. tennis. That kind of frame-sensitivity is universal in language, perception, action control, memory, problem-solving, etc.

Even conceptual assumptions can act as unconscious frames (contexts). Each of us is run by beliefs that are unconscious at the time they shape our thoughts and actions. Consider the famous mind–body debate. Ask someone about their own freedom of action, and they will claim some kind of free-will mentalism. Ask them about taking a physical aspirin for a mental headache, and they will smoothly switch to dualism. Ask college students whether their minds can be understood in terms of neurons, and they will probably agree to physicalistic reductionism. Each of these positions involves a cluster of beliefs, most of which are unconscious most of the time. Yet they shape our conscious thoughts every second of the day.

The Director

Executive functions seem to be contextual frames in just this way. They seem to make use of the conscious bright spot, even when they are not conscious themselves. It is believed that human working memory is guided by some sort of executive system that makes decisions guided by goals. The decision to rehearse a telephone number may not be entirely conscious. We rarely have much access to the reasons why we do anything, and when we are forced to guess we are often wrong. Thus it seems that the theater director also works invisibly behind the scenes. Such executive functions are apparently located in frontal cortex; damage to this part of the brain leads to a predictable loss of ability to guide one’s actions by long-term goals.

5. The audience. Consciousness is the gateway to a vast unconscious collection of specialized knowledge. All unified models of cognition today suggest some sort of unconscious audience: It may be called long-term memory or automatic productions, but it consists of multiple specialized capacities that are not conscious. We have illustrated three examples above, and we will explore some implications below.

Psychologists have become convinced that the real work in navigating through the problem spaces of our lives is done unconsciously for most of us most of the time. This is a counterintuitive idea. Intuitively we tend to think of our selves as being in charge of our actions, our bodies, even our thoughts. But the nervous system prefers a different style of operating, one that is more distributed, in which most of the work is done in a decentralized way, by local processors.

Executive control does exist, but it seems to take place by way of those distributed specialized capacities. In saying a word, we have some overall control, but the delicate and subtle execution of speech articulation is largely unconscious.

Some Implications

1. Learning is guided by selective attention, and evoked by conscious access.

2. The idea that consciousness is a gateway — something that creates access to a vast unconscious mind — has interesting implications for understanding learning. It suggests that learning just requires us to point our consciousness at some material we want to learn, like some giant biological camera, and the detailed analysis and storage of the material will take place unconsciously. Given a conscious target, it seems as if learning occurs magically, without effort or guidance, carried out by some skilled squad of unconscious helpers.

For two decades cognitive scientists have tried to model expert knowledge in medicine, physics, and computer programming. The big lesson of those years is that expert knowledge is highly domain specific: medical knowledge, for example, is so different from computer programming that almost nothing in one domain applies to the other. And yet as human beings we do only one thing with whatever we need to learn: we just bring it to consciousness, and specialized learning somehow occurs.

Language activates an utterly different part of the brain than visual events, which are yet different from planning and feeling, action control, learning what foods taste good, and hundreds of other specialized mechanisms for interpreting conscious information. We direct our attention to the formula x = y + 3, play with its elements and rules, and somehow, with no detailed conscious encoding of the information, we acquire the ability to understand and use it. We learn to see new visual patterns simply by paying attention to a set of X-rays or a series of Flemish paintings. We learn to hear in new ways merely by listening to bird songs or symphonies. Paying attention — becoming conscious of some material — seems to be the sovereign remedy for learning anything, applicable to many very different kinds of information. It is the universal solvent of the mind.

How can we think about this with the theater notion? It seems that all the learning engines are located in the darkened audience of the theater. Conscious events on stage seems to elicit automatic learning in certain unconscious neural assemblies. It is the audience members that do the learning, just as in the real theater.

3. Implicit learning. Children learning language do not label the words they hear as nouns or verbs. Rather, they pay attention to speech sounds, and as a consequence, the underlying regularities are learned implicitly. We rarely become conscious of abstract patterns — the regularities of grammar, the harmonic progressions of a symphony, or the delicate brushwork of Vermeer. Most knowledge is tacit knowledge; most learning is implicit.

Nevertheless, even in implicit learning we must be conscious of the material from which we derive the unconscious pattern. A child learning the rules of grammar must listen quite consciously to a long series of spoken sentences. Thus the weight of evidence today suggests that all learning requires conscious access to what is to be learned. In theater terms, it is as if we merely place an actor in the spotlight, and the audience will silently remember his or her speech.

4. Automatisms steer us through the world. Try to read the following words without hearing them in your inner speech:

inchoate Pappa Doc Infundibulum

The mere visual experience of a printed word seems to trigger automatic inner speech for most of us. A large part of the unconscious consists of complex automatic processes, that are triggered by conscious priming events. Again, it seems as if events in the spotlight of attention automatically trigger complex uncontrolled events that take place in the audience.

5. Problem-solving functions. Consciousness creates access to unconscious problem-solving. The famous incubation process in mathematics involves a conscious question, unconscious work on the problem, and a conscious emergence of the solution. But we can see the same three-stage pattern in answering everyday questions: What is your mother’s maiden name? What is 20 x 13? In each case, there is a brief pause, and then, without conscious work on the question, the answer appears. It is as if unconscious algorithms about one’s mother, or about multiplying numbers, are recruited by a conscious appeal for an answer.

The theater analogy is clear: we only need to have an actor proclaim a question, and special problem solvers in the audience go to work to solve the problem without further conscious involvement. When an answer is found, it is often returned to consciousness, as if an audience member mounts the stage to announce the answer.

6. Priming: consciousness is used to set the stage for future events. Remember the list of words (above), each followed by set? Each of those words served to prime a certain interpretation of set. And indeed, the title of this section helped to prime your interpretation of this sentence at this very moment. But of course you are not conscious of the section title at this very moment, because doing that would interfere with what you are conscious of now.

One of the remarkable features of conscious experiences is how they can trigger unconscious frames (contexts) that help to interpret later conscious events. It is as if some actors have the function of announcing changed circumstances, that will shape our understanding of the next scene, like the witches in Macbeth.

7. Consciousness also creates access for the self. In a brilliant observation, Daniel Dennett (1978) has written that:

“That of which I am conscious is that to which I have access, or (to put the emphasis where it belongs), that to which I have access…”

I have access to perception, thought, memory, and body control. Each of us would be mightily surprised if we were unable to gain conscious access to some vivid recent memory, some sight, smell or taste in the immediate world, or some well-known fact about our own lives such as our name. The self involved in conscious access is sometimes referred to as the self as observer. William James called it the knower, the I.

This is of course our common intuition, one that was not seriously doubted until the 20th century, when philosophers like Gilbert Ryle found ways to question it. Empirically we now know that Ryle was wrong. The narrative interpreter found in the left frontal cortex of split-brain patients, does indeed receive conscious sensory information (Gazzaniga, 1993). The narrative interpreter takes in and comments on that information, acts upon it, and is able to describe it; in general it displays just the kind of access to conscious input that one would expect from the everyday notion of self.

There may be a complementary but inarticulate self in the right frontal cortex. Without such access of the observing self, we cannot obtain information from the world, from memory, or from imagined ideas of the future. Without frontal cortex we cannot exercise voluntary control over skeletal muscles or inner speech. When the observing self is eclipsed by psychogenic fugue or multiple personality disorder, victims report time loss — as if the eclipse in the observing self has also caused consciousness to disappear, for weeks or even months. The observing self seems to be a necessary framework for conscious experience.