“One of the major features of the Global Workspace hypothesis began with limited capacity, that there has to be a compensatory event in the brain happening, and the most plausible one, for various reasons, including other people’s work, of course, was that there’s some kind of very wide recruitment of brain resources that happens as a function of becoming conscious of something.“
– Dr. Bernard Baars, originator of Global Workspace Theory and Global Workspace Dynamics, a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex and consciousness
In this episode of the podcast On Consciousness With Bernard Baars, neuroscientist Bernard Baars sat down with two interviewers, Ilian Daskalov and Alea Skwara to discuss Global Workspace Theory, which is the widely used framework Baars developed in 1983 that deals with conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain.
Together, the trio explores the origins and various components of Baars’ Global Workspace Theory (GWT), a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex, and consciousness. GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious events in the functioning of the brain, a set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been in the last twenty years. Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) is the most current version of GWT — attempting to take into account the complexities of the living brain.
They touched on a variety of topics, including: the origins of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), a few main features of GWT, a few things people get wrong about GWT, how Baars’ own understanding and conceptualization of GWT has changed over the years, and why it’s so difficult to define the term ‘Consciousness.’
Bernie opens the conversation with the point that consciousness has largely been perceived as a passive state. When scientists initially started recording brain activity, the collection of brain regions which were active in the absence of a given task were considered to be “the brain’s metabolic baseline.” This notion, however, has received plenty of pushback in recent years and this baseline is now regarded as an active cognitive task.
“Researchers and philosophers have been debating the nature and origins of consciousness for centuries. There are many different theories both of what consciousness is, and what creates it. One of Bernie’s major contributions to the science of consciousness is Global Workspace Theory, or GWT. In the most basic terms, GWT is a hypothesis about how conscious experience arises from in the mind, and, more recently, about how the brain might give rise to conscious experience.”
— Alea Skwara, postdoctoral scholar at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and Global Migration Center
Stream and download On Consciousness with Bernard Baars on your favorite podcast platform: PodBean, ApplePodcasts, iHeart, GooglePlay, GooglePodcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, aCast, YouTube, and Spotify.
Talking Points:
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0:00 – Intro by Natalie Geld, Bernard Baars, Alea Skwara & Ilian Daskalov
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5:58 – Is a Stream of Consciousness a Passive State?
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11:59 – How is Consciousness Defined?
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18:29 – Unpacking the Origins of Global Workspace Theory
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28:37 – Features of Global Workspace Theory
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37:45 – The Limited Capacity of Conscious Awareness
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42:36 – Parallel Integrated Computing
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50:28 – Widespread Integration and Broadcasting
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1:00:55 – What People Get Wrong About GWT
Bios
Bernard J. Baars: a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, Bernie is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory and global workspace dynamics, a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex and consciousness. Bernie’s many acclaimed books include A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness; The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology; In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind; Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience. Winner of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by the International Neural Network Society, which recognizes work in perception proven to be paradigm changing and long-lasting.
Alea Skwara is now a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and Global Migration Center. Her research explores the neurocognitive bases of compassion and adaptive responses to suffering, and how we can bridge basic research and urgent real-world issues to create a more just society for all.
Ilian Daskalov is a senior undergraduate student at University of California, Irvine where he studies Cognitive Science. His research interests include sleep, psychedelics, and artificial intelligence and he is passionate about communicating science and promoting critical thinking.
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.
