by Bernard J. Baars | Jan 7, 2022 | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Seasonal Affective Disorder
Human beings have known about “Winter sadness” for a long, long time. However, scientific research on SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is still recent. We know that sunlight and artificial light helps, especially in the mornings, to “pace” your biological light...
by Bernard J. Baars | Aug 15, 2021 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, mindbrain
Suppose Captain Kirk and the Star Trek crew landed on a mysterious planet with an ancient, deeply buried Zombie civilization. How could Kirk find out if the Zombies are still secretly alive, somewhere deep underneath the planet? Or suppose your cell phone died one day...
by Bernard J. Baars | Jun 15, 2021 | Unconscious Processes, Unconscious States
[This is an excerpt from Part II of my latest book On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity.] Looking directly at the brain we see great orderly forests of neurons, each...
by Bernard J. Baars | May 5, 2021 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Cortex and Consciousness
The cortex is a flat sheet, shown beautifully here by Van Essen et al (see the Van Essen Lab at the University of St. Louis). This is the six-layered sheet of cells and fibers that makes up our cortex, the “neo-cortex” (because it really expands for mammals like...
by Bernard J. Baars | Apr 20, 2021 | conscious brain, Global Workspace Theory
“So, I want to just return to the Global Workspace Theory. You’retelling 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...
by Bernard J. Baars | Mar 15, 2021 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Global Workspace Theory
[This is an excerpt from Part II of my latest book On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity and is Part 2 in a 3 Part series on “A Working Theater of Consciousness”. To read part 1, please click here] ...
by Bernard J. Baars | Mar 1, 2021 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Global Workspace Theory
. . . “Why don’t we start out with a little bit of a definition of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about ‘consciousness’, because we can mean a whole lot of different things by it. I’m wondering if...
by Bernard J. Baars | Feb 22, 2021 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Cortex and Consciousness
[This is an excerpt from Part II of my latest book On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity.] In Book VII of Plato’s Republic (Plato, 1956) we find the following allegory: Imagine mankind as dwelling in an underground cave with necks and legs fettered, so they...
