An invitation to understand the mindbrain
Cortex is the organ of mind.
The double-decker cortex, both the outer neocortex and the inner paleocortex, were proposed to be the “organ of mind,” as pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield wrote, based on 1,200 open brain-surgeries in conscious epileptic patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Speculation along those lines goes back more than two thousand years to the School of Hippocrates of Cos. But proof positive has been extremely difficult to obtain, and it has taken long-term research programs with advanced brain imaging to settle the question.
This image shows the physical stimulation of the fovea, the functional center of the retina, roughly a 1000x1000 array of dense receptors.
The retinal array is mirrored point-to-point in the visual thalamus (LGN), and again in the first visual projection region called V1. Critically, the connectivity of LGN and V1 is bi-directional, with any minicolumn in LGN linking to a minicolumn in V1, and vice versa. This would seem to risk an explosive feedback loop, but the waking cortex runs very well in the normal, healthy brain.
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#27 – Is Willpower Like Muscle Power? with Roy F. Baumeister
EXPLORING THE SCIENCE OF EGO DEPLETION & WILLPOWER WITH PSYCHOLOGIST ROY F. BAUMEISTER Episode 27 features Professor Roy Baumeister, one of the world’s most prolific and influential psychologists, known for his work on the self, social rejection,...
#26 – SMELL, TASTE & CONSCIOUSNESS: A Special Interview with Neurobiologist, Dr. Stuart Firestein.
The olfactory system detects molecular odorants. It has both similarities and differences from the other senses. We often talk about five major senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Actually, there are more than five, like pain, sensory...
#25 – Human Consciousness & AI: What Does the Future Hold? A Special Interview with Dr. Susan Schneider
Dr. Susan Schneider is Founding Director of FAU's Center for the Future Mind, and co-director of the MPCR Lab at FAU's new Gruber Sandbox, a large facility which builds AI systems drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments.For the last 200,000...
#24 – “The Conscious Brain Evolved” with Jay Giedd, David Edelman & Mark Mitton
The home of the late Nobel Laureate, Gerald Edelman, is the setting for an elevated discussion on human consciousness among three neuroscientists and a professional magician. Bernie Baars opens the discussion by asking what is on top of everyone’s...
#23 – Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Prefrontal Cortex: Recent Developments (Baars et al., 2021)
“One of the major errors in the Raccah et al. (2021) paper is that Raccah and his co-authors looked at the different brain regions as separate “neighborhoods,” without taking into consideration the functional interactions between its different parts.” - Bernard...
#22: Consciousness Has an Integrative Function
“Can consciousness be seen as the key to understanding our surroundings and organizing our actions?" - David Edelman, PhD, Neuroscientist and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College Episode 22 of our podcast...
#21: The Duet of Physics & Psychology
“Subjectivity and consciousness are the two main mysteries that science is still faced with. I'm an optimist. I believe that in the next half a century we might make progress on understanding consciousness." - Stanley A. Klein, psychophysicist, professor of...
#20: Neural Traffic Flow in the Conscious Brain
“The brain seeks meaning and patterns. It would be very adaptive to do so in nature, because you need to know how to predict danger and to develop social ties. So our brains are very good at recognizing patterns, but also at creating them, even when they're not...
#19: The Sleeping Brain: Better Than a Cup of Coffee
“Studies show that, especially for young children, if you prematurely wake them up and deprive them of that much needed sleep, it becomes detrimental to their proper cognitive development further down in life. I just wonder about the amount of damage we’re...
#18: Global Workspace Functions, the Brain and Consciousness: Connectivity, Waking, & Sleep
“I think a feature, like Bernie mentioned, of sleeping is that we’re not attending to things in our sensory environment in the same way. Maybe we’re dreaming, maybe we don’t have any awareness of what’s going on, but our brain doesn’t just stop working." ...
#17: Global Workspace Theory: Exploring Evidence for Widespread Integration & Broadcasting of Conscious Signals
“I think in terms of consciousness, it seems to me that these Feelings of Knowing are perhaps the conscious tip of the iceberg for this huge amount of unconscious processing that's going on of all this information in our environment, where maybe I couldn't tell you...
#16: Global Workspace Theory: Exploring Origins and Evidence
“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...
#15: Dr. Heather Berlin on the Future of Artificial Intelligence
“While our understanding of consciousness is yet incomplete, the biological components that it consists of appear to be fundamental building blocks." - Dr. Heather Berlin, Neuropsychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai In Episode 15 of our...
Observational Definitions of Consciousness
Many scientists ask us "What is the meaning of consciousness?" That is an historical question, because none of the empirical sciences started with adequate definitions. Scientific concepts like “heat,” “force” and “momentum” evolved over long periods of time,...
What Is The Fundamental Nature of Reality? Facing the philosophical “mind-body” debate.
The Philosophical “Mind-Body” Debate. What is the Fundamental Nature of Reality? Is it Mental or Physical? Technical philosophers go into immense detail to justify their positions on the mind-body problem, but over the last 25 centuries there have only been three main...
#14: Psychedelics, Impulsivity, and Brain Stimulation with Dr. Heather Berlin
. . . “In many cases you can see an immediate effect, as in chronic depression — suddenly you turn on the electrodes — you don’t tell them when it’s on or off, right? And...
Winter SADness? Light therapy might help!
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...
Breakthrough: A Brain Measure of Consciousness?
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...
A Vast Collection of Unconscious Processes
[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...
YOUR CORTEX IS FLAT: A Basic Insight Into 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...
What constrained our imaginations about how our brains might really be working? The Brain Science Podcast with Ginger Campbell, MD
“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...
The Parts of a Theater: Major features of conscious cognition can be approached with a theater metaphor, an ancient but still useful idea.
[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] ...
Bernard Baars on Tackling Consciousness Scientifically : The CogNation Podcast Interview
. . . “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...
A Working Theater of 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...
Treating Sciencephobia : How to read real science without having a nervous breakdown
For reasons that drive scientists close to despair, many media writers get science stories wrong. They make small advances look like Great Leaps Forward, and when really big steps take place they usually miss the real story. This is sad, because real science is such a...
What kind of brain activity could carry out a global workspace (GW) function?
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...
Episode #13: Thinking About Animal Consciousness with David Edelman
. . . "The only way we get certainty or stability in the world is to start from what we know, and gradually move to what we don't know." - Bernard Baars, PhD The question of...
Episode #12: The Brain is Embodied and the Body is Embedded
"Consciousness can be firmly embedded in biology, based on the fact that all kinds of [demonstrably biological] processes that are not [by themselves] conscious are important for conscious process[ing]." -- David Edelman, PhD, a neuroscientist and a Visiting Scholar...
Episode #11: Brain Regions & Neural Functions Critical to Conscious States with Dr. Jay Giedd
"Episodic memory involves conscious experiences being encoded. Same goes for semantic and autobiographical memories. All varieties of memories come in through conscious moments of recall. So, I think that consciousness is the means by which any kinds of memories are...
Episode #10: Global Workspace Theory (GWT) – Brain Aspects and Evidence with Dr Jay Giedd
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." And I think ultimately that's the test of a construct like Global Workspace Theory - does it lead us to greater knowledge? Does it suggest areas of research? Does it make predictions that we can test? And that's why I think...
Episode #8: In the context of developing human brains, how can we understand consciousness?
"I want to try to understand consciousness from a neuroanatomy and neuro-function standpoint. What would consciousness look like in a brain scanner and other types of imaging? What are we looking for, in a sense, and could I predict from basically the architecture and...
Episode #7: On Consciousness & The Brain – An Uplifting Discussion with Bernard Baars & David Edelman at DG Wills Books
In this uplifting episode recorded at La Jolla landmark D.G. Wills Books, neuroscientists Bernie Baars & David Edelman unpack the nature of consciousness — the ineffable sense of ‘aboutness’ each one of us experiences that encompasses features of the outside...
Episode #6: The Potential of Biologically Inspired Neural Modeling with Neurorobotics Expert, Jeffrey Krichmar
In this episode of "On Consciousness," neuroscientists Bernie Baars, Jeff Krichmar, and David Edelman engage in a freewheeling conversation that begins with mulling over the possible development of conscious machines — or ‘conscious artifact,’ as Gerald Edelman put it...
Consciousness in Animals and Machines: Cortex is the “organ of mind.”
If the cortex is the sign of consciousness, then it suggests that all vertebrates with cortex have at least some kind of consciousness. The cortex is the “organ of mind,” both conscious and unconscious aspects. That phrase “organ of mind” was written by Wilder...
Episode #5: Is Cortex the Organ of Mind?
Why are we conscious? Is cortex the organ of mind? Throughout human history, people have perceived the conscious brain as the great nexus of human life, of social relationships, of their personal identities and histories, in encounters with new challenges. In Episode...
Episode #4: Roundtable on Neural Darwinism and Waking Consciousness. Building a brain that learns, remembers, and experiences.
The engine of evolution is geared to overproduce and selectively eliminate. How do biological systems confront, adapt, and survive an ever-changing world? This is the central question that defined Charles Darwin’s scientific journey. In Episode #4 of NATURALIZING...
Episode #3: What is the best scientific evidence about the biology of subjectivity?
. . . What Is Subjectivity? Consciousness is a core question of life. Making progress in understanding consciousness has an endless number of benefits — philosophical,...
Major Features of Conscious States and Contents
The closer cortical activity is observed, the more it resembles coherent, task driven signaling between small regions. Major features of conscious states and contents: 1. Raw scalp EEG signature of waking. The raw scalp EEG signature of waking appears to be...
Episode #2: Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman’s Professional Artistry: A Tribute by his son, neuroscientist David Edelman
. . . “You can actually study consciousness. You can do psychological studies and behavioral studies. So the question I’ve been interested in is whether we can go beyond that...
Biology of Consciousness
Gerald Edelman | Joseph A. Gally | Bernard J. Baars
The Dynamic Core and Global Workspace hypotheses were independently put forward to provide mechanistic and biologically plausible accounts of how brains generate conscious mental content. The Dynamic Core proposes that reentrant neural activity in the thalamocortical system gives rise to conscious experience. Global Workspace reconciles the limited capacity of momentary conscious content with the vast repertoire of long-term memory. In this paper we show the close relationship between the two hypotheses.
Global workspace dynamics: cortical “binding and propagation” enables conscious contents.
Bernard J. Baars | Stan Franklin | Thomas Z. Ramsoy
A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function.
What can Neuroscience Learn from Contemplative Practices?
Editorial
Zoran Josipovic | Bernard J. Baars
Contemplative practices like meditation and mindfulness have recently gained increased acceptance in science and clinical practice, although a number of issues related to their phenomenology and to experimental designs still remain (Dahl et al., 2015).
The Cortex and Thalamus
On Consciousness: Part II
Bernard J. Baars
An architectural model of conscious and unconscious brain functions
Global Workspace Theory and IDA
Bernard J. Baars | Stan Franklin
Self as the enduring frame layers of experience and action.
On Consciousness: Part III
Bernard J. Baars
SAVE 40% on Bernie’s new book! APPLY DISCOUNT CODE “VIP40” AT CHECKOUT.
This book by Bernard Baars, a pioneer in the field and originator of the Global Workspace theory, represents a landmark effort to comprehensively address, in an accessible way, the various dimensions of the global workspace, from its cognitive architecture to the living brain dynamics through which it is manifest.
“On Consciousness” is an indispensable addition to the library of both students and experts who study consciousness.
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