by Bernard J. Baars | Aug 15, 2022 | conscious brain, Cortex and Consciousness, Podcast, Podcast Episodes, Psychobiology
“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...
by Bernard J. Baars | Aug 1, 2022 | conscious brain, Cortex and Consciousness, Podcast, Podcast Episodes, Psychobiology
“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.”...
by Bernard J. Baars | Jul 20, 2022 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Cortex and Consciousness, Global Workspace Theory, Podcast, Podcast Episodes, Psychobiology
“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...
by Bernard J. Baars | Jun 20, 2022 | conscious brain, Conscious Experiences, Cortex and Consciousness, Global Workspace Theory, Podcast, Podcast Episodes, Psychobiology
“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...
by Bernard J. Baars | Apr 8, 2022 | Cortex and Consciousness, mindbrain
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...
by Bernard J. Baars | Mar 7, 2022 | conscious brain, Cortex and Consciousness, mindbrain
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...
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 | 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...
