Consciousness and the Social Brain

typically has a single focus, but while attending mostly to
A
, the brain spares some attention for
B
. Awareness also has a focus and is graded in the same manner. One can be most intently aware of
A
and a little aware of
B
.
    5. Both operate on similar domains of information. Although most studies of attention focus on vision, it is certainly not limited to vision. The same signal enhancement can be applied to any of the five senses, to a thought, to an emotion, to a recalled memory, or to a plan to make a movement, for example. Likewise, one can be aware of the same range of items. If you can attend to it, then you can be aware of it.
    6. Both imply an effect on behavior. When the brain attends to something, the neural signals are enhanced, gain greater influence over the downstream circuitry, and have a greater impact on behavior. When the brain does not attend to something, the neural representation is weak and has relatively little impact on behavior. Likewise, when you are aware of something, you can choose to act on it. When you are unaware of something, you will generally fail to react to it. Both, therefore, imply an ability to drive behavior.
    7. Both imply deep processing. Attention is when an information processor devotes computing resources to an information set. Awareness implies an intelligence seizing on, being occupied by, experiencing, or knowing something.
    8. Finally, and particularly tellingly, awareness almost always tracks attention. Awareness is like a needle on a dial pointing more or less to the state of one’s attention. At any moment in time, the information that is attended usually matches the information that reaches awareness. In some situations they can be separated. 10 , 11 , 14 – 16 It is possible to attend to a visual image by all behavioral measures, processing the picture in depth and even responding to it, while being unaware of it. Because attention and awareness can be dissociated, we know that they are not the same thing. But mismatches between them are rare. Awareness is evidently a close but imperfect indicator of attention.
    Many more comparisons are possible, but I have listed at least the main ones. The point of the list is that awareness can be understood as an imperfect but close model of attention.
    Consider how the brain models the property of color, in particular the color white. White light contains a mixture of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. It is the dirtiest, muddiest color possible. But the visual system does not model it in that way. Instead, the visual system encodes the information of high brightness and low color. That is the brain’s modelof white light—a high value of brightness and a low value of color, a purity of luminance—a physical impossibility. Why does the brain construct a physically impossible description of a part of the world? The purpose of that inner model is not to be physically accurate in all details, which would be a waste of neural processing. Instead, the purpose is to provide a quick sketch, a representation that is easy to compute, convenient, and just accurate enough to be useful in guiding behavior.
    By the same token, in the present hypothesis, the brain constructs a model of the attentional process. That model involves some physically nonsensical properties: an ethereal thing like plasma vaguely localizable to the space inside us, an experience that is intangible, a feeling that has no physicality. Here I am proposing that those nonphysical properties and other common properties ascribed to awareness are schematic, approximate descriptions of a real physical process. The physical process being modeled is something mechanistic and complicated and neuronal, a process of signal enhancement, the process of attention. When cognitive machinery scans and summarizes internal data, it has no direct access to the process of attention itself. Instead, it has access to the data in the attention schema. It can access, summarize, and report the contents of that information set. Introspection returns an answer based on a quick, approximate sketch, a cartoon of attention, the item we call awareness. Awareness is the brain’s cartoon of attention.
How Awareness Relates to Other Components of the Conscious Mind

    Consider a simple sentence:
    I am aware of
X
.

    Pick any
X
you like. An apple. A sound. The thought 2 + 2 = 4. The emotion of joy. I am aware of
X
. To be able to report this, andactually mean it, my brain must possess