Consciousness and the Social Brain

three chunks of information all bound together:
    [I] [am aware of] [
X
].

    In pursuing consciousness, one possible approach is to focus on the first part, the knowledge of the self, the “I” in “I am aware of
X
.” One aspect of self-knowledge is body knowledge. The “body schema” is a rich understanding of your physical self, of the distinction between physical objects that belong to your personhood (this is my hand, this is my leg) and objects that are outside of you (this is somebody else’s hand, this is the chair). A second aspect of self-knowledge is psychological knowledge. You have knowledge of your own mind, including knowledge about current thoughts and emotions, about autobiographical memories that define your sense of personhood. Your knowledge of self is based on a vast range of information. Does the secret of consciousness lie in this “I” side of the equation? The self-knowledge approach to consciousness, while doing a good job of explaining why we have detailed information about ourselves, does a poor job of explaining how we become aware of that information or of anything else. I will discuss this general approach in much greater detail in Chapter 10 .
    Another possible approach to consciousness is to focus on the object of the awareness, the “
X
” in “I am aware of
X
.” The assumption is that, if you are aware of a visual stimulus, then awareness must be created by the visual circuitry. Some trick of the neuronal interactions, some oscillation, some feedback, some vibration causes visual awareness to emerge. Tactile awareness must arise from the circuitry that computes touch. Awareness of emotion must arise from the circuitry that computes emotion. Awareness of an abstract thought might arise from somewhere in the frontal lobe where the thought is presumably computed. Awareness, in that view, is a byproduct of information. Brain circuitry computes
X
, and an awareness of
X
rises up from the circuitry like heat. Why we end up with a unified awareness, if everybrain region generates its own private awareness, is not clear. It is also not clear how the feeling of awareness itself, having been produced, having risen up from the information, ends up physically impacting the speech circuitry such that we can sometimes report that we have it. I will discuss this approach in greater detail in Chapter 11 .
    In contrast to these common approaches, in this book I am pointing to an overlooked chunk of information that lies between the “I” and the “
X
,” the information that defines the relationship between them, the proposed attention schema. In the theory proposed here, awareness itself does not arise from the information about which you are aware, and it is not your knowledge that
you
, in particular, are aware of it. It is instead your rich descriptive model of the relationship between an agent and the information being attended by the agent.
    The other two components are important. Without them, awareness makes no sense. Without an agent to be aware, and without a thing to be aware of, the middle bit has no use. I do not mean to deny the importance of the other components. They are a part of consciousness. But awareness itself, the essence of awareness, I propose to be specifically the piece in the middle: the attention schema.
Awareness and Social Perception

    The attention schema is not so far-fetched a hypothesis. We already know the brain contains something like it. The brain contains specialized machinery that computes a description of someone else’s state of attention. It is part of the machinery for social thinking. 17 – 21
    Humans have an ability to monitor the gaze of others. We know where other people are looking. The scientific work on social attention, as it is sometimes called, has tended to limit itself to detecting someone else’s gaze direction. 17 , 22 – 24 But I doubt that our sophisticated machinery for understanding other people’s attention is limited to vector geometry based on the eyes. Computing where someone elseis looking is, in a sense, incidental. Computing someone else’s attentional state is a deeper task. I argue that we have a rich, sophisticated model of what attention is, of how it is deployed, of its temporal and spatial dynamics, of its consequences on action. A model of that type is essential to understanding and predicting another person’s behavior. Gaze direction is merely one visual cue that can help to inform that model. After