Consciousness and the Social Brain

vignette works on many levels, but one part of its appeal is that it connects to something we all understand. People have an intuitive grasp of psychokenesis. Children are especially gullible about the mind force and require some experience to learn that it is not so.
    In common mythology, therefore, when you focus your awareness on something, you can move it. Awareness not only takes impressions from the physical world but it also pushes on the physical world.
My Head Hurts from Thinking Too Much

    Consider a curious, common experience: someone who is thinking too hard might put a hand to his or her head and say, “My head hurts. It feels like it’s going to explode!” I felt this way a few times while writing this book.
    A favorite question of those who study consciousness could be put like this: why does information processing in the brain
feel
like anything at all? How come the information isn’t simply manipulated, machine-like, without an inner feeling?
    To me, this question conflates two issues. First, why do we have an inner experience at all? Second, why do we usually compare the inner experience to a kind of touch?
    Most of this book is focused on the first question—why do we have an inner experience at all?—and I’ve suggested the attention schema theory as a possible answer. Here I would like to focus on the narrower, much less mysterious but nonetheless interesting second question: why do we compare awareness to a felt event?
    We rarely say, “My awareness
looks
like it is inside my head,” or, “My awareness
sounds
like it is inside me.” An out-of-body experience never involves
tasting
your awareness to be in the upper corner of the room. In fact, such comments seem ridiculous because of their literal falsity. Instead, we feel. We
feel
awareness to be inside us. Awareness seems to be linked in a special way to the somatosensory domain. Somatosensory information may be a crucial part of the weave of information that composes A.
    In previous sections of this chapter I discussed the spatial structure of awareness. We intuitively understand awareness to emanate from a location inside us. Part of constructing the feature of awareness is attributing it to a specific location inside the body. In this sense awareness is another example of a body sense such as touch. It is a representation of the workings of the inner environment. Like a sensory representation of a stomachache, or of joint rotation, or of a pressure headache behind the eyeballs, or of being cold or hot, one’s own awareness is a representation of an event (physiological attention) that occurs inside the body. In this way awareness certainly resembles a feeling more than a sight or a sound. The culturally common analogy that we
feel
awareness inside us makes sense.
    But the idea that we feel awareness may be more than an analogy. It may have a literal component. Drawing attention to your hand makes you feel your hand a little more vividly. Merely flashing a light near your hand will cause your brain to enhance the processing of touch on your palm. 21 Likewise, by localizing your awareness to the inside of your head, you may subtly, but literally, feel something touching or pressing inside your head. Awareness may come with rich informational associations to touch, temperature, pressure, perhaps even pain. All of these internal senses may be subtly primedand subtly activated along with the localization of awareness to the inside of the body.
The Physical Properties Attributed to Awareness

    What do these culturally universal myths and illusions reveal about awareness?
    In the present theory, awareness is information. It is an informational model in the human brain. The item described by that model is attention—the process by which a brain enhances signals. But the description is only a crude sketch and in many ways does not match attention. The model describes something remarkable, strange, physically impossible, and loosely based on the dynamics of attention.
    Awareness, the model, lacks all the mechanistic details of neurons and competing signals in the brain. The physical nuts and bolts of attention are not present in the model. Why would an organism need to know those mechanistic details? Instead the essential dynamics of attention are duplicated in the model. According to the information set
A
, awareness is when an intelligence seizes on something. It is when a mind experiences something. It is a directing of mental effort