Consciousness and the Social Brain

account for awareness is the topic of this book. The attention schema theory, as I eventually called it, takes a shot at explaining consciousness in a scientifically plausible manner without trivializing the problem.
    The theory took rough shape in my mind (in my consciousness, let’s say) over a period of about ten years. I eventually outlined it in a chapter of a book for the general public,
God, Soul, Mind, Brain
, published in 2010, 14 and then in a stand-alone neuroscience article that I wrote with Sabine Kastner in 2011. 15 When that article was published, the reaction convinced me that nothing, absolutely nothing about this theory of consciousness was obvious to the rest of the world.
    A great many reaction pieces were published by experts on the topic of mind and consciousness and a great many more unpublished commentaries were communicated to me. Many of the commentaries were enthusiastic, some were cautious, and a few were in direct opposition. I am grateful for the feedback, which helped me to further shape the ideas and their presentation. It is always difficult to communicate a new idea. It can take years for the scientific community to figure out what you are talking about, and just as many years for you to figure out how best to articulate the idea. The commentaries, whether friendly or otherwise, convinced me beyond any doubt that a short article was nowhere near sufficient to lay out the theory. I needed to write a book.
    The present book is written both for my scientific colleagues and for the interested public. I have tried to be as clear as possible,explaining my terms, assuming no technical knowledge on the part of the reader. To the neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, I apologize if my explanations are more colloquial than is typical in academia. I was more concerned with explaining concepts than with presenting detail. To the nonexperts, I apologize if the descriptions are sometimes a little wonkish, especially in the second half of the book. I tried to strike a balance.
    My purpose in this book is to explain the new theory in a step-by-step manner, to lay out some of the evidence that supports it, and to point out the gaps where the evidence is ambiguous or has yet to come in. Especially on the topic of consciousness, I’ve discovered how easy it is for people to half-listen to an idea, pigeonhole it, and thereby conveniently dismiss it. My task in this book is to try to explain the theory clearly enough that I can communicate at least some of what it has to offer.
    None of us knows for certain how the brain produces consciousness, but the attention schema theory looks promising. It explains the main phenomena. It is logical, conceptually simple, testable, and already has support from a range of previous experiments. I do not put the theory in opposition to the three or four other major neuroscientific views of consciousness. Rather, my approach fuses many previous theories and lines of thought, building a single conceptual framework, combining strengths. For all of these reasons, I am enthusiastic about the theory as a biological explanation of the mind—of consciousness itself—and I am eager to communicate the theory properly.

2
Introducing the Theory

    Explaining the attention schema theory is not difficult. Explaining why it is a good theory, and how it meshes with existing evidence, is much more difficult. In this chapter I provide an overview of the theory, acknowledging that the overview by itself is unlikely to convince many people. The purpose of the chapter is to set out the ideas that will be elaborated throughout the remainder of the book.
    One way to approach the theory is through social perception. If you notice Harry paying attention to the coffee stain on his shirt, when you see the direction of Harry’s gaze, the expression on his face, and his gestures as he touches the stain, and when you put all those clues into context your brain does something quite specific: it attributes awareness to Harry. Harry is aware of the stain on his shirt. Machinery in your brain, in the circuitry that participates in social perception, is expert at this task of attributing awareness to other people. It sees another brain-controlled creature focusing its computing resources on an item and generates the construct that person
Y
is aware of thing
X
. In the theory proposed in this book, the same machinery is engaged in attributing awareness to yourself—in computing that you are