Consciousness and the Social Brain

aware of thing
X
.
    A specific network of brain areas in the cerebral cortex is especially active during social thinking, when people engage with other people and construct ideas about other people’s minds. Two brain regions in particular tend to crop up repeatedly in experiments on social thinking. These regions are called the superior temporalsulcus (STS) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). I will have more to say about these brain areas throughout the book. When these regions of the cerebral cortex are damaged, people can suffer from a catastrophic disruption of awareness. The clinical syndrome is called neglect. It is a loss of awareness of objects on one side of space. While it can be caused by damage to a variety of brain areas, it turns out to be especially complete and long-lasting after damage to the TPJ or STS on the right side of the brain. 1 , 2
    Why should a person lose a part of his or her own awareness after damage to a part of the social machinery? The result is sometimes viewed as contradictory or controversial. But a simple explanation might work here. Maybe the same machinery responsible for attributing awareness to other people also participates in constructing one’s own awareness and attributing it to oneself. Just as you can compute that Harry is aware of something, so too you can compute that you yourself are aware of something. The theory proposed in this book was first described from this perspective of social neuroscience. 3 , 4
    Theories of consciousness, because they are effectively theories of the soul, tend to have far-reaching cultural, spiritual, and personal implications. If consciousness is a construct of the social machinery, if this social machinery attributes awareness to others and to oneself, then perhaps a great range of attributed conscious minds—gods, angels, devils, spirits, ghosts, the consciousness we attribute to pets, to other people, and the consciousness we confidently attribute to ourselves—are manifestations of the same underlying process. The spirit world and its varied denizens may be constructs of the social machinery in the human brain, models of minds attributed to the objects and spaces around us.
    In this book I will touch on all of these topics, from the science of specific brain areas to the more philosophical questions of mind and spirit. The emphasis of the book, however, is on the theory itself—the attention schema theory of how a brain produces awareness. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an initial description of the theory.
Consciousness and Awareness

    One of the biggest obstacles to discussing consciousness is the great many definitions of it. I find that conversations go in circles because of terminological confusion. The first order of business is to define my use of two key terms. In my experience, people have personal, quirky definitions of the term
consciousness
, whereas everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the term
awareness
. In this section, for clarity, I draw a distinction between consciousness and awareness. Many such distinctions have been made in the past, and here I describe one way to parcel out the concepts.

    FIGURE 2.1
One way to define consciousness and awareness. Consciousness is inclusive, and awareness is a specific act applied to the information that is in consciousness.

    Figure 2.1 diagrams the proposed relationship between the terms. The scheme has two components. The first component is the information about which I am aware. I am aware of the room around me, the sound of traffic from the street outside, my own body, my own thoughts and emotions, the memories brought up in my mind at the moment. All of these items are encoded in my brain as chunks of information. I am aware of a great diversity of information. The second component shown in the diagram is the act of being aware of the information. That, of course, is the mystery. Not all informationin the brain has awareness attached to it. Indeed, most of it does not. Some extra thing or process must be required to make me aware of a specific chunk of information in my brain at a particular time.
    As shown in the same diagram, I use the term
consciousness
inclusively. It refers both to the information about which I am aware and to the process of being aware of it. In this scheme,
consciousness
is the more general term and
awareness
the more specific. Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness