Consciousness and the Social Brain

diagrammed in Figure 2.4 . Perhaps the apple is green. It’s more or less round. Perhaps it’s moving—rolling to the right. Binding of stimulus features such as color and shape and motion into a single larger representation has been studied intensively, especially in the domain of visual perception. 5

    FIGURE 2.4
Awareness as a computed feature. A green apple is encoded in the visual system as a set of stimulus features described by chunks of information that are bound together. The property of awareness might be another computed stimulus feature bound to the rest.

    I am suggesting that the property of awareness is another such computed feature, a description, a chunk of information, that can be bound to the larger object file. The many chunks of informationdepicted in Figure 2.4 are connected into a single representation, a description in which the greenness, the roundness, the movement, and the property of having a conscious experience, are wedded together. My cognitive machinery can access that information, that bound representation, and report on it. Hence the machinery of my brain can report that it is aware of the apple and its features.
    In this account, awareness is information; it is a description; it is a description of the experiencing of something; and it is a perception-like feature, in the sense that it can be bound to other features to help form an overarching description of an object.
    I suggest that there is no other way for an information-processing device, such as a brain, to conclude that it has a conscious experience attached to an apple. It must construct an informational description of the apple, an informational description of conscious experience, and bind the two together.
    The object does not need to be an apple, of course. The explanation is potentially general. Instead of visual information about an apple you could have touch information, or a representation of a math equation, or a representation of an emotion, or a representation of your own person-hood, or a representation of the words you are reading at this moment. Awareness, as a chunk of information, could in principle be bound to any of these other categories of information. Hence you could be aware of the objects around you, of sights and sounds, of introspective content, of your physical body, of your emotional state, of your own personal identity. You could bind the awareness feature to many different types of information.
    Why would the brain construct such a strange chunk of information unless it represents something of use in the real world?
    The brain constructs descriptions of real entities in the real world. Those descriptions may not always be accurate. They may be simplified or schematized, but they generally reflect something useful to know. When the brain encodes information about the color of an apple, for example, that information relates to something physicallyreal—wavelengths reflecting from the surface of the apple. What real or useful property might be represented by this strange chunk of information that describes the state of being aware? Why attach an “awareness feature” to the other, more concrete features in order to make up the brain’s description of an apple?
    The theory can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention.
Awareness as a Sketch of Attention

    When people use the word
attention
colloquially, it has a variety of meanings. Are you paying attention to my book? The guy in the next office is an attention seeker. Attention all shoppers! The term is also used scientifically. In cognitive psychology, it refers to an enhanced way of reacting to incoming stimuli. In neuroscience, it refers to a type of interaction among signals in the brain. I am going to give you a neuroscientist’s perspective: attention as a data-handling method in the brain. From now on, when I use the term
attention
, I will mean it in this technical, neuroscience sense.
    In Figure 2.5 , the circles represent competing signals in the brain. These signals are something like political candidates in an election. Each signal works to win a stronger voice and suppress its neighbors. Attention is when one integrated set of signals rises in strength and outcompetes other signals. Each signal can gain a boost from a variety of sources. Strong sensory input, coming from the outside, can boost a particular signal in the brain (a bottom-up bias), or a high-level decision in the brain can boost a particular