Self Comes to Mind

created from the same cloth —images generated by the brain’s map-making abilities .
    Even though all aspects of consciousness are constructed with images, not all images are born equal in terms of neural origin or physiological characteristics (see Figure 3.1 ). The images used to describe most objects-to-be-known are conventional, in the sense that they result from the mapping operations we discussed for the external senses. But the images that stand for the organism constitute a particular class. They originate in the body’s interior and represent aspects of the body in action. They have a special status and a special achievement: they are felt , spontaneously and naturally, from the get-go, prior to any other operation involved in the building of consciousness. They are felt images of the body, primordial bodily feelings, the primitives of all other feelings, including feelings of emotions. Later we shall see that the images that describe the relationship between organism and object draw on both kinds of images—conventional sensory images and variations on bodily feelings.
    Finally, all images occur in an aggregate workspace that is formed by separate early sensory regions of the cerebral cortices and, in the case of feelings, by selected regions of the brain stem. This image space is controlled by a number of cortical and subcortical sites whose circuits contain dispositional knowledge recorded in dormant form in the convergence-divergence neural architecture we discussed in Chapter 6 . The regions can operate either consciously or nonconsciously, but in either case they do so within precisely the same neural substrates. The difference between the conscious and unconscious modes of operation in the participating regions depends on degrees of wakefulness and on the level of self processing.
    In terms of its neural implementation, the notion of image space advanced here differs considerably from the notions found in the work of Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. Baars originated the notion of global workspace, in purely psychological terms, to call attention to the intense cross-communication of different components of the mind process. Dehaene and Changeux came to use global workspace, in neuronal terms, to refer to the highly distributed and interrelational neural activity that must underlie consciousness. Brainwise, they focus on the cerebral cortex as a provider of contents of consciousness, and they privilege the association cortices, especially the prefrontal, as a necessary element in the access to those contents. Later work by Baars also puts the global workspace notion at the service of access to contents of consciousness.
    For my part, I focus on the image-making regions, the playground where the puppets in the show actually play. The puppeteers and the strings are outside the image space, in dispositional space located in the association cortices of the frontal, temporal, and parietal sectors. This perspective is compatible with imaging studies and electrophysiological studies that describe the behavior of those two distinct sectors (image space and dispositional space) in relation to conscious versus nonconscious images, such as in the work of Nikos Logothetis or Giulio Tononi on binocular rivalry, or the work of Stanislas Dehaene and Lionel Naccache on word processing. Conscious states require early sensory engagement and the engagement of association cortices, because, as I see it, that is from where the puppet masters organize the show. 6 I believe my account of the problem complements the global neuronal workspace approach, rather than standing in conflict with it.
The Protoself
     
    The protoself is the stepping-stone required for the construction of the core self. It is an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism’s physical structure . The protoself maps are distinctive in that they generate not merely body images but also felt body images. These primordial feelings of the body are spontaneously present in the normal awake brain.
    The contributors to the protoself include master interoceptive maps, master organism maps , and maps of the externally directed sensory portals . From an anatomical standpoint, these maps arise both from the brain stem and from the cortical regions. The basic state of the protoself is an average of its interoceptive component and its sensory portals component.