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Writer's pictureHatsuo Yamada

By "noticing", we start thinking using innumerable neural circuits.

Updated: May 29, 2022

Studying the "Study of Consciousness" (Stanislas Duanne) can further deepen your understanding of coaching theory.

I am studying to add a unique flavour to "unconscious rewriting".


This series of blog posts are my study notes. This time, the theme that follows the unconscious and conscious

I will write a "sign of consciousness".


 

Stanislas Duanne et al. Advocate the "Global Neuronal Workspace" hypothesis. The essence is that "consciousness is the sharing of information throughout the brain."


I want to study "what is consciousness" and "why consciousness arises" by looking at this theory.


When we recognize that we are aware of certain information, that information is stored in a particular storage area and made available to other brain areas.


Of the myriad images that pass through the unconscious brain, the one that meets the current goal = is selected.

Consciousness then makes that information available to higher-dimensional decision-making systems in the brain.


Psychologist Bernard Bath called this the "global workspace." The "Global Workspace" represents a system in the brain that freely evokes a personal image of the mind and conveys it to a myriad of functionally specialized mind processors.


The "global workspace" means that consciousness is a place for information sharing throughout the brain.

We keep it in mind for a long time whenever we are conscious of something, even after the corresponding external stimulus is cut off.




The brain can bring information into the workspace and retain it regardless of the time and space initially perceived.


As a result, we can use that information in any way we like, such as "send it to a language processor and give it a name." It can also be stored in long-term memory or used for future planning. Flexible dissemination of information is one of the main qualities of consciousness.


The concept of a workspace integrates various early psychological theories about attention and consciousness, and as early as 1870, the French philosopher Hippolyte Taine used the parable of "theatre of consciousness". I am.


According to Taine, consciousness is like a narrow stage that encourages you to hear only one performer at a time.

The human mind is likened to a narrow stage at the tip of the theatre's footlights and widens as it recedes into the background.


At the tip, there is only room for a single performer. So as you move away from the tip, you move away from the light, and the other performers behind you become more and more blurred.


In addition, countless other performers behind these groups, behind the scenes and near the armpits, are barely visible but come forward when called.


This metaphor for Taine was published decades after Freud's appearance.

I think that only one piece of information is conscious and that our mind is a creative expression of the wide variety of unconscious processors.


The mind has much staff to support the one-person show of consciousness. In other words, the content of consciousness arises from the myriad of activities supported by the unconscious activities behind it.


There was a theory that "a dwarf lives in the brain". But there is no dwarf in the global workspace. The unconscious receives the message and works on it according to his ability. It's a collection of processors.


Collective intelligence arises through the exchange of selected information in the brain.

This idea is nothing new, and in the early days of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers proposed the concept of subprograms exchanging data through a shared data structure similar to the "clipboard" of a personal computer. Masuda.

In that sense, it may be easier to say that the workspace of consciousness is the clipboard of the mind.


The information we find is available and guides decision making and intentional action. And that creates the feeling that those actions are "under their control."


Modern cognitive psychologists perceive conscious access as a "central bottleneck" or a "second processing stage" similar to a VIP lounge that only the lucky minority can enter.


Language, long-term memory, attention, and intentional systems are components of the neural circuit that exchanges conscious information and communicates with the mind.


Thanks to such a workspace, the information we are aware of can be distributed by any route, become the subject of sentences, form the core of memory, become the focus of attention, and become the core of the next act. It will become.

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