This old talk by Daniel Dennett touches on a lot of topics we’ve discussed recently. Dennett explains why it’s wrong to regard phenomenal consciousness (the “what it’s likeness” or “raw experience” version) as separate from access consciousness (the cognitive access of information for decision making, memory, report, etc).

Note that Dennett doesn’t deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness here, just the idea that it’s something separate and apart from access. He even passes up opportunities to dismiss qualia, although he does provide a reduction of them.

This video is about 66 minutes long. Unfortunately the video and sound quality aren’t great, and the camera operation is annoying, but the talk is worth powering through.

Attention schema theory has some plausibility.

Lately I’ve been reading up on global workspace theory (GWT). In a survey published last year, among general consciousness enthusiasts, integrated information theory (IIT) was the most popular theory, followed closely by GWT. However, among active consciousness researchers, GWT was seen as the most promising by far (although no theory garnered a majority). Since seeing those results, I’ve been curious about why.

One reason might be that GWT has been around a long time, having first been proposed by Bernard Baars in 1988, with periodic updates all recently republished in his new book. It’s received a lot of development and has spawned numerous variants. Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model is one. But perhaps the one with the most current support is Stanislas Dehaene’s global neuronal workspace, which I read and wrote about earlier this year.

All of the variants posit that for an item to make it into consciousness, it has to enter a global workspace in the brain. This is most commonly described using a theater metaphor.

New Science Advances research in mice reveals that immune cells in the brain engulf microplastics, forming clusters that can cause cerebral clots.

The human brain is formed by a complex network of neural connections and most of them link neighboring brain regions, which are also the most studied to date. But a recent neuroscientific study by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the University of Oxford, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that connections between distant brain regions, though rarer and less frequent, play a fundamental role in explaining brain dynamics.

The role of these long-range connections could be likened to those of an airport hub, which—with long-haul flights—directly connects different parts of the world without the need for stopovers, which would make the trip far longer. In the case of the brain, long-range connections serve to transmit information more quickly and directly between distant regions (without the need to go through all the successive neighboring regions that separate them). This yields optimal and efficient information processing.

The connections between distant regions of the brain are activated both spontaneously in a resting state and when performing numerous cognitive functions in our daily lives, which allow us to carry out specific tasks. For example, for as simple a task as remembering an image we have just seen, the brain connects the frontal lobe (which deals with short-term memory) with the occipital lobe, which deals with image perception.