The cognition needed to support cooperation in its multifaceted forms varies in different scenarios. In this Review, Melis and Raihani argue that whether individuals must recognize interaction partners and whether cooperative interactions need investment repayment can differentiate the cognitive demand posed.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) can be compared to a theater of mind, in which conscious contents resemble a bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, selected by a spotlight of attention under executive guidance. Only the bright spot is conscious; the rest of the theater is dark and unconscious. GWT has been implemented in a number of explicit and testable global workspace models (GWM’s). These specific GW models suggest that conscious experiences recruit widely distributed brain functions that are mostly unconscious (unreportable). A large body of new findings support that view. For example, brain experiments show that while unconscious visual stimuli evoke high activity in visual cortex, identical conscious stimuli reveal an additional spread of high brain activity to frontal and parietal lobes (Dehaene, 2001). Similar results have been found for hearing, touch, pain, and sensorimotor skills (Baars, 2002). The conscious waking state supports such fast, flexible, and widespread brain interactions, while unconscious states do not (Baars et al, 2004). These findings illustrate the ability of the GW framework to suggest novel and falsifiable hypotheses.

In this work, we provide a brief overview of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), along with recent developments and clarifications of modern neuroscientific evidence. GWT started in the 1980s as a purely psychological theory of conscious cognition, and has become a prominent approach in scientific studies of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020). Based on today’s far more detailed understanding of the brain, GWT has adapted to new waves of evidence. The brain-based version of GWT is called Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) (Baars et al., 2013; Baars and Geld, 2019) precisely because the cortex is viewed as a “unified oscillatory machine” (Steriade, 1999). GWT therefore joins other theories in viewing consciousness as the product of highly integrated and widespread cortico-thalamic (C-T) activity, following a long trail of evidence (Dehaene et al., 1998).

Here we aim to clarify some empirical questions that have been raised, and review evidence that the prefrontal and posterior regions support dynamic global workspace functions, in agreement with several other authors. Static, gross anatomical divisions are superseded by the dynamical connectome of cortex.

We aim to correct the following misunderstandings. In a recent paper, Raccah et al. (2021) claimed that the prefrontal cortex (PfC) is not causally involved in enabling consciousness, based on a review of intracranial electrical stimulation (iES) experiments. We will show that Raccah et al.’s claim that the prefrontal cortex (PfC) does not support consciousness is incorrect.

A group of nerve cells in the brain displays a remarkable ability to halt all forms of movement, as revealed by a recent study conducted on mice. This finding contributes significantly to our understanding of how the nervous system exercises control over our movements.

When a hunting dog detects the scents of a deer, it sometimes completely freezes. This phenomenon can also be observed in humans who must focus intently on a complex task.

Now, a recent discovery contributes to our understanding of what happens in the brain when we abruptly stop moving.