Consciousness and the Social Brain Read Free

can communicate at least some of what it has to offer.
    None of us knows for certain how the brain produces consciousness, but the attention schema theory looks promising. It explains the main phenomena. It is logical, conceptually simple, testable, and already has support from a range of previous experiments. I do not put the theory in opposition to the three or four other major neuroscientific views of consciousness. Rather, my approach fuses many previous theories and lines of thought, building a single conceptual framework, combining strengths. For all of these reasons, I am enthusiastic about the theory as a biological explanation of the mind—of consciousness itself—and I am eager to communicate the theory properly.

2
Introducing the Theory

    Explaining the attention schema theory is not difficult. Explaining why it is a good theory, and how it meshes with existing evidence, is much more difficult. In this chapter I provide an overview of the theory, acknowledging that the overview by itself is unlikely to convince many people. The purpose of the chapter is to set out the ideas that will be elaborated throughout the remainder of the book.
    One way to approach the theory is through social perception. If you notice Harry paying attention to the coffee stain on his shirt, when you see the direction of Harry’s gaze, the expression on his face, and his gestures as he touches the stain, and when you put all those clues into context your brain does something quite specific: it attributes awareness to Harry. Harry is aware of the stain on his shirt. Machinery in your brain, in the circuitry that participates in social perception, is expert at this task of attributing awareness to other people. It sees another brain-controlled creature focusing its computing resources on an item and generates the construct that person
Y
is aware of thing
X
. In the theory proposed in this book, the same machinery is engaged in attributing awareness to yourself—in computing that you are aware of thing
X
.
    A specific network of brain areas in the cerebral cortex is especially active during social thinking, when people engage with other people and construct ideas about other people’s minds. Two brain regions in particular tend to crop up repeatedly in experiments on social thinking. These regions are called the superior temporalsulcus (STS) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). I will have more to say about these brain areas throughout the book. When these regions of the cerebral cortex are damaged, people can suffer from a catastrophic disruption of awareness. The clinical syndrome is called neglect. It is a loss of awareness of objects on one side of space. While it can be caused by damage to a variety of brain areas, it turns out to be especially complete and long-lasting after damage to the TPJ or STS on the right side of the brain. 1 , 2
    Why should a person lose a part of his or her own awareness after damage to a part of the social machinery? The result is sometimes viewed as contradictory or controversial. But a simple explanation might work here. Maybe the same machinery responsible for attributing awareness to other people also participates in constructing one’s own awareness and attributing it to oneself. Just as you can compute that Harry is aware of something, so too you can compute that you yourself are aware of something. The theory proposed in this book was first described from this perspective of social neuroscience. 3 , 4
    Theories of consciousness, because they are effectively theories of the soul, tend to have far-reaching cultural, spiritual, and personal implications. If consciousness is a construct of the social machinery, if this social machinery attributes awareness to others and to oneself, then perhaps a great range of attributed conscious minds—gods, angels, devils, spirits, ghosts, the consciousness we attribute to pets, to other people, and the consciousness we confidently attribute to ourselves—are