I explained why understanding consciousness is important in my previous blog. In short, theories reason from assumptions not to them. Traditional cognitive theories assume consciousness and therefore can never explain it. This is a serious limitation. Not being able to explain consciousness means that psychologists cannot fully explain all that derives from consciousness which is essentially everything psychological.
I concluded my previous blog by saying that neural network models are computational neuropsychological methods that offer the exciting possibility of advancing our understanding of real brain models including how they compute qualia, including the subjective experience of conscious awareness. In this blog I focus on the brain models of attention that Michael S. A. Graziano (2013) claims cause consciousness in his book entitled Consciousness and the Social Brain.
Graziano reminded us that our conscious experience is a model of external reality, not an exact copy of it, by using white light as an example. White light appears to us as a single pure fully unified experience when in fact it is not. What we perceive as white light is actually composed of all of the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to which our eyes are sensitive. The neural networks that compose our visual system create, compute, a model of this visual event including the false color qualia of white light. Such qualia help guide our behavior. For example, the qualia of red and green help us find ripe fruit.
Graziano notes that attention and consciousness are closely related in that typically we are only conscious of what we attend to. Brain neural networks compute false colors to help us attend to relevant stimuli such as the example given above of picking ripe fruit. More importantly, humans survived because they lived in groups. It is important to attend to the behavior and motives of other people when living in groups. Graziano reported evidence that the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS), Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ) and Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) mediate social cognition by computing models concerning the motives and intentions of other people. He further claimed that these same structures enable us to attend to our own motives and behaviors by computing self-models that carry the qualia of consciousness. In support of this view, he cites evidence that damage to the STS, and TPJ, especially on the right side, impairs self-awareness in addition to social cognition. Graziano reported that disrupting the right TPJ using transcranial magnetic stimulation can relocate one’s locus of conscious awareness outside of their body.
I concluded my previous blog by saying that neural network models are computational neuropsychological methods that offer the exciting possibility of advancing our understanding of real brain models including how they compute qualia, including the subjective experience of conscious awareness. In this blog I focus on the brain models of attention that Michael S. A. Graziano (2013) claims cause consciousness in his book entitled Consciousness and the Social Brain.
Graziano reminded us that our conscious experience is a model of external reality, not an exact copy of it, by using white light as an example. White light appears to us as a single pure fully unified experience when in fact it is not. What we perceive as white light is actually composed of all of the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to which our eyes are sensitive. The neural networks that compose our visual system create, compute, a model of this visual event including the false color qualia of white light. Such qualia help guide our behavior. For example, the qualia of red and green help us find ripe fruit.
Graziano notes that attention and consciousness are closely related in that typically we are only conscious of what we attend to. Brain neural networks compute false colors to help us attend to relevant stimuli such as the example given above of picking ripe fruit. More importantly, humans survived because they lived in groups. It is important to attend to the behavior and motives of other people when living in groups. Graziano reported evidence that the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS), Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ) and Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) mediate social cognition by computing models concerning the motives and intentions of other people. He further claimed that these same structures enable us to attend to our own motives and behaviors by computing self-models that carry the qualia of consciousness. In support of this view, he cites evidence that damage to the STS, and TPJ, especially on the right side, impairs self-awareness in addition to social cognition. Graziano reported that disrupting the right TPJ using transcranial magnetic stimulation can relocate one’s locus of conscious awareness outside of their body.
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