Global Workspace Theory

post by Douglas_Reay · 2012-06-05T17:16:23.448Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 5 comments

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Much research has been done upon visual perception.   Humans have the illusion that they are directly aware of everything in their 'field of view', but it turns out that they actually navigate not through reality, but through a model of reality that their brain stitches together mainly from the bits the eye is directly looking at as it darts about, with the rest supplied by interpolation based upon expectations.

For more info, read The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System, by Berliner and Cohen.

 

Global Workspace Theory is the idea that our awareness of our own thought process works the same way.  We have the illusion of an unbroken stream of consciousness, but what we're actually referencing is a model of what the brain thinks it has been consciously thinking about, that is stitched together from brief fragments, the way a spotlight in a theatre might move about shining on different parts of a stage, revealing actors making speeches and interacting with each other.   Even when the spotlight moves on, the actors, stage hands and directors remain and keep working.   When the spotlight returns, to catch a later part of the drama in that area, we interpolate what the actors would have been doing while we were paying attention elsewhere.

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