ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the neurobiological approach to consciousness. In the 1990s, cognitive neuroscientists began to search for what are known as the neural correlates of consciousness. Once the sweep reaches a certain area after about 100 ms, however, lateral and feedback connections are initiated that share the information already processed in a feedforward manner with additional areas in the frontoparietal and motor regions. Global workspace theory was originally proposed by Baars in 1988. The central claim of this theory is that information carried by representations in the brain becomes conscious when it is “broadcast” to specialized processors and thereby made accessible. The basic idea is that, by way of broadcasting to these processors, conscious information ends up being information that is well integrated within one's cognitive economy. The main contenders include recurrent processing theory, global neuronal workspace theory, information integration theory, and higher-order theory.
