We’re doing this all the time, with other people, with our pets, even with things that aren’t alive to some extent. Everybody has the experience of getting mad at the coffee machine when it doesn’t work, or at your car, or we see children perceiving awareness in their stuffed animals, etc. We live in this world that’s suffused with awareness that we are generating in our heads and attributing to things all around us. That’s at the heart of this theory.
For instance, when I talk to you I have some sense that you’re aware of things, you’re aware of what I’m saying, I see where your eyes are pointing, your body language. That makes it much easier for me to predict your behavior. And in a sense, what I’m doing, without necessarily realizing it, is coming up with a nice, easy, simple way to understand the focus of your brain’s processing.
That’s often called “attention,” but the word “attention” is somewhat confusing because it has so many different meanings. Essentially, your brain is focusing its resources on something and I look at you and I attribute to you a mind state that you’re aware of that something.
BW: … which might be different from the mind state that I attribute to myself?
MG: Exactly! I get a powerful sense that it’s real, and really emanating from you. But actually that’s illusory. It’s only my own perception of you and I may be completely wrong and I may never know that. That’s one of the interesting properties of human interactions.
We have trouble distinguishing between what’s really true about a person and the kind of model that we’ve constructed and attributed to that person. We tend to think that the awareness and the thoughts and the perspectives are real things, really inside that other person, and yet they’re just biased constructs emanating from our own brains and we often get them wrong.
BW: So what about our awareness of our own selves?
MG: The idea here is just as it’s useful for me to have some kind of model of you and what your brain is focusing on, even if it’s not a perfectly accurate model, it’s equally useful for me to have a similar model of myself, for essentially the same reasons. To control my own behavior, I need to predict my own behavior. I need to have a fairly sophisticated ability to understand myself, know what it is that I’m focusing on and what the consequences are, in order to make better choices.
So, in humans at least, at the center of this theory is that we think the same brain mechanisms are involved in social thinking, especially attributing this property of awareness to other people, and in our own subjective awareness.
BW: What are those mechanisms?
MG: There are two different lines of research that have been going on for about 30 and 100 years respectively, which seem to be contradictory and have led to a lot of controversy. And it’s exactly that contradiction that I find most interesting.
One line of research, the longer running one, is founded on the discovery of a particular syndrome caused by brain damage that causes a major problem in awareness. It’s called “neglect” or “hemispatial neglect” syndrome. What happens is that you get damage in one side of the brain (mostly the right side of the brain) and you lose awareness of everything to the other side of your body (say, left). These people are unaware of anything to the left. They can physically see things, but they aren’t aware of them.
For instance, if you throw a ball to their left, they’ll duck, but they won’t be aware of why they did that. They eat food from one side of the plate, or if you tell them to close their eyes and remember their childhood bedroom, they’ll tell you everything on the right side of their bedroom and have no awareness of things on the left (nor awareness of not being aware of those things).
You may get this syndrome from damaging different areas of the brain, but it turns out the area that gives you the most long lasting and most complete form of neglect is this region more or less right above the ear called the temporal-parietal junction where the two lobes meet. There is a very long, rich, tradition of research that studies how damage in this area of the brain can cause this very profound disruption of your awareness of things around you.
The second line of research, developed mostly in the past 30 years, basically asks what are the brain mechanisms for social thinking. Experiments involve putting people in a functional MRI scanner and measuring brain activity when the person does social tasks like trying to understand what other people are thinking, or what they are aware of, what beliefs are in their minds, what they are feeling emotionally etc. And they found that a very consistent network of areas around the brain become activated, including a hotspot in the temporal-parietal junction.
That’s how the controversy has come about: What is that area? Is it for attention and awareness or is it for social thinking?
This is very interesting and aligned with the theory that we’re trying to put forward. Basically, the mechanisms and the networks in the brain that attribute awareness to yourself — that allow you to say I’m aware of this and that — seem to overlap with the same machinery in there that’s attributing awareness to other people.
So we think that your own private or personal awareness is kind of an example of a much more general process where we attribute awareness to all kinds of things, to other people, to animals and to ourselves.
