Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes

[bernard]

Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes

A free paper.

The close relationship between attention and
consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these
processes. This article summarizes psychophysical
evidence, arguing that top-down attention and consciousness
are distinct phenomena that need not occur
together and that can be manipulated using distinct
paradigms. Subjects can become conscious of an isolated
object or the gist of a scene despite the near
absence of top-down attention; conversely, subjects
can attend to perceptually invisible objects. Furthermore,
top-down attention and consciousness can have
opposing effects. Such dissociations are easier to
understand when the different functions of these two
processes are considered. Untangling their tight relationship
is necessary for the scientific elucidation of
consciousness and its material substrate.

[Diane]

Here is a video on consciousness (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/102), about 22 minutes of Daniel Dennett talking about how consciousness is a function of about 100 trillion little robots that comprise our body, that don't know or care who we are. Matthias referred to this as a bag of tricks in his excellent blogpost today (http://neurotopian.blogspot.com/2007/11/mirror-box-therapy-part-i.html).

It has something in it for the manual magic thread (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3407) too. Dennett explains that people think they already know about consciousness, and they don't want it "ruined" for them by any information that conflicts with their beliefs, the same way people don't really want to know how a magic trick is done - it ruins the "effect" of the trick once they know. Barrett said something along those lines.

Anyway, a really good talk by Dennett, about how brains make us think things. Lots of visual illusions to illustrate. See if you can quickly spot the changes in the images at the end.