Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis

Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis A common modern view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain, perhaps caused by neuronal complexity, and perhaps with no adaptive value. Exactly what emerges, how it emerges, and from what specific neuronal process, are in debate. One possible explanation of consciousness, proposed here, is that it is a construct of the social perceptual machinery. Humans have specialized neuronal machinery that allows them to be socially intelligent. The primary role of this machinery is to construct models of other people's minds thereby gaining some ability to predict the behavior of other individuals. In the present hypothesis, awareness is a perceptual reconstruction of attentional state; and the machinery that computes information about other people's awareness is the same machinery that computes information about our own awareness. The present paper brings together a variety of lines of evidence, including experiments on the neural basis of social perception, on hemispatial neglect, on the out-of-body experience, on mirror neurons, and on the mechanisms of decision-making, to explore the possibility that awareness is a construct of the social machinery in the brain. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cognitive Neuroscience Taylor & Francis

Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis

Cognitive Neuroscience , Volume 2 (2): 16 – Jun 1, 2011
36 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/human-consciousness-and-its-relationship-to-social-neuroscience-a-qUrwh5bIVI

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
Copyright 2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
ISSN
1758-8936
eISSN
1758-8928
DOI
10.1080/17588928.2011.565121
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

A common modern view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain, perhaps caused by neuronal complexity, and perhaps with no adaptive value. Exactly what emerges, how it emerges, and from what specific neuronal process, are in debate. One possible explanation of consciousness, proposed here, is that it is a construct of the social perceptual machinery. Humans have specialized neuronal machinery that allows them to be socially intelligent. The primary role of this machinery is to construct models of other people's minds thereby gaining some ability to predict the behavior of other individuals. In the present hypothesis, awareness is a perceptual reconstruction of attentional state; and the machinery that computes information about other people's awareness is the same machinery that computes information about our own awareness. The present paper brings together a variety of lines of evidence, including experiments on the neural basis of social perception, on hemispatial neglect, on the out-of-body experience, on mirror neurons, and on the mechanisms of decision-making, to explore the possibility that awareness is a construct of the social machinery in the brain.

Journal

Cognitive NeuroscienceTaylor & Francis

Published: Jun 1, 2011

Keywords: Awareness; Neural correlates of consciousness; Social neuroscience; Hemispatial neglect; Attention; Out of body

There are no references for this article.