Abstract
What is consciousness? In his book Principles of Psychology (1890), W. James stated that consciousness is an organizational system added to control a nervous system that has developed to such complexity that it can no longer regulate itself. Today, advances in research on the social brain have revealed that a broad network connecting the frontal lobe and parietal lobe plays a key role in consciousness. It can be said that, due to the increasing complexity of the brain, humans have, through the course of brain evolution, developed a flexible regulatory system for consciousness in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) known as working memory.
Working memory is an active form of memory involved in goal-directed tasks and activities, but its functions are not strictly limited to memory. Instead, its role extends into broader areas of cognition and behavior, serving as a foundation for conscious awareness. This article explores how working memory gives rise to the dynamic process of consciousness through the lens of the Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and its extension, the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (Dehaene, 2006).
GWT, proposed by the American cognitive psychologist Baars in 1988, is a cognitive theory of consciousness (and unconsciousness) based on information processing (Baars, 1988) and continues to evolve today. This paper also discusses how these theories could potentially become a more unified theory of consciousness by incorporating working memory’s self-monitoring function as metacognition.
