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104 Consciousness was smeared across time
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104 Computational model by Stanislav Nikolov
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105 Detected up to 10 seconds prior to the conscious decision
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CHAPTER 4: PAY ATTENTION TO THAT PATTERN!
111 “. . . Mummy sent me to fetch you”
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113 Brain . . . half of all the energy the child consumes
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113 Human brain . . . nearing the endpoint . . . biologically possible
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114 Two photos identical except for one feature
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115 Half the volunteers notice . . . person has changes
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116 44 percent of people actually notice the gorilla
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117 Conscious of fainter targets . . . also detect targets faster
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117 Object will be perceived . . . more contrast
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118 Attention emerging from . . . collective neuronal war
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119 Famous student physics lectures
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122 Ferret brains . . . rewired . . . visual cortex in blind . . . process Braille
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124 Constant competition . . . in the brain
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127 Modern version of Phineas Gage
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129 Multiple personality disorder . . . attribute . . . experiences to other personalities
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131 Aware of your own consciousness
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132 Poor at matching their confidence to their accuracy
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135 Three or four conscious items
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135 “Global workspace theory” proposed by Bernard Baars
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136 George Sperling presented subjects
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137 Steven Yantis presented subjects with
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137 Our working memory limit . . . same as the monkey’s
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138 Other species . . . same upper bound . . . honeybee
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138 3 or 4 items . . . maximum that can be practically sustained
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139 Each holder . . . cope equally well . . . simplest . . . most complex
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140 Say back a novel sequence that was 80 digits
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142 Presented volunteers . . . sequences of 4 double digits
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142 Chess masters . . . remember . . . whole board
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143 Increase the amount of information per item
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144 Greater the number, the less likely . . . identify each
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144 Attention has two clear stages
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145 Leonardo Chelazzi and colleagues used electrodes
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145 Michael Cohen and colleagues recently carried out
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146 Divert attention away . . . fails to enter consciousness
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146 Working memory . . . is limited to . . . 4 . . . items
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147 Psychologists assumed that our working memory capacity was around double this
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148 Douglas Hofstadter’s whimsical and influential book
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150 Prior expectations . . . guide our attention
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151 Other species can start to learn . . . grammatical language
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151 A “language instinct”
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152 Learning an artificial grammar . . . same brain areas . . . chunking task
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152 FOXP2
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154 The evolutionary advantage of awareness
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155 Stan Beilock and colleagues tested . . . goft-putting
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155 Similar results . . . soccer, baseball . . . touch typing
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CHAPTER 5: THE BRAIN’S EXPERIENCE OF A ROSE
160 Woman was born . . . no cerebellum
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160 Cerebellum . . . 80 percent of . . . brain’s neurons
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161 Isn’t enough neural coherence . . . aware . . . when . . . awake
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163 Similar stories occur for blindtouch
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163 A visual experience . . . primary visual cortex is missing
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163 Degraded form of consciousness . . . matches their reduced ability
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164 Blindsight patient in the fMRI scanner
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165 Nikos Logothetis and his team, who carried out
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166 Primary visual cortex is not quite as dumb
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168 Two other regions also light up at least as brightly
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168 Record . . . experiences switch . . . candlestick or faces
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168 Posterior parietal . . . always activated . . . with the lateral prefrontal
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169 Stanislas Dehaene . . . showed subjects a rapid sequence
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169 Touch or a sound, or . . . combination of senses
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169 Physical size . . . brain structure . . . links with awareness
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169 Antoine Del Cul and colleagues gave patients
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170 Jon Simons and colleagues gave a memory test
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170 Matt Davis and colleagues played volunteers . . . sentences
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170 The lowest share compared to our primate cousins
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