[su_quote style=”modern-light”]What we call consciousness is inherently linked to our social habits and behavior, and their respective regions of the brain. Michael Graziano. [/su_quote]

 

 

Since 2010 Graziano’s lab has studied the brain basis of consciousness. Graziano proposed that specialized machinery in the brain computes the feature of awareness and attributes it to other people in a social context. The same machinery, in that hypothesis, also attributes the feature of awareness to oneself. Damage to that machinery disrupts one’s own awareness.

 

 

 Princeton’s Michael Graziano recently published a fascinating, controversial piece about the nature of consciousness for The Atlantic. A choice quote:

Arguably, science is the gradual process by which the cognitive parts of our brains discover the profound inaccuracies in our deeper, evolutionarily built-in models of the world.

Neuroscientist  Michael Graziano’s work highlights consciousness as, to put it simply, the brain’s construction of a model of itself. In Graziano’s view, this model is quick, imprecise, and just good enough to get the job done:

The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch.