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

The Human Brain and Conscious Experience

What is Consciousness?

Consciousness is your inner experience of the world. It includes being aware of sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts and more. Scientists don't fully understand where consciousness comes from in the brain. Some think it emerges from complex information processing. Others believe the social brain creates it. This article explores a new idea about consciousness and the brain.

The Traditional Mystery of Consciousness

Here's the mystery: Information processing happens in the brain. But how does it produce inner conscious experience? If you see a green apple, your brain processes color and shape. But how does that data become your feeling of "green apple-ness"? No one knows how physical brain activity creates private, subjective experience.

Some believe consciousness is like a spirit or energy. Others say it emerges from bound information across the brain. But no one can explain the essence of awareness. So consciousness remains a mystery.

Studying Our Own Consciousness

It's hard to study consciousness directly. But we can study how people report on their own awareness. To say "I'm aware of X," you need to decide you're conscious of X. This requires:

1) Brain areas that represent consciousness

2) Decision-making regions that check if awareness is present

So consciousness must involve information we can measure and report on.

Awareness as Social Perception

What if consciousness is created by our social brain? We naturally perceive others' minds. We compute if someone is aware of something. The hypothesis is: Maybe we use the same social machinery to model our own awareness. Some evidence:

- Damage to social brain areas impairs consciousness, like in neglect.

- Social brain areas activate with attention tasks.

- Out-of-body illusions involve misplacing the self in the social brain.

So perhaps our inner experience stems from perceiving our own attentional state.

How Could Awareness Feel Real?

But how could an information model explain the feeling of awareness? Some possibilities:

- We localize awareness to inside our body, like a perception.

- It shares properties with sensing our own body, which feels real.

- Mislocating awareness (like in out-of-body illusions) reveals it's computed.

So maybe awareness feels real because it's a brain-generated body perception.

Integrating With Other Theories

This theory connects to others. Binding information across the brain may be part of it. And mirror neurons could help simulate perceived mental states. Different ideas of consciousness may fit together.

In Summary

Consciousness remains a mystery. But this theory offers a new way to view it - as our social brain modeling our own attentional state. This makes consciousness an information model, that we can measure and report on. More research is needed, but it may bring us closer to understanding our inner experience.

Key References

- Crick & Koch 1990 - Binding information for consciousness - Graziano & Botvinick 2002 - The brain's body perception - Lamme 2006 - Attention and consciousness - Blanke et al. 2002 - Out-of-body illusions - Frith 2002 - Social brain and self-perception - Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2010 - Mirror neurons