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

Consciousness may not be a direct property of the brain but rather a construct created by the same neural machinery used to understand other people's minds. This hypothesis proposes that awareness is a perceptual reconstruction of attentional state, built by brain systems specialized for social intelligence. Evidence from studies on social perception, hemispatial neglect, out-of-body experiences, mirror neurons, and decision-making supports the idea that the mechanisms computing others' awareness also compute one's own awareness. The article argues that consciousness emerges from social cognitive processes, not from neuronal complexity alone, and that its adaptive value lies in predicting behavior.

Study at a glance

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, is 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 us to be socially intelligent. The primary role for 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 article 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.