Rethinking Consciousness Michael S A Graziano by Michael S A Graziano instant download after payment.

Neuroscientist and psychologist Michael Graziano puts forward a groundbreaking new theory of the origin of consciousness.

Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano shows how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.

Then covert attention evolved— a roving, mental focus separate from where the senses are pointed. To monitor and control covert attention, Graziano posits in his attention schema theory, the brain evolved a simplified model of it— a cartoonish self- description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness. That self model not only gives us our intuitions about consciousness, but makes us empathetic social beings as we...