GWT II. Global Workspace Theory's Crucial Predictions - BAARS LAB

Current Status

Price

$127.00

Get Started

Take this Course

8 Lessons

5 Videos

All Levels

Skill Level

2hr 45min

to complete

Flexible

Your pace

Examine cutting edge brain evidence for GWT's crucial prediction of dynamic, widespread integration and broadcasting

In 1983 Bernard Baars proposed Global Workspace Theory (GWT), which started out as a purely psychological account of how a small amount of what we experience gets selected, integrated, and broadcast widely enough to become conscious.

To account for the continued rise of brain evidence, psychological understanding, and complexity of the living brain, Global Workspace Theory has advanced from a widely used framework to a leading testable theory.

One of the GWT’s crucial predictions is “widespread integration and broadcasting”.

This prediction can be most directly tested by brain activity, so neuroscientist Alea Skwara and researcher Ilian Daskalov sit down with Baars and make him answer for it, paper by paper, against the actual brain evidence that’s accumulated since.

They work through 4 specific empirical cases to see where GWT actually stands today:

Baars own 2013 paper, the result of three decades of work, argues that the brain doesn’t need one fixed anatomical hub for conscious cognition, but a dynamic, momentary functional hub the way a city’s busiest intersection can shift depending on the hour.
Gaillard and colleagues’ 2009 study out of Paris shows that a consciously perceived word lights up the brain more widely and for longer than the same word flashed too fast to notice.
A Yale epilepsy team’s discovery of an actual “switch and wave” — a shift away from the brain’s resting default network, followed by a wave of gamma band activity in the first second of conscious perception — gives the theory a measurable signature.
And Deco et al.’s “functional rich clubs” propose that certain functional hubs and intersections in the brain’s connectome carry disproportionately more of the integrative traffic.

Along the way, the conversation turns to compelling questions that make this material worth sitting with like feelings of knowing, the neuroscience of gut instinct, and why introspection — a word that’s been fairly smeared in psychology — is actually how two centuries of solid sensory science got built, including the earbuds you may be wearing right now.

Baars, Skwara & Daskalov disagree where the evidence is still thin, and debate honestly about what remains unknown.

Press play. Let’s see what the evidence shows.

Four Papers, One Theory: Does the Brain Evidence Hold Up?

A gamma wave, a functional rich club of neurons, and the evidence for how a thought becomes conscious. Explore the links between cutting edge brain evidence and how that supports or updates our understanding of consciousness and Global Workspace Theory (GWT).

Watch a brief preview of this course →

LEARNING OUTCOMES: After completing this course, you will gain the skills to

Interpret brain-imaging evidence for conscious versus unconscious processing. Use findings like Gaillard et al.'s (2009) to evaluate what "widespread and sustained" cortical activity demonstrates about conscious cognition.
Identify the neural signature of a conscious perceptual event. Describe the "switch & wave" pattern and explain why its timing matters.
Apply the "functional rich club" to brain connectivity. Use Deco et al.'s (2019) framework to explain how certain hubs in the brain's connectome may carry disproportionate integrative load, and connect this to the broader city/traffic metaphor used throughout the course.
Defend the scientific legitimacy of introspection as a research tool. Counter the assumption that self-report is unreliable by citing concrete historical examples built on careful, controlled methods.
Explain why Global Workspace Theory doesn't require or suggest a fixed anatomical hub. Cite leading edge brain evidence demonstrating dynamic, functional hubs, and use the city-intersection analogy to reason about how location-independent "widespread integration and broadcasting" occurs.
Evaluate whether independent lines of evidence genuinely converge on a single theory. Synthesize findings from four different methodologies (structural modeling, word-perception imaging, intracranial recording, and connectome analysis) to assess whether or not they support a unified account of conscious cognition and the brain.

Who is this course for?

This course is for you if you are interested in, or teach, or study any of the following subjects: Psychology, Neuroscience and Education, Cognitive Science, Health Education, or Philosophy. And anyone working in AI who wants to understand the biological basis of consciousness before assuming machine minds.

Trusted by academics

“Baars was just waaaay ahead of everyone else in approaching questions concerning consciousness as scientific questions. He's done vastly more than metaphor-slinging philosophers to make progress. His preference for testable hypotheses as opposed to dead-end thought-experiments have made a major difference in shifting the topic to a secure knowledge base from which real progress can be made.”

“Eyebrows are no longer raised even among neuroscientists when the topic of consciousness is discussed, largely due to authors like Bernard Baars. His works explain many insights of the complex workings of the brain.”

“Bernard Baars is both one of the pioneers of the cognitive study of consciousness and currently one of its most important contributors.”

“Bernard Baars is the leading thinker behind the Global Workspace theory of consciousness that has been recently championed by top neuroscientists, such as Stanislas Dehaene.”