Long List Example: The Parts of a Theater: Stage, Audience & Backstage

Major features of conscious cognition can be approached with a theater metaphor, an ancient but still useful idea.

1. The stage of working memory.

Here is a little demonstration to help focus again on the facts:

Try to stop your inner speech for ten seconds (timing yourself by looking at a clock). I find it impossible to do for more than five seconds or so. It is the simplest possible demonstration, but it shows how dependent we are on the flow of inner speech, which is one dimension of our working memory.

Now think about traveling from home to work, remembering to stop off at the supermarket on the way home… can you see it? It is difficult not to see concrete spatial descriptions. That is the domain of working imagery. Over the last few decades we have gathered a body of solid evidence about the verbal and visual components of working memory, but one thing has not changed: both components are remarkably limited in their capacity to retain information.

As we pointed out above, we can still retrieve words and images from working memory (WM) after they have faded, for some seconds. Thus WM is mostly in the dark at any single time. Yet we need to be aware of the active elements in working memory, including sensory input, rehearsed and imagined items, items we act on voluntarily (by rehearsing a phone number, for instance), and those we plan to act on. We may say that WM input, output, and manipulated items in WM apparently need to be conscious.

2. The bright spotlight of attention.

We can shift at will among the numbers we are keeping in working memory. In imagining the supermarket on the way home, we can focus at will on the various items for sale, the apples or the soap. The contents of consciousness can be guided, both voluntarily and spontaneously, like a bright spot on the stage of working memory. As we showed before, WM is not entirely conscious. We can add this feature to our theater metaphor. Let’s say that the theater has a powerful spotlight of attention, and only events in the bright spot on stage are strictly conscious.

3. The actors competing for the bright spot.

All working memories show competition between different actors, the potential thoughts, images or sensations that try to reach the stage in this figure below. The more conscious involvement is required for any actor, the more it will compete against the others.

This image of an actor trying to gain access to the spotlight of attention is too simple, of course. Sensory systems have a vast range of contents, from a single star on a dark night to a fast-moving ball game in a crowded stadium. There is much evidence to show that the actors can be decomposed into single sensory neurons, and recomposed into complex multimodal events involving millions of sensory cells.

Metaphors have their limits, and this is clearly one of them.

4. Contextual frames shape scenes.

Any experience is shaped by unconscious frames (contexts), just as events on stage are shaped by directors and stage hands behind the scenes. Much attentional selection is spontaneous and unconscious, as if commands from behind the scenes influence the direction of the spotlight.

All perceptual systems are shaped by unconscious factors; our visual perception of depth is shaped by the unconscious assumption that light comes from above. Lighting someone’s face from below can make it unrecognizable. Above we have shown the difference in our understanding of the word set when it is preceded by put vs. tennis. That kind of frame-sensitivity is universal in language, perception, action control, memory, problem-solving, etc.

Even conceptual assumptions can act as unconscious frames (contexts). Each of us is run by beliefs that are unconscious at the time they shape our thoughts and actions. Consider the famous mind–body debate. Ask someone about their own freedom of action, and they will claim some kind of free-will mentalism. Ask them about taking a physical aspirin for a mental headache, and they will smoothly switch to dualism. Ask college students whether their minds can be understood in terms of neurons, and they will probably agree to physicalistic reductionism. Each of these positions involves a cluster of beliefs, most of which are unconscious most of the time. Yet they shape our conscious thoughts every second of the day.

But we can see the same three-stage pattern in answering everyday questions: What is your mother’s maiden name? What is 20 x 13? In each case, there is a brief pause, and then, without conscious work on the question, the answer appears. It is as if unconscious algorithms about one’s mother, or about multiplying numbers, are recruited by a conscious appeal for an answer.

The theater analogy is clear: we only need to have an actor proclaim a question, and special problem solvers in the audience go to work to solve the problem without further conscious involvement. When an answer is found, it is often returned to consciousness, as if an audience member mounts the stage to announce the answer.

The Director

Executive functions seem to be contextual frames in just this way. They seem to make use of the conscious bright spot, even when they are not conscious themselves. It is believed that human working memory is guided by some sort of executive system that makes decisions guided by goals. The decision to rehearse a telephone number may not be entirely conscious. We rarely have much access to the reasons why we do anything, and when we are forced to guess we are often wrong. Thus it seems that the theater director also works invisibly behind the scenes. Such executive functions are apparently located in the frontal cortex; damage to this part of the brain leads to a predictable loss of ability to guide one’s actions by long-term goals.

5. The audience.

Consciousness is the gateway to a vast unconscious collection of specialized knowledge. All unified models of cognition today suggest some sort of unconscious audience: It may be called long-term memory or automatic productions, but it consists of multiple specialized capacities that are not conscious. We have illustrated three examples above, and we will explore some implications below.

Psychologists have become convinced that the real work in navigating through the problem spaces of our lives is done unconsciously for most of us most of the time. This is a counterintuitive idea. Intuitively we tend to think of our selves as being in charge of our actions, our bodies, even our thoughts. But the nervous system prefers a different style of operating, one that is more distributed, in which most of the work is done in a decentralized way, by local processors.

Executive control does exist, but it seems to take place by way of those distributed specialized capacities. In saying a word, we have some overall control, but the delicate and subtle execution of speech articulation is largely unconscious.