Bernard Baars

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Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1946, and moved to the United States as a child. He is married to Dr. Katharine A. McGovern.

Bernard Baars

Baars is a cognitive scientist specializing in conscious and unconscious brain functions, voluntary control, and concepts of self. These common sense ideas have long been difficult to study in the biobehavioral sciences, but have returned to the forefront in recent decades. Baars is best known for his book, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988) in which he develops an integrative theory called Global Workspace Theory (GWT) as a model for conscious and unconscious processes in the human brain. GWT continues to be developed, in collaboration with Prof. Stan Franklin of the University of Memphis, Prof. Murray Shanahan of Imperial College, London, and scientists working in the Neural Darwinism tradition of Gerald A. Edelman at the Neurosciences Institute. A number of neuroscientists are advancing the theory from their own perspectives, notably Prof. Stan Dehaene and his research group in Paris. A popular account of GWT appeared in 1997, called In the Theater of Consciousness: the Workspace of the Mind, from Oxford University Press (1997; translated into German and Japanese).

The term "global workspace" is now widely used to describe the role of conscious processes in the brain. A great deal needs to be done, however, to flesh out the theory and evidence, and to clarify the functions of conscious cognition in the human mind-brain. GWT is currently a plausible research framework rather than a settled theory.

Baars helped to return the topic of consciousness to the forefront of scientific studies by showing that a vast body of empirical evidence is relevant to it, and that it can be (and has been) studied quite successfully. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence and theory regarding consciousness goes back at least to the early 19th century, which defined "consciousness" as the focus of the mind and brain sciences. William James' great Principles of Psychology of 1890 summarized a century of empirical findings on the topic in two large volumes. In that sense, the contemporary scientific return to consciousness is a revival of a strong tradition that began at least with the development of psychophysics in the 1820s, and even as far back as Isaac Newton's classical prism experiment. Newton showed that white sunlight can be decomposed into consciously perceived component colors. Colors are psychobiological entities, not physical facts in the inanimate world, although they are reliably evoked by different wavelengths of light. Thus the study of consciousness goes back to the beginnings of modern science.

The conceptual novelty of modern research comes from the use of close experimental comparisons between matched conscious and unconscious brain processes, to home in on the question of consciousness "as such." Baars has called this approach "contrastive analysis," but it is of course the application of the experimental method to the study of consciousness as a variable. A great deal of modern research involves such close experimental comparisons. Although simple, this idea was historically revolutionary in that earlier periods could not conceive of unconscious brain processes as purposeful, complex computations comparable to conscious ones. William James, for example, passionately argued against the idea that unconscious processes could be intelligent and purposeful. In such a philosophical framework, conscious and unconscious mind-brain events are so different that they cannot be compared. The modern view is different in that respect, and has been very productive.

Baars co-founded the journal Consciousness & Cognition together with William P. Banks, published by Academic Press/Elsevier, and was the first president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (www.assc.caltech.edu). ASSC is still the sole scientific organization dedicated to the empirical study and understanding of consciousness and related issues. Both Consciousness & Cognition and ASSC have helped to expand the accepted reach of consciousness science to a large number of topics, including such fields as animal consciousness. Baars is also a founder and editor of the web bulletin Science and Consciousness Review, along with Thomas Ramsoy and others. SCR aims to make the fast-growing scientific literature available to a wider web audience.

Because residual behaviorism still keeps topics like consciousness and voluntary control out of the standard college curriculum, Baars has recently developed teaching materials for a web-based course through the University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies (www.consciousness.arizona.edu). He has also edited a college textbook, together with Nicole M. Gage, called Cognition, Brain and Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience. (Elsevier/Academic Press, 2007). A number of topic authors contributed chapters to the text.

Baars' Homepage (below) contains a number of free electronic articles on the topic of consciousness and related questions.

[edit] Bibliography

Bernard Baars: The cognitive revolution in psychology, NY: Guilford Press, 1986, ISBN 0-89862-912-8.
Bernard Baars: A cognitive theory of consciousness, NY: Cambridge University Press 1988, ISBN 0-521-30133-5.
Bernard Baars: The experimental psychology of human error: Implications for the architecture of voluntary control, NY: Plenum Press, Series on Cognition and Language, 1992, ISBN 0-306-43866-6
Bernard Baars: In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-19-514703-0.
Bernard Baars and Nicole M. Gage: Cognition, Brain and Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience., London: Elsevier/Academic Press, 2007, ISBN 976-0-12-373677-2.