A Study Of Bernard J. Baars Theater Model Of Consciousness

Consciousness issues are never easy problems, it is even more difficult to conquer the fort of conscious process issues. We are creatures of being conscious, but we cannot observe consciousness directly, even it is our own. So scientists dedicated to collecting the subjective and objective evidences to study consciousness.In the late 19th century, when psychology just turned to be an experimental science, many people held great passion to study consciousness, though they knew little about consciousness. The most famous one is the laboratory of Wundt in Leipzig University, Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud, Jung etc. developed the understanding of consciousness and unconsciousness, draw many attention. After that, Watson launched behaviorism movement, the consciousness was driven out of the profession of psychology, meanwhile eliminating the study of consciousness became a critical goal for western mainstream psychology before world warⅡ. In 1960s, psychological science was found in a "cognitive revolution" or "consciousness revolution" along with the rise and prosperity of the humanism psychology and cognitive psychology, consciousness issues returned to the legal system of psychology. During the 1990s, the "Renaissance" movement of studying consciousness problem worldwide broke out. In this movement cognitive science played an important role. Although we don't yet know whether the cognitive psychology can achieve success in the research of consciousness, we are sure that consciousness must have its neural basis.But how can we study consciousness, and how to find out experimental evidence about consciousness? Baars argued that if we want to conduct a research about consciousness, we must treat consciousness as a variable by the way of contrasting analysis. Through the comparative analyzing between some simple, obvious conscious and unconscious events, Baars developed a dynamic model for brain mechanism—the theater model of consciousness."Theater model"also called as"global work-space theory", in recent years has become a popular theory in the west. This model was proposed by Bernard J.Baars, from university of California institute of white, an outstanding representative professor of cognitive psychology and cognitive scientific research of consciousness.He thought that the occurrence of consciousness is like the performance in the theater: (1) Working memory is the stage with limited capacity, a region of our mental, where we can plural number , continue to our own story, it includes the internal words and visual image; (2) Sensation,image and ideas are performers onstage, they are competing to get into the stage of working memory, expecting access to the spotlight region;(3) Actor that is performing in the spotlight region is our conscious contents. We could not realize all of the actors that have entered the stage, the one had the honor of being illuminated by the spotlight can become consciousness;(4) Spotlight is our attention, conscious contents are limited in a point of working memory, the point is the illuminating point, the content that we are noting is conscious experience; (5) Background is our context which is the source of conscious experience, contains the existing unconscious expectations and intention, although itself is unconscious, but it can guide and shape our conscious experience; (6) Director is the self , it is a stable, unified consciousness situation that controls everything on the stage; (7) Audiences are the unconscious specialized processors, distributed in the brain widely and processing the information released from the stage unconsciously.Baars described the complex activity of the huge biological brain using a few simple theater terms and a performance, established a dynamic model for consciousness mechanism. The theater model got a lot of supports from neurobiology and its influence on academia is becoming more and more stronger, meanwhile it is of great significance to promote the basic researches of consciousness in psychology.Yet,the significance of theater model is not just limited to the research field of consciousness. We can also apply it into some theoretical assumptions about bounding knowledge,working memory,selective attention and interaction between thalamus cortex based on the model. It will play an important role in instructing the research of relevant field. In addition, the model also has certain practical significance in psychological consultation, and it will also lead us to explore the unknown. We believe that Baars'theater model of consciousness must have more value of extensive application, waiting for our further exploration.Of course, the theater model of consciousness also has deficiencies and defects. We believe that it will be continuously sophisticated with new evidences being discovered and method being improved.