Chapter 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Introduction

In this chapter a myriad of literature will be reviewed in an attempt to address the various issues pertaining to the subject of this dissertation. The four major sections of the chapter will cover the following topics:

• Consciousness in cognitive psychology: Baars’ Global Workspace Theory

• Mystical Experience

• Working Memory

• Meditation and Contemporary Theatre

2.1 Consciousness

Consciousness has been discussed back to the earliest writings in Greece and India, when many of the basic ideas we try to understand today were first articulated by Plato and Aristotle, and the Vedanta and Buddhist philosophers. In the 19th century, psychology was defined as the exploration of consciousness, a tradition that was swamped by a great wave of physicalism in academic life immediately after 1900. Since that time and until this last decade, psychology had produced little scientific work on the topic as such, although a vast amount of work had been published on perception, sensation, sleep, waking, dreaming, working memory, inner speech, selective attention, and a host of other issues which all involve conscious experience.

Consciousness has been studied in connection to three different categories of brain functions: wakefulness, awareness, and self-consciousness (Ito, 1998). Wakefulness, as the opposite of sleep, is a fundamental brain function common to all vertebrates, and is regulated by the brainstem. Awareness, common to all mammals, is related to a cerebral cortical process for the perception of what is going on in the external world. Self-consciousness, however, entails awareness of what is going on inside one’s own internal world. It implies monitoring of what the self is doing, giving rise to the perception of self. Self-consciousness may not be unique to humans, and may be common to a greater or lesser degree to primates who possess a well-developed association cortex. The association cortex includes the prefrontal cortex and the parietolateral area surrounded by the primary sensory areas (Ito, 1998). These two areas will be studied in further detail when discussing mystical states, and in reviewing literature on working memory.

In this dissertation the focus is on the latter two aspects of consciousness: awareness and self-consciousness. Crook (1980) has described these two aspects as a dichotomy. Awareness, which he names ‘subjective self-awareness’ is that state where the senses and the organism are completely focused on the environment and the task at hand. The human self is unaware of itself and all attention is totally focused on the external object. This state is inherent to spiritual practices, which lead to mystical experiences.

In contrast, with self-consciousness, or ‘objective self-awareness’ the subject is aware of its self as a focus of attention. The individual is attending to his conscious state or to her behaviour, personal history, circumstances, body or character in an evaluative manner. Thus a characteristic of objective self-awareness is that it is based on the existence of a set of standards by which each person regulates his self-esteem and sense of well being. To have one’s attention drawn to oneself is to evaluate oneself in terms of one’s position on some dimension of personal desirability, originally based in requirements made by society, but then internalised by the self through socialisation.

Thus objective self-awareness is linked to low self-esteem, which is the root of various psychological problems, whilst it has been shown that mystics or individuals who attain subjective self-awareness, score significantly more highly on psychological well-being than do non-mystics (Hay, 1985). Moreover Duval and Wicklund (1972) argue that conscious attention cannot be focused simultaneously on an aspect of the self and be absorbed with a feature of the environment. Consequently, objective self-awareness automatically blocks subjective self-awareness, and vice-versa.

Consciousness is intimately related to attending. Conscious awareness is, indeed, the focusing of attention. Single-pointed attention creates a narrowing of consciousness (e.g. in meditation or when totally involved with a task), but awareness is often divided into a more- and a less-focused area, like when we drive a car and listen to the radio. In this case attention creates the foreground of consciousness, letting the rest slip into peripheral awareness (Crook, 1980). When learning a task, for instance riding a bicycle, at first one attends to every muscular movement, but as one gains in skill, riding becomes more automatic and slips into the periphery of awareness. Conscious attention is freed to survey the landscape, but the peripheral background of awareness would still sustain the cycling which quickly comes back into attention if a sudden danger comes in the way.

Attention and the periphery of awareness are the two salient points in Baars’ Global Workspace (GW) theory of consciousness (Baars, 1988). Baars suggests that the mental architecture may be seen metaphorically as a 'working theatre'.

In Baars’ model, focal consciousness acts as a ‘bright spot’ on the stage, directed by the selective ‘spotlight’ of attention. The bright spot is surrounded by a ‘fringe’ of vital but vaguely conscious events on a ‘stage’ of working memory. Information from the bright spot is globally distributed through the theatre to two classes of complex unconscious processors: those in the darkened theatre ‘audience,’ who receive information from the bright spot; and the ‘behind the scenes’, unconscious contextual systems, which shape events in the bright spot (Baars, 1997b).

Various elements of this model are described briefly:

• The stage of working memory (WM)

Although WM can store up to seven plus or minus two elements, we are only conscious of a single element at any point in time. WM contents are mostly in the dark, but its active elements can come into awareness (Baars, 1997b). This core aspect of Baars’ (1988) theory has been echoed by other theorists who view consciousness as the awareness of what is in WM (LeDoux, 1998). Kosslyn and Koenig (1992) argue that to be aware of something, it must be in WM, and Johnson-Laird (1988) notes that the contents of WM are what we can be conscious of at any moment. WM stores relevant information only temporarily, and its main feature is its ever-changing content. Thus the object in awareness can similarly change continuously.

• The spotlight of attention

Only events in the bright spotlight are strictly conscious at any point in time. However the contents of WM can become conscious as the attention spotlight roams onto them. This is especially true of information bits on the fringe of the attention spotlight.

• The actors trying to get in the bright spot

Elements in WM, like potential thoughts, images or sensations, compete to gain the spotlight of attention. The more an ‘actor’ requires being conscious, the more it will compete against the others. For example, our daily worries come into consciousness even when we are trying to concentrate on the task at hand.

• Context is set behind the scenes

Often enough attentional selection is spontaneous and unconscious, as if commands from behind the scenes influence the direction of the spotlight. For instance, all perceptual systems are shaped by unconscious factors: for example, our visual perception of depth is shaped by the unconscious assumption that light comes from above. Similarly, conceptual assumptions can act as unconscious contexts.

• The director

Working memory is guided by an executive system that makes decisions guided by goals. But the goals themselves may not be entirely conscious. We seldom have much access to reasons why we do most automatic processes. Thus it seems that the theatre director works invisibly behind the scenes. Such executive functions are located in the prefrontal cortex (Baars, 1997c).

• The audience

This consists of diverse specialised unconscious capacities, like long-term memory, and operators which induce implicit learning or procedural knowledge. Consciousness can be the gateway to vast unconscious knowledge (Baars, 1997b).

The strength of the GW theory is that it clearly describes what all of us know intuitively. In normal everyday consciousness the complex network system in our brains generates thousands of bits of information per second. But our limited WM enables us to attend to the seven bits of information, which are currently crucial. This produces a stream of consciousness, which contains the most relevant pieces of information from one moment to the next. But our fleeting mind seems to change the contents of our working memory all the time, producing the myriad of thoughts, emotions and perceptions, we feel continuously bombarded with. Our normal everyday consciousness can be likened to a continuous divided attention task: we drive, whilst listening to the radio; listen to a lecture, whilst thinking about yesterday’s party. We seldom focus on the same object in the environment for more than a few minutes.

This is contrary to the issue raised by Crook (1980) where he showed that when subjectively aware a person is completely focused on the environment or the task at hand. This implies that the object of attention remains fixed for a lengthy period of time. Forman (1998) showed that this is precisely the technique used by mystics to empty their mind and reach altered states. Through disciplines like meditation, where there is a focusing of attention on a single repetitive stimulus like breathing, the stream of consciousness is reduced to a single element over time. Forman (1998) raises the issue that the mystical experience is the simplest possible consciousness, and consequently should be studied to enlighten us on the more complex forms of everyday consciousness.

In this dissertation the elements presented by Baars’ Global Workspace Theory to explain everyday consciousness will be studied from a different level of consciousness: the mystical experience. Although Forman (1998) describes it as a 'simpler' level of consciousness, lay people and scholars of mysticism alike, usually regard it as an ‘altered’ or heightened level of consciousness, precisely because the subject appears to have reached a purer level of consciousness.

Baars' GW theory has two core elements to it: the attention spotlight and the working memory stage. Although Baars himself does not allude to the subject, in this dissertation his theory will offer an interesting workspace to explore focused attention and a dynamic WM, in the altered state.