- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
PRoFILe 7.1
Michael Graziano (b. 1967)
Michael Graziano is a composer,
novelist, and author of children’s
books as well as Professor of
Psychology and Neuroscience
at Princeton University. His
wide-ranging research includes
studies of spatial perception and
sensorimotor integration in mon-
keys, how the brain represents the body and its surround-
ings, and more recently the brain basis of consciousness,
including relationships between awareness, attention,
and social perception in the human brain. His theoretical
work explores the idea that awareness is a construct of
the brain’s social machinery and his ‘attention schema
theory’ extends this to suggest that awareness is an
attention schema computed by an expert system in the
brain that attributes awareness to others as well as to
oneself. Apart from his surrealist novels, he is author of
Consciousness and the Social Brain (2010), arguing
that awareness is information and consciousness is not
mysterious. Graziano is also a skilled ventriloquist when
accompanied by his dummy monkey, Kevin.There are alternatives to accounts which try to reduce atten-
tion to neural or computational processes. Instead of focusing
on attention’s function of selecting items for acting on, we
can treat it as something which shapes our experience of the
world. In the structuring view of attention, ‘attention is con-
trastive: it structures our mental life so that some things are
in the foreground of others’, whether or not for the purpose of
action selection (Watzl, 2011, p. 849). The conviction that the
‘phenomenal character’ of attention needs taking seriously if
we are to pin down its functional role leads, in this case, back to
James’s concept of consciousness as a stream: ‘attention is the
mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness’ (p.
849). In other theories, attention is treated not as a process in
itself, but as a manner in which things happen – as an adverb,
not a noun. In the cognitive-unison view, for example, the aim
is to account for what it takes for someone to perform a task
attentively rather than inattentively, and the proposed differ-
ence is that the task is carried out with ‘cognitive unison’ (Mole,
2011). This shifts the question from a what? to a how?
‘[A]ttention is rational-access consciousness’, claims philoso-
pher Declan Smithies, in a theory that tries to unify the func-
tional and the phenomenal aspects of attention (2011, p. 268).
The idea is that attention is a form of consciousness that makes
information fully accessible for use in the rational control of
thought and action. ‘Rationality’ here is a person-level concept:
only when high-level processing like reasoning or goal-directed
action is based on information that has been attended to is it
‘rational’ (Smithies, 2011). Here we see that theories of atten-
tion are also attempting to characterise how our experience
changes when we pay attention, or even equating attention
with a kind of consciousness. This takes us back to our initial
question of how attention and consciousness relate.CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION
There are six main possibilities for how consciousness and attention relate to one
another. First, consciousness may depend on attention: we cannot be conscious
of something if we aren’t paying attention to it. Second, attention may depend
on consciousness: we cannot pay attention to something unless we are conscious
of it. Third, consciousness and attention may be correlated but not causally con-
nected – maybe because they are both the results of some other mechanism.
Fourth, they may be entirely unrelated – in which case the question is why they
seem to be related. Fifth, they may actually be the same thing. Or sixth, one or
both may be illusory (not be what they seem), or not exist at all – in which case
we again have to ask ourselves why we are mistaken.CAUSAL CONNECTION I: CONSCIOUSNESS DEPENDS ON ATTENTION
The first possibility is that attention is necessary for consciousness: there can be
no consciousness without attention.‘attention is the
mental activity of
structuring the stream
of consciousness’
(Watzl, 2011, p. 849)
‘Attention is [. . .] a
relevant attribute of
the stimulus. It’s red,
it’s round, it’s at this
location, and it’s being
attended by me’
(Webb and Graziano, 2015, p. 9)