John G. Taylor’s research while affiliated with King's College London and other places

This both accessible and exhaustive book will help to improve modeling of attention and to inspire innovations in industry. It introduces the study of attention and focuses on attention modeling, addressing such themes as saliency models, signal detection and different types of signals, as well as real-life applications. The book is truly multi-disciplinary, collating work from psychology, neuroscience, engineering and computer science, amongst other disciplines. What is attention? We all pay attention every single moment of our lives. Attention is how the brain selects and prioritizes information. The study of attention has become incredibly complex and divided: this timely volume assists the reader by drawing together work on the computational aspects of attention from across the disciplines. Those working in the field as engineers will benefit from this book’s introduction to the psychological and biological approaches to attention, and neuroscientists can learn about engineering work on attention. The work features practical reviews and chapters that are quick and easy to read, as well as chapters which present deeper, more complex knowledge. Everyone whose work relates to human perception, to image, audio and video processing will find something of value in this book, from students to researchers and those in industry.

There are numerous mental diseases that yet require deep investigation in terms of the alteration of the mental state of the patient due to the disease onset. Of course there are other aspects of mental diseases which obviously urgently need exploration, such as cause, cure, etc. However it is only appropriate to consider the alteration of the patient’s mental state in this book. And of all the mental diseases it is schizophrenia which is most relevant in looking for the mental disease with greatest effect on the subject’s mental state. Numerous researchers have pointed out over the last decades that there is a loss of the sense of the inner self in schizophrenia. In particular the illuminating paper of Sass and Parnas (Schizophr Bull 29(3):427–444, 2003) gives an underpinning explanation of the disease along these lines in each of its three manifestations, with positive, negative or disordered symptoms (see also Cermolacce M, Naudin J, Parnas J, Conscious Cogn 16:703–714, 2007; Parnas J, Handest P, Saebye D, Jansson L, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 108:126–133, 2003; Parnas J, Handest P, Jannsson L, Saebye D, Psychopathology 38(5):259–267, 2005; Sass L, Parnas J, Explaining schizophrenia: the relevance of phenomenology. In: Chung MC, Fulford KMW, Graham G (eds) Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 63–95, 2007; Sass L, Madness and modernism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992). The crucial component of the analysis of these researchers is that of various disturbances in ipseity (the ongoing sense of ‘being there’ accompanying all conscious experience) that can occur for a sufferer, giving a framework with which to understand the disease. Such analyses of schizophrenia in terms of distortions of the self go back much earlier (Berze J, Die Primare Insuffizienz der Psychishcen Aktivitat: Ihr Wesen, ihre Erscheinungen and ihre Bedeutung als Grundstorungen der Dementia Praecox und des hypophrenen Uberhaupt. F Deutke, Leipzig, 1914; Minkowski E, La schizophrenia. Psychopathologie des shizoides et des schizophrenes. Payot, Paris, 1927; Blankenburg W. First steps toward a psychopathology of “common sense (trans: Mishara A). Philos Psychiatry Psychol 8:303–315, 2001; Kimura B, Ecrits de Psychopathologie Phenomenologique. Trans Boderlique. P.U.F, Paris France, 1992; Sass LA, Philos Psychiatry Psychol 8:251–270, 2001). However the more recent work has become more precise and embracing in terms of seeing most forms of schizophrenia as arising from such distortions. It also provides new ways of looking at and diagnosing the disease.

The functioning of the pre-reflective or inner self is considered in more detail in this chapter in terms of its possible creation through the CODAM model of attention presented in the previous chapter. In contradiction to the view of Western phenomenology, that the inner self appears to serve no specific purpose except that of providing the further ownership of experience, it is proposed here that the inner self acts rather as a call centre, enabling connections to be made between distant and functionally different components of brain processing thereby making such interactions more efficient. It achieves these functions by monitoring and speeding up ongoing calls or those calls about to be set up so that incorrect call routing is avoided and call switching occurs as fast as possible.

Is each of us free to act in whatever way we wish at any time? Or instead are we completely controlled by our brain processes, so that there is no such freedom? Given the CODAM framework for supposedly explaining all of our conscious experience, how is our strong sense of having such freedom an illusion? How could such a strong belief arise? If not, where is the gap in a CODAM to let the freedom of will occur? These are questions to which it is natural to expect answers. The sense of freedom of the will is strong in all of us. We are often told “It is up to you” about some decision we have yet to make. We naturally expect to have this sense of freedom explained by any detailed model of experience.

We started this book with comments on the story of the Universe (Big Bang and all) and continued with only a brief part of the story of consciousness and its urgent need for completion at, for example, approximately up to the same level as the story of the material Universe. Are we now in a position to begin to complete the story of consciousness to that level, as we had hoped, from what has been said in this book? In particular, are the fragments of the story put together in Chap. 12 on the evolution of consciousness enough to allow us to complete the story? Have we reached the end of the road as far as consciousness is concerned?

The American neuroscientist Christof Koch, working with his group at Caltech, has spearheaded the important thesis that consciousness and attention are not as closely fused as is almost universally claimed. The usual statement is that attention to a stimulus in the external world is necessary for consciousness of that stimulus to arise in a subject. More may be needed for that consciousness to arise, but at least attention must be directed to that stimulus in order for there to be any chance of consciousness of the stimulus. This implies that consciousness is to be searched for in the interstices of attention. Koch claims that this is not the case. In particular he and his colleague Tsuchiya (Koch C, Tsuchiya N, Trends Cogn Sci 11(1):16–22, 2007) wrote that consciousness could arise in a subject without them paying attention to the relevant stimulus. This claim was based on several subtle experiments, which clearly we need to analyze in some detail in order to investigate this important claim.

Determination of the details of how consciousness evolved in living systems is still to be achieved. In this chapter we take an approach to this problem through the evolution of the mechanism of attention across the animal kingdom. This is natural since one must attend to a stimulus in normal viewing conditions in order to be conscious of it. The present understanding of attention in primates, using single cell and fMRI results is shown to lead to a control approach which we suggest evolves through four stages to an extended form of ballistic attention control; a similar sequential approach was already discussed in Chap. 5, although will take a slightly different form here due to the approach trying to keep to an evolutionary path rather than purely a functional one. The final step in either path is to be finally extended for humans by addition, we propose (on the basis of the CODAM architecture) of a corollary discharge signal of that for the movement of the focus of attention, as developed in Chap. 6. It is suggested that this is the final (fifth) stage in the evolution of attention, with consciousness as a concomitant of the corollary discharge signal itself.

We are concerned here with a particular component of consciousness, its phenomenal aspect. This was already discussed in the previous two chapters (although mainly in Chap. 7), assuming it existed. The problem we now have to face is: does ‘I’ really exist or not?

If consciousness is created by brain activity, either solely or in part, then the traces of the relevant brain activity should be able to be observed by suitably subtle experiments and sensitive enough experimental apparatus. Such is the route that has been followed over the last few decades by increasing numbers of neuroscientists to search for what are called the ‘neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) but, however, with rather uncertain results. The main feature of this uncertainty is, I suspect, due to the lack of clarity as to what precisely is to be discovered. In other words there is the difficulty of what exactly the brain activity represents as part of the upcoming conscious experience of a given subject?