How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution.
-
What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
-
Attention Schema Theory (AST),
- ...20 more annotations...
-
The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right-and that has yet to be determined-then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.