Back in the 1980s, in one of the first modern attempts to explain consciousness, the neuroscientist Bernard Baars introduced the global workspace theory. Baars suggested that we are conscious of the information that has been brought into a centralized “workspace” in the brain. Dehaene adopted and developed this view. A related family of theories claim that we are conscious of whatever information is being fed into working memory, a special kind of memory which holds an immediate store of images, words, and sounds that we can reason with and bring to bear on problems.
