Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.



Then some animals evolved covert attention-a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the sen...