Bernard J. Baars (born 1946, in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

) is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at

The Neurosciences Institute The Neurosciences Institute (NSI) was a small, nonprofit scientific research organization that investigated basic issues in neuroscience. Active mainly between 1981 and 2012, NSI sponsored theoretical, computational, and experimental work on consc ...

San Diego, CA San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human

cognitive architecture A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. The formalized mod ...

and consciousness. He previously served as a professor of psychology at the

State University of New York, Stony Brook Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system ...

where he conducted research into the causation of human errors and the

Freudian slip In psychoanalysis, a Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought. Classical examples involve slips o ...

, and as a faculty member at the

Wright Institute The Wright Institute is a private graduate school focused on psychology and located in Berkeley, California. History The institute was founded by Nevitt Sanford in 1968 when he left Stanford. Dr. Sanford first gained prominence as a co-author of ...

. Baars co-founded the

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) is a non-profit organization for professional membership that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disc ...

, and the Academic Press journal

Consciousness and Cognition The journal ''Consciousness and Cognition'' provides a forum for scientific approaches to the issues of consciousness, voluntary control, and self. The journal was launched by Bernard Baars and William Banks. The journal's editor-in-chief position ...

, which he also edited, with William P. Banks, for "more than fifteen years". In addition to research on global workspace theory with Professor Stan Franklin and others, Baars is working to re-introduce the topic of the conscious brain into the standard college and graduate school curriculum, by writing college textbooks and general audience books, web teaching, advanced seminars and course videos. Baars has also published on animal consciousness, volition, and feelings of knowing, and is currently working on an approach to "higher" states, as defined in the meditation traditions. New brain recording methods continue to reveal unexpected evidence on those topics.

Bibliography

*Bernard Baars: ''The cognitive revolution in psychology'', NY: Guilford Press, 1986, . *Bernard Baars: ''A cognitive theory of consciousness'', NY: Cambridge University Press 1988, . *Bernard Baars: ''The experimental psychology of human error: Implications for the architecture of voluntary control'', NY: Plenum Press, Series on Cognition and Language, 1992, *Bernard Baars: ''In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind'', NY: Oxford University Press, 1997, . *Bernard Baars and Nicole M. Gage: ''Cognition, Brain and Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience''. (Second Edition). London: Elsevier/Academic Press, 2010.

References

External links

Published articles as pdf downloads, with Stan Franklin and other coauthors

Homepage

Consciousness: The WebCourse
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baars, Bernard 1946 births Living people American neuroscientists Scientists from Amsterdam Dutch emigrants to the United States American consciousness researchers and theorists