I’m delighted that my new book called Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN: How Each Brain Makes a Mind has been getting discussed! I did want to call your attention to why the word “conscious” and “resonant” are in its title.
I realize that the word “consciousness” is often used in a loose way. I was lucky to notice, after years of developing Adaptive Resonance Theory with many gifted colleagues, that its processes of Learning, Expectation, Attention, Resonance, and Synchrony always led to detailed representations of individual conscious experiences. Hence Consciousness was always in the mix, leading to the idea that ART clarifies the CLEARS processes.
With this background, I should note that the book explains how humans consciously see, hear, feel, and know things about the world and shows how these conscious representations enable us to plan and act to realize valued goals;
classifies 6 distinct resonances in conscious perception or recognition, how they work, where in the brain they occur, and WHY evolution may have been driven to discover conscious states;
identifies resonances that cannot become conscious and explains why;
identifies brain processes that never become resonant and explains why;
and supports all of these proposals with principled explanations of large psychological and neurobiological databases.
Testable predictions are also provided, many of which have been supported by subsequent psychological and neurobiological experiments.
The book also summarizes a thought, or gedanken, experiment about how any system can autonomously correct errors in a changing world that is filled with unexpected events using hypotheses that are familiar facts from daily life. The result is Adaptive Resonance Theory.