"Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim is: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a "global workspace" so that many parts of your mind can access it at once - speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a few things can occupy it at any one moment."
"Therefore, if Global Workspace Theory is correct, conscious experience should be sparse. Almost everything happening in your sensory systems right now - the feeling of your shirt on your back, the hum of traffic in the distance, the aftertaste of coffee, the posture of your knees - should be processed entirely nonconsciously unless it is currently the topic of attention."
Global Workspace Theory posits that conscious experience occurs only when information is broadly broadcast within a limited-capacity global workspace, enabling many cognitive systems to access it simultaneously. Because the workspace can hold very few items at once, most ongoing sensory signals remain nonconscious unless they are the focus of attention. Examples include the feeling of clothing, distant noises, tastes, and proprioceptive details that usually do not enter consciousness. The theory yields a clear, testable prediction that conscious experience should be sparse rather than richly abundant. Introspective judgments about abundance versus sparseness vary widely across people, reducing confidence in naive introspection.
Read at Psychology Today
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