A Synergistic Workspace for Human Consciousness Revealed by Integrated Information Decomposition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how the brain orchestrates information from multiple input streams into a unified conscious experience. Here, we address two fundamental questions: how is the human information-processing architecture functionally organised, and how does its organisation support consciousness? We combine network science and a rigorous information-theoretic notion of synergy to delineate a “synergistic global workspace”, comprising gateway regions that gather synergistic information from specialised modules across the brain. This information is then integrated within the workspace and widely distributed via broadcaster regions. Through functional MRI analysis, we show that gateway regions of the synergistic workspace correspond to the brain’s default mode network, whereas broadcasters coincide with the executive control network. Demonstrating the empirical relevance of our proposed architecture for neural information processing, we show that loss of consciousness due to general anaesthesia or disorders of consciousness corresponds to a diminished ability of the synergistic workspace to integrate information, which is restored upon recovery. Thus, loss of consciousness coincides with a breakdown of information integration within the synergistic workspace of the human brain. This work contributes to conceptual and empirical reconciliation between two prominent scientific theories of consciousness, the Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory. Taken together, this work provides a new perspective on the role of prominent resting-state networks within the human information-processing architecture, while also advancing our understanding of how the human brain supports consciousness through the synergistic integration of information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".