Global Workspace Theory proposes that consciousness is what happens when one specialist signal wins the competition and gets broadcast to the whole brain.
broadcast winner = argmax(salience)
only broadcast content is globally available
- Specialist processors — unconscious specialist modules (vision, memory, language) competing for access.
- Workspace connectivity — how directly each specialist can reach the shared global broadcast hub.
- Input competition rate — how often new candidate signals enter the competition.
- Broadcast threshold — salience a signal needs to win and become globally available to the whole system.
Global Workspace Theory explains why you can only consciously attend to one dominant train of thought at a time, even though dozens of processes run unconsciously in parallel.