Unpacking the toolkit of human consciousness

No matter how different they seem — the learned and contemplative neuroscientist versus the toy orangutan with a penchant for off-color jokes — almost any adult who experiences them knows that Princeton University professor Michael Graziano is the voice behind his simian puppet Kevin. Yet to most listeners, Kevin — who acts as the comic relief when Graziano publicly presents his work — nonetheless has a distinct personality and consciousness — he seems aware of and comments on his surroundings in his own unique way.

While Kevin is not “real” in the sense of being an animate biological being, Graziano, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, suggests that humans attribute consciousness to the puppet in the same way that we attribute consciousness to each other and to ourselves. Graziano has developed a new theory of consciousness he calls the “attention schema theory” that suggests that specialized systems in the human brain compute information about the things of which a person is aware, and project the property of consciousness onto ourselves and others. In that sense, the puppet’s consciousness is every bit as real as that of anyone wincingly laughing at his jokes about living atop Graziano’s hand.

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