Global Neuronal Workspace

Consciousness has long been treated as the mystery science cannot touch. Stanislas Dehaene rejects this framing entirely. Working with Jean-Pierre Changeux and Lionel Naccache, he has spent decades identifying the precise physical signatures that distinguish conscious from unconscious processing in the human brain. The theory that resulted—the global neuronal workspace—makes a specific, testable, and falsifiable claim: that consciousness is not a mysterious extra ingredient added to computation but a specific computational architecture, in which information that remains local and fleeting stays unconscious, while information that crosses a threshold into a sudden, large-scale synchronous broadcast becomes conscious—available to memory, language, decision, and report. The signatures of this ignition are measurable: a late amplification of neural activity around 300 milliseconds post-stimulus, a slow positive electrical wave detectable on the scalp, a burst of high-frequency oscillation, long-distance synchrony between distant regions. The clinical power of this theory is considerable: these signatures have been used to detect residual consciousness in patients diagnosed as unresponsive. Its power for the