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information that lies between the “I” and the “
X
,” the information that defines the relationship between them, the proposed attention schema. In the theory proposed here, awareness itself does not arise from the information about which you are aware, and it is not your knowledge that
you
, in particular, are aware of it. It is instead your rich descriptive model of the relationship between an agent and the information being attended by the agent.
    The other two components are important. Without them, awareness makes no sense. Without an agent to be aware, and without a thing to be aware of, the middle bit has no use. I do not mean to deny the importance of the other components. They are a part of consciousness. But awareness itself, the essence of awareness, I propose to be specifically the piece in the middle: the attention schema.
Awareness and Social Perception

    The attention schema is not so far-fetched a hypothesis. We already know the brain contains something like it. The brain contains specialized machinery that computes a description of someone else’s state of attention. It is part of the machinery for social thinking. 17 – 21
    Humans have an ability to monitor the gaze of others. We know where other people are looking. The scientific work on social attention, as it is sometimes called, has tended to limit itself to detecting someone else’s gaze direction. 17 , 22 – 24 But I doubt that our sophisticated machinery for understanding other people’s attention is limited to vector geometry based on the eyes. Computing where someone elseis looking is, in a sense, incidental. Computing someone else’s attentional state is a deeper task. I argue that we have a rich, sophisticated model of what attention is, of how it is deployed, of its temporal and spatial dynamics, of its consequences on action. A model of that type is essential to understanding and predicting another person’s behavior. Gaze direction is merely one visual cue that can help to inform that model. After all, blind people, with no visual cues about someone else’s gaze direction, still understand other people’s attention.
    As diagrammed in Figure 2.6 , the proposed attention schema can
use
gaze direction as a cue, but does not necessarily do so. It brings together a totality of evidence to constrain a rather rich and sophisticated model of someone else’s attention. It can use that model to help understand other people and predict their behavior. I am proposing that the same machinery used to model another person’s attentional state in a social situation is also used to model one’s own attentional state. The benefit is the same: understanding and predicting one’s own behavior. The machinery is in this sense general.

    FIGURE 2.6
The attention schema, the hypothesized model of attentional state and attentional dynamics, relies on information from many sources. Diagrammed here are some of the cues from which we reconstruct someone else’s attentional state.

    Where in the brain should we look for this proposed attention schema? The theory makes three broad predictions about the brain areas involved.
    First, a brain system that constructs the attention schema should be active when people engage in social perception. It should be involved in monitoring or reconstructing other people’s mind states, especially reconstructing the state of other people’s attention.
    Second, a brain system that constructs the attention schema should somehow track or reflect a person’s own changing state of attention.
    Third, when that brain system is damaged or disrupted, awareness itself should be disrupted.

    FIGURE 2.7
Two areas of the human brain that might be relevant to social intelligence.

    Do any areas of the brain satisfy these predictions? It turns out that all three properties overlap in a region of the cerebral cortex that lies just above the ear, with a relative emphasis on the right side of the brain. Within that brain region, two