## 2 Phenomenal Consciousness Aka Sensory Experience
### Brain Processes Wrongly Equated with Sensory Consciousness
#### 2.2.2 Processes Occuring in 'the Global Workspace'  
Much of the popularity of attention as a proxy for conscious experience arises from its identification as the spotlight in a theatre metaphor of consciousness. As [PERSON] [14] puts it \"The theater metaphor of mind is both ancient and modern. [PERSON] and [PERSON] used it, as did the Vedanta philosophers and [PERSON]. Modern researchers who have developed scientific theatre models include [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] in cognitive science and [PERSON] in neurobiology. [PERSON] referred to the \"bright spot\" in the cortex, which integrated all sensory input into one united activity\". Actually, it is not at all clear how related either [PERSON]'s allegory of the cave or [PERSON]'s common sense [15] really are to the theatre metaphor of consciousness, and the writers of the Vedanta did not, to my knowledge, say anything that even vaguely resembles this idea. However it is certainly true that the theatre metaphor of consciousness, rebranded as (or perhaps morphed into) the global workspace theory, has been an influential model over the past few decades.  
In fact though, the status of both attention and consciousness in global workspace theory is significantly muddled. [PERSON] [16] first says \"The central theoretical claim made here is that attention creates access to consciousness\". But later in the same paragraph, \"consciousness is needed to create access to unconscious processing resources such as the lexicon, autobiographical memory, action routines\". So it would seem that consciousness is now recognised not to be attention, because attention is said to create access to consciousness. But consciousness is not identical with the processes that go on in the global workspace either--[PERSON] (rightly in my view) specifically characterises those processes as unconscious. So where exactly in this sequence of events _does_ consciousness fit in? It is not clear.  
[PERSON] and [PERSON], who later pick up and run with the global workspace metaphor, are much less confused about the status of consciousness in their theory (albeit ultimately no less wrong about its status in reality). These workers state quite clearly that \"global availability of information through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state\" [17]. But the problem with this is that a plethora of experiments reveal the spreading of information throughout the global workspace to be just another step along the pathway towards the eventual appearance of sensory experience.  
As [PERSON] had long argued [18], feed-back (aka re-entrant aka recurrent) activity carrying information from the global workspace back to the primary and/or secondary sensory areas of the cortex turns out to be absolutely necessary for conscious experience. [PERSON]'s initial conjecture in this regard has now been unequivocally verified by a large number of experiments, in which various areas of brain are temporarily inactivated by focal TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) at various times after a sensory stimulus [19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32; 33]. For example, [PERSON] et al. [34] show that blindsight can be induced by brief inactivation of V1 at 100 ms post-stimulus, and [PERSON] and colleagues [30] report that consciousness of motion can be ablated by TMS delivered to any of (i) V1 at 40-60 ms, (ii) V5/MT at 60-80 ms, or (iii) V1 at 80-100 ms post-stimulus.  
Finding (iii) above fits well with the post-stimulus time at which other experimental work suggests that sensory experience occurs [35; 36].