Conscious and nonconscious thought: Insights from the neuroscience of decision-making
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 26, 2026 N. Shadlen Michael
Conscious thought does not require a special neural mechanism but arises from the same representations used in nonconscious decision-making. Nonconscious thoughts are structured as interrogations that produce provisional intentions guiding action without awareness, relying on persistent neural representations that encode both potential actions and the questions giving them meaning. These states may preserve source-sensitive structure supporting minimal experiential organization. Conscious thought emerges when such a state is reformatted for potential report to another mind or oneself, recruiting theory of mind and narrative structure and placing its content in a shared space. This proposal bridges nonconscious decision mechanisms to phenomenal consciousness, placing part of the hard problem within empirical reach.