Bernard Baars

Bernard J. Baars (born 1946 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, US. He is currently an Affiliated Fellow there.

He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a concept of human cognitive architecture and consciousness. He previously served as a professor of psychology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he conducted research into the causation of human errors and the Freudian slip, and as a faculty member at the Wright Institute.

Baars co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Academic Press journal Consciousness and Cognition, which he also edited, with William P. Banks, for "more than fifteen years".

In addition to research on global workspace theory with Professor Stan Franklin and others, Baars has done work to reintroduce the topic of the conscious brain into the standard college and graduate school curriculum, by writing college textbooks and general-audience books, web teaching, advanced seminars, and course videos.