All information that comes into our conscious mind through our five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch moves through our own individual filters into our unconscious mind (see Figure 4 below). Apart from our five senses, by which we take in our surroundings and evaluate our lives, human beings also have intellectual or mental faculties. Those faculties – perception, will, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason – are the gifts of the mind that distinguish us as co-creators. We all have the ability to use those intellectual faculties in our conscious mind to influence what goes from our conscious into our unconscious mind, but only few people know how to use those faculties to create the life they want.
Figure 4 – Our Five Senses and the 3 Most Important Intellectual Faculties
While all intellectual faculties are important in having conscious control in our lives, the faculties of Perception, Memory and Imagination are the intellectual faculties that are most potent in changing the mind on a conscious level, so let’s have a closer look at them now. Perception
"The moment you change your perception is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body.”
- Dr.
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Implicit Memory helps us accomplish many of the things we do automatically without thinking. Even when we are not consciously thinking about how to complete an activity, our muscles remember for us. One classic example of such a feat is when you walk up to the ATM, and although you have used the pin so many times, it just won’t come up in your mind. It seems to be gone from your memory. Yet the moment your fingers hit the keypad, you automatically type in the correct number sequence. Research tells us that this kind of memory remains even after severe brain injury and amnesia. Other examples are riding a bike, driving a car, and replacing an old light
Chapter 4 discusses the several states of consciousness: the nature of consciousness, sleep and dreams, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and meditation. Consciousness is a crucial part of human experience, it represents that private inner mind where we think, feel, plan, wish, pray, omagine, and quietly relive experiences. William James described the mind as a stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of changing sensations, images thoughts, and feelings. Consciousness has two major parts: awareness and arousal. Awareness includes the awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences. Arousal is the physiological state of being engaged with the environment. Theory of mind refers to individuals understanding that they and others think,
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” (Shelley 162)
Eagleman talks about unconscious learning, and explores how much of what we do daily is learned and directed by the unconscious mind. The first example is changing lanes: when we’re driving, we do it without thinking. However, when asked to describe how they change lanes, many people are flummoxed. Changing lanes is so automatic that when the conscious mind tries to take control, it confuses our brains and our gears become out of sync. The second example is chicken sexers: people who can sort chick hatching even though male and female chicks look exactly alike. The third example is plane spotters: people who could distinguish between enemy and ally planes thousands of feet in the air. In both cases, the people just knew! They couldn’t explain how they knew. Rather, after trial and error, their unconscious picked up on the slight cues that allowed to them tell the difference. The conscious mind, on the other hand, was unaware of this
Christian Jarrett explains that having 5 senses is a myth. Just by defining the word “sense” we can tell that five is inaccurate. If a sense is a way for the brain to receive information about the world and the body, then we will agree that there are more than five. If senses were differentiated depending on the type of receptors, then that will multiply the number of senses even more. So five senses actually makes no sense.
explanation of where our minds, or consciousness, came from and how we are able to
Cognition refers to the process required for acquiring and comprehending of knowledge, this involves the use of high-functioning parts of the brain such as memory, perception, recall and attention. As speculated by cognitive psychologists, scientists and approaches, the process of cognition is defined by an interface between our internal learning processes and sensory processes, which can be also referred to as top-down and bottoms up processing. . These processes occur consciously and unconsciously and help us as individuals to function. Memory plays a big role in cognition and is described as our ability to learn new experiences as well as recall and retain past occurrences (Webster 1992), it is required for everyday learning, thinking and recalling of information in the mind, as without memory we would be learning things anew every day, even though we carry out the same routines daily. Therefore, our experiences turn into memories and are stored in our minds, but how does this process work?
The objective mind takes cognizance of the objective world. Its media of observation are the five senses. It is the out growth of man’s physical nece...
Lots of our memory is submerged from conscious view such as, driving skills or typewriting. Activity on complicated tasks like playing musical instrument may be disrupted when conscious awareness unpermitted, and we learn and remember how to use language often without having to be conscious of its grammatical rules. The best definition of memory might be ‘the ability to gain and utilize acquired knowledge or information’.
This paper aims to endorse physicalism over dualism by means of Smart’s concept of identity theory. Smart’s article Sensations and the Brain provides a strong argument for identity theory and accounts for many of it primary objections. Here I plan to first discuss the main arguments for physicalism over dualism, then more specific arguments for identity theory, and finish with further criticisms of identity theory.
Explicit memory is a conscious, recollection of an event or an item of information. It is usually measured using recall or recognition methods. Recalling has the ability to retrieve and reproduce information. Recognizing has the ability to identify information you have previously learned, read, or heard about.
The mind is a collection of various classes of processes that can be studied empirically. To limit the field of mental processes we must follow the criteria of folk psychology. There are three kinds of mind: human, animal and mechanical. But the human mind is the paradigm or model of mind. The existence of mechanical minds is a serious challenge to the materialism or the mind-brain identity theory. Based on this existence we can put forward the antimaterialist argument of machines. Intelligence is a class of mental processes such that the mind is the genus and the intelligence is a species of this genus. The capacity to solve problems is a clear and definite criterion of intelligence. Again, like in the mind, the human intelligence is the paradigm of the intelligence. There are also three kinds of intelligence: human, animal and mechanical. Searle’s Chinese room argument is misleading because Searle believes that it is possible to maintain a sharp distinction between syntax and semantics. The reasonable dualism in the brain-mind problem defends the existence of brain-mental processes, physical-mental processes, and non-physical-mental (spiritual) processes. Constitution of the personal project of life, self-consciousness and free volitions are examples of spiritual processes. Usually the intelligence has been considered the most important quality of human beings, but freedom, or the world of free volitions, is a more specific quality of human beings.
The world is made up of two types of ‘things’- mental and material. While material things are characterized by physical properties such as shape, mass, and color, and are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, mental things are made up of properties such as consciousness, awareness, beliefs, and desires, all of which are not limited to space (Fieser, 2008; Yang, 2012). Philosophy of mind is concerned with the relationship between these two sets of properties and tries to explain whether there are such things as minds, such properties as mental properties, and whether mental and physical bodies interact with each other (Mandik, 2010).
Sensation refers to the process of sensing what is around us in our environment by using our five senses, which are touching, smell, taste, sound and sight. Sensation occurs when one or more of the various sense organs received a stimulus. By receiving the stimulus, it will cause a mental or physical response. It starts in the sensory receptor, which are specialized cells that convert the stimulus to an electric impulse which makes it ready for the brain to use this information and this is the passive process. After this process, the perception comes into play of the active process. Perception is the process that selects the information, organize it and interpret that information.
Nowadays, the definition of term consciousness has raised many controversies. “Consciousness is a term to indicate awareness. It includes awareness of the self, of bodily sensations, of thoughts and the environment (Biswas-Diener & Teeny, 2016). It’s not by chance that our life circumstances occur. Most often, they are the projections shown in our thoughts without our knowledge. Multiple observations conducted by scientists and psychologists confirm the influence of though on the conscious. But some of them are beyond our control. To better understand this process, let’s us examine some of my daily situations.
“Consciousness is defined as everything of which we are aware at any given time - our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions of the external environment. Physiological researchers have returned to the study of consciousness, in examining physiological rhythms, sleep, and altered states of consciousness (changes in awareness produced by sleep, meditation, hypnosis, and drugs)” (Wood, 2011, 169). There are five levels of consciousness; Conscious (sensing, perceiving, and choosing), Preconscious (memories that we can access), Unconscious ( memories that we can not access), Non-conscious ( bodily functions without sensation), and Subconscious ( “inner child,” self image formed in early childhood).