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essay on the meaning of consciousness
essays on consciousness
essay on the meaning of consciousness
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Every human being has a conscious, often we think of conscious as being a bad or guilty feeling. Such as a terrible secret one is hiding or the feeling of a deep regret. In psychology the idea of consciousness being a bad idea is thrown out the door. In psychology consciousness is a two dimension idea wakefulness and awareness. Wakefulness and awareness refers to one’s individual awareness of their unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environment.
Wakefulness is an individual’s degree of alertness which is distinguished between being awake and being asleep. Awareness is monitoring of information from the environment and one’s own thoughts. There are many key points that consciousness touches one such as minimal consciousness,
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Awareness in psychology refers to a consciousness of internal or external events or experiences. Wakefulness refers to alertness, or the extent to which a person is awake or asleep. Wakefulness distinguishes between being awake and being asleep. Awareness deals with how one monitors information from their surroundings and their own thoughts. Usually wakefulness and awareness go together or can be compared side by side, but they do not always work together. A person can be awake but not very aware. Wakefulness and awareness share the same aspect of sleeping, dreaming, perception, sensation, and responsiveness. Wakefulness and awareness are the two main dimensions of …show more content…
There are several parts that connect to attention such as selective attention, cocktail party affect, intentional blindness, perceptual load model, multitasking, and training consciousness. Selective attention is the ability to focus awareness on a specific feature in the environment while ignoring others. This occurs on a daily basis and can be seen in how people pay attention to something and how much attention is given at that time. It is impossible to give attention to everything that goes on in the world; we use selective attention to select what events in our daily lives are important. The cocktail party effect is hearing your name in spite of numerous distractions that is going on around you. The cocktail party effect also goes along with the intentional blindness which is when one has been accused of something. Focusing on these areas needs to be given a lot of attention and your consciousness needs to be aware of all these areas. One important part of awareness is the perceptual load model which is where you have limited capacity. When this happens you either turn down the radio while reading or focusing on another thing beside the radio. This is the ability to maintain or focus on a target or idea without another distraction. Multitasking is when you shift your attention. It is a rapid switching from one task to another and it really
Vithoulkas, George, and D. F. Muresanu. "Conscience and Consciousness: A Definition.” Journal of Medicine & Life 7.1 (2014): 104-08. Print.
§ Physical Bodies - dreaming - e.g. do you know you are awake now? Or
Helton, W.S., & Warm, J.S. (2008). Signal salience and the mindlessness theory of vigilance. Acta Psychologica, 129(1), 18-25. Doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.04.002
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
an individual is overcome by sleep. It is during these times where the mind is
From the time of hunters and gatherers, the some of the thing that has accompanied the human race is their brains. Human's intelligence and consciousness has evolved just as humans have evolved from early hominids to modern humans. Consciousness refers to an individual's awareness of their surroundings and everything that is going on around them. During the course of a lifetime, there are many instances where a shift in the quality and pattern of an individual's mental activity occurs. Altered states of consciousness includes the variable aspects of sleep, dreams, drug induced consciousness, and hypnosis.
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sleep is defined as a period of reduced activity in which an individual’s response to his/her environment is decreased (Healthy Sleep, n.d.) The body undergoes fluctuations in brain wave activity, breathing, heart rate and other functions. These changes occur during two main stages of sleep. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is the stage in which dreaming typically occurs and absorption of newly learned information takes place. The deep restorative sleep known as slow-wave sleep consolidates memories (Healthy Sleep, n.d.) Recent studies have found that some individuals may not experience both stages of sleep. This can contribute to problems in learning, memory and brain restoration.
According to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of “The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness,” he responds to consciousness being very difficult to define and explain how or why any physical state is conscious rather than being unconscious. Another primary issue of consciousness is the issue of having experience. When one thinks and perceives, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is a subjective aspect. A majority of people assume that all mental states are conscious, but none of us know that for sure, and so the problem of describing or explicating consciousness collapses into the problem of explaining mentality. Even though perception can give someone access to knowledge, obtaining your personal perspective cannot only seek knowledge as well, but it can show the spiritual or personal aspect towards
The notion of Consciousness took various definitions through time and even today it still doesn’t have a general accepted definition. A more universal one would be that Consciousness is a state of awareness of one’s surroundings, of the external objects around, or being aware of oneself. From a more psychological perspective, Consciousness represents a state characterized by perceptions, sensations, emotions, thoughts, where the individual is aware of what he sees, feels, thinks and observes himself, those around him and the environment.
Sleep is a behavioral state characterized by little physical activity and almost no awareness of the outside world. Sleep is actually made up of two separate and distinctly different states called REM sleep (rapid eye movement) and NREM sleep (non-rapid eye movement). With NREM sleep it is further divided into stage 1-4 based on the size and the speed of the brain waves. Step one is the stage when you drift off to sleep or doze off. For example people doze off in class because you are bored and have nothing to do but listen to the teacher talk. Some parents may call it a cat nape when their kids go to sleep for about ten minutes or so. The second stage is called an intermediate stage of sleep. That is when
Freud did not invent the idea of the conscious versus the unconscious. However, he was responsible for making it popular. What you are of aware of at any particular moment is called being conscious. By being conscious you are aware of certain things such as your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and fantasies. All of our knowledge is bound up with consciousness. Consciousness is the surface of the mental
“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).
Consciousness is the ability to think about your surroundings, be aware of yourself, and be awake. It's considered to be the essence of existence, particularly by Descartes, who so famously said, "I think, therefore, I am."
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.