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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
dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” This quote by Carl Jung provides a brilliant overview of his concept
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,
Having no sleep can lead to unhealthy lives, relationships, one’s ability to function and interact with the world, and an unbalanced state of body, mind, and spirit. Sleep is crucial to an individual because it is a time where the body rests and restores energy and develops important information and without sleep, the body will slowly disintegrate. Poor sleep quality often is associated with Insomnia, but the two are two different items. Poor sleep quality is where an individual does not get at least 4 hours of sleep, but is still able to sleep and does not have a normal sleeping cycle. Insomnia is classified as a sleeping disorder, where one persistently lacks the ability to sleep or maintain sleep. This paper goes into a deep discussion of what Insomnia is and the two different types, the causes of Insomnia and how it affects a person’s lifestyle, a comparison between Men and Women who have Insomnia, and possible treatments to aid this disorder.
Performing well in at certain tasks and retaining information both require a high level of attention. Multitasking requires that this attention be divided amongst different tasks. As a result, the some of the attention used for a certain task must now be used for other tasks, which affects the factors needed to complete it. Referring to an experiment that was discussed earlier, Wieth and Burns (2014) stated that even with the reward, the promise of incentive could not override the limits of people’s attention. Retaining information requires undivided attention. The key word is ‘undivided.’ According to this experiment, it is nearly impossible to have the same high level of focus while working on multiple tasks that a person would while working on one task. Once someone has reached the end of their attention span, their performance begins to falter. In a final experiment involving media multitasking and attention, Ralph, Thomson, Cheyne, and Smilek (2014) stated that multitasking can lead to mind wandering and lapses in attention, which distracts people from their tasks. These results show that once their attention is divided, it can lead to distractions and difficulty completing different tasks. It is difficult to complete one assignment while focusing on several others at the same time. Multitasking affects the attention needed for a task, which can affect everything
There is almost no doubt that there is a relationship between psychology and philosophy. Indeed, many people actually considering that the philosophies related to and concerned with the mind and thought are the precursor to modern psychology. Of course, most of these philosophies were decidedly western, or popular in the west. However, the problem with our western views of consciousness in philosophy and psychology is that often times the way we view the conscious process leads to a so-called "infinite regression." That is to say, if we see consciousness as a set of rules guiding our experiences in life, there must also be another set of rules that defines how we know when to use those rules, and so on and so forth. (Kurak 2001, 18-19). In this paper, I will attempt to show how we can turn to Buddhist principles to help us gain a better understanding of human consciousness.
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.
I will commence by defining what makes a mental state conscious. This will be done aiming to distinguish what type of state we are addressing when we speak of a mental phenomenon and how is it, that can have a plausible explanation. By taking this first approach, we are able to build a base for our main argument to be clear enough and so that we can remain committed to.
an individual is overcome by sleep. It is during these times where the mind is
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
In the field of psychology, the concept of sleep has raised multiple questions over time. Psychologists are constantly doing studies on people while they sleep to diagnose sleep disorders. Using EEG readings, they study and record brain waves and muscle movements that occur while the participant is asleep. Sometimes they even wake the person up so they can observe what happens to the brain when you are woken up in different stages of sleep. In order to diagnose sleep disorders, we must first understand what exactly sleep is. Sleep is generally made up of multiple 90-minute cycles. Every time sleep occurs, we cycle through four stages followed by a fifth stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement). The final stage proves the brain is functioning even
“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).
The way that our brain processes information and responds to the awareness of things is a very complex system with in the brain. One study mentioned talks about the integration of senses in the brain and how we process the information. “Another study better illustrates the integrative nature of this synchrony. Words were presented in various locations on a screen; whether the subject became aware of the word’s color or if its location-indicated by being able to recall is later-depended on whether a frontal or temporal area was activated during the presentation. But if the individual registered both the color and the location, additional activity occurred in a part of the parietal cortex (Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006).” (Garrett, pg.501) This research demonstrates how different people react differently to stimuli and different levels of their cognition and awareness. It is important for people to develop a sense of awareness in order to function fully in the world. The book argues “that one apparent advantage is that it enables consistency and a playfulness in our behavior that would not be possible otherwise. (Garrett, pg. 502) It is human nature to rely on a consistency and the ability to plan ahead which is why the function of awareness is so important to the human
Sleeping and Dreaming Despite the large amount of time we spend asleep, surprisingly little is actually known about sleeping and dreaming. Much has been imagined, however. Over history, sleep has been conceived as the space of the soul, as a state of absence akin to death, as a virtual or alternate reality, and more recently, as a form of (sub)consciousness in which memories are built and erased. The significance attributed to dreams has varied widely as well.
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.
Attention is defined as “notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important”.