Growing up, I believed the common conception of what consciousness pertains to what is done with your thoughts and your mind depending on your body to analyze what is occurring in the world. However, when taking an in-depth examination of this specific topic, there is an immense amount of information and components to it. Consciousness is a familiar concept to many people, yet it is mysterious. It poses a baffling problem of the mind and it raises many questions regarding its true definition and how it correlates to everything else we know today. I have a few definitions that could fit into what consciousness is.
First, conscious means to be awake. When an individual is in a coma, asleep, or anesthetized, he or she is in an unconscious state. Everyone else who respond to his or her environment is conscious or awake. Therefore, any animal such as a cat, a giraffe, or a dog experiences consciousness while it is not sleeping.
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Second, consciousness can mean thinking the way a person thinks. This involves mental activities such as talking, listening to music, feeling emotions, doing mathematics, and experiencing anything sensuous. It can be individually different.
Synesthesia, a condition which one sensory involuntarily or automatically leads to another unstimulated sensory. For example, the letter A or the number 3 may elicit a certain color that most likely will not change. A research study conducted by Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) used an embedded figures test, in which they require participants to detect shapes within a display of the numbers 2 and 5. Synesthetic individuals could automatically and immediately identify what the shape is. From this study, I can conclude that the trigger color experience is automatic, and the concurrent color is consistent over a period. When this whole process occurs, I think there is an intermingling of senses that activates or triggers a part of the brain to react the way it does.
Finally, the third definition involves being aware of yourself and of your own thoughts. A good way to get to do this is by closing your eyes in a quiet room and stop thinking about anything in particular. When you do this, what do you think about? Are your thoughts distracted by pressing thoughts such as a big exam, a secret, or the feeling of loneliness? Perhaps you step out of your body to become more aware of yourself. All the things that did not reach your awareness before creeping up in your mind and so many other things. One major point that stuck out to me during the lecture in class is that the more you suppress your thoughts for a long period, the harder it will be to not obsess over doing exactly what you attempted to not think about or do. For example, my mom once bought a beautiful and delicious cake for my birthday. I so badly wanted to taste the cake, but I knew she would be upset if I did. The more I thought about not tasting the cake, the less control I began to have over the thought. In the end, I gave up and dabbed my finger across the icing and it was delicious. In the end, I should have found a distraction to keep me from thinking about doing exactly what I knew would get me into trouble.
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