Consciousness

Consciousness refers to a number of phenomena, including the waking state; experience; and the possession of any mental state. Self-consciousness includes proneness to embarrassment in social settings; the ability to detect one’s own sensations and recall one’s recent actions; self-recognition; awareness of awareness; and self-knowledge in the broadest sense.

TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Consciousness

FIELDS OF STUDY: Cognitive processes; sleep; thought

Introduction

Many scientists have ignored the phenomena associated with consciousness because they deem it inappropriate for empirical investigation. However, there is clear evidence that this position is changing. Researchers in the fields of psychology, neurobiology, philosophy, cognitive science, physics, medicine, anthropology, mathematics, molecular biology, and art are now addressing major issues relating to consciousness. These researchers are asking such questions as what constitutes consciousness, whether it is possible to explain subjective experience in physical terms, how scientific methods can best be applied to the study of consciousness, and the neural correlates of consciousness.

Moreover, new methods of brain imaging have helped clarify the nature and mechanisms of consciousness, leading to better understanding of the relationship between conscious and processes in perception, memory, learning, and other domains. These and other questions have led to a growing interest in consciousness studies, including investigations of properties of conscious experience in specific domains (such as vision, emotion, and metacognition) and a better understanding of disorders and unusual forms of consciousness, as found in blindsight, synesthesia, and other syndromes.

History of Consciousness Study

The definition of consciousness proposed by English philosopher John Locke—“the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind”—has been that most generally accepted as a starting point in understanding the concept. Most of the philosophical discussions of consciousness, however, arose from the mind-body issues posed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Descartes raised the essential questions that until recently dominated consciousness studies. He asked whether the mind, or consciousness, is independent of matter, and whether consciousness is extended (physical) or unextended (nonphysical). He also inquired whether consciousness is determinative or determined. English philosophers such as Locke tended to reduce consciousness to physical sensations and the information they provide. European philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, however, argued that consciousness had a more active role in perception.

The nineteenth century German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart had the greatest influence on thinking about consciousness. His ideas on states of consciousness and unconsciousness influenced the German psychologist and physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, as well as the ideas of Sigmund Freud on the nature of the unconscious.

The concept of consciousness has undergone significant changes since the nineteenth century, and the study of consciousness has undergone serious challenge as being unscientific or irrelevant to the real work of psychology. Nineteenth century scholars had conflicting opinions about consciousness. It was either a mental stuff different from everyday material or a physical attribute like sensation. Sensation, along with movement, separates humans and other animals from nonsensate and immobile lower forms of life. Scholars viewed consciousness as different from unconsciousness, such as occurred in sleep or under anesthesia. Whatever the theory, these scholars generally employed the same method, that of introspection.

Experimental Study

It was the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt who began the experimental study of consciousness in 1879 when he established his research laboratory. Wundt saw the task of psychology as the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. By the 1920s, however, behavioral psychology had become the major force in psychology. John B. Watson was the leader of this revolution. He wrote in 1913, “I believe that we can write a psychology and never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind . . . and the like.” Between 1920 and 1950, consciousness was either neglected in psychology or treated as a historical curiosity. Behaviorist psychology led the way in rejecting mental states as appropriate objects for psychological study. The inconsistency of introspection as method made this rejection inevitable. Neurophysiologists also rejected consciousness as a mental state but allowed for the study of the biological underpinnings of consciousness. Thus, brain functioning became part of their study. The neural mechanisms of consciousness that allow an understanding between states of consciousness and the functions of the brain became an integral part of the scientific approach to consciousness. Brain waves—patterns of electrical activity—correlate with different levels of consciousness. These waves measure different levels of alertness. The electroencephalograph provides an objective means for measuring these phenomena.

Beginning in the late 1950s, however, interest in the subject of consciousness returned, specifically in those subjects and techniques relating to altered states of consciousness: sleep and dreams, meditation, , hypnosis, and drug-induced states. When a physiological indicator for the dream state was found, a surge in sleep and dream research followed. The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) helped to generate a renaissance in consciousness research. Thus, during the 1960s there was an increased search for “higher levels” of consciousness through meditation, resulting in a growing interest in the practices of Zen Buddhism and yoga from Eastern cultures.

This movement yielded such programs as Transcendental Meditation, and these self-directed procedures of physical relaxation and focused attention led to biofeedback techniques designed to bring body systems involving factors such as blood pressure or temperature under voluntary control. Researchers discovered that people could control their brain-wave patterns to some extent, especially the alpha rhythms generally associated with a relaxed, meditative state. Those people interested in consciousness and meditation established a number of “alpha training” programs.

Hypnosis and psychoactive drugs also received great attention in the 1960s. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was the most prominent of these drugs, along with mescaline. These drugs have a long association with religious ceremonies in non-Western cultures. Fascination with these altered states of consciousness led to an increased interest in research on consciousness. As the twentieth century progressed, the concept of consciousness began to come back into psychology. , cognitive psychology, and the influence of cognitive philosophy each played a role in influencing the reintroduction of the concept, more sharply etched, into the mainstream of psychology.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, viewed consciousness as central to psychological study. Therefore, he sought to find ways to make its study scientific. To do so, Piaget dealt in great detail with the meaning of the subject-object and mind-body problems. Piaget argued that consciousness is not simply a subjective phenomenon; if it were, it would be unacceptable for scientific psychology. Indeed, Piaget maintained that conscious phenomena play an important and distinctive role in human behavior. Moreover, he directed research to examine the way in which consciousness is formed, its origins, stages, and processes. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, nor can psychologists reduce it to physiological phenomena. For Piaget, consciousness involves a constructed subjective awareness. It is a developmentally constructed process, not a product. It results from interaction with the environment, not from the environment’s action on it: “[T]he process of becoming conscious of an action scheme transforms it into a concept; thus becoming conscious consists essentially in conceptualization.”

There are two relationships necessary for the understanding of consciousness. The first is that of subject and object. The second is the relationship between cognitive activity and neural activity. Both are essential to getting at the process of cognition and its dynamic nature.

Memory and Altered States

A variety of studies and have explored the effects of certain variables on consciousness. For instance, it is important to ascertain the way in which variables that increase memorability in turn influence metamemory. Results have been inconsistent. However, it was found that when experimenters directed subjects to remember some items and forget others, there was an increase in recalling those items that experimenters were directed to remember. There was, nevertheless, no effect on the accuracy of what was remembered.

Sleep and dreams, hypnosis, and other altered states have provided another intriguing area of study for those interested in consciousness. The relationship of naps to alertness later in the day has proved of great interest to psychologists. In one study, nine healthy senior citizens, seventy-four to eighty-seven years of age, experienced nap and no-nap conditions in two studies each. Napping was for one and one-half hours, from 1:30 to 3:00 P.M. daily. The no-nap condition prohibited naps and encouraged activity in that period. Various tests were used to measure evening activity as well as record sleep. Aside from greater sleep in the twenty-four-hour period for those who had the ninety-minute nap, there was no difference on any other measure.

The threat simulation theory of dreaming holds that dreams have a biological function to protect the dream self. This dream self behaves in a defensive fashion. An empirical test of this theory confirmed the predictions and suggests that the theory has wide implications regarding the functions of consciousness.

The study of consciousness, then, has elucidated understanding of perception, memory, and action; created advances in artificial intelligence; and illustrated the philosophical basis of dissatisfaction with the dualistic separation of mind and body. Electrical correlates of states of consciousness have been discovered, as well as structures in the brainstem that regulate the sleep cycle. Other studies have looked at neural correlates in various states such as wakefulness, coma, the persistent vegetative state, the “locked-in” syndrome, akinetic mutism, and brain death. There are many other areas of consciousness in which neuroscience has made major advances.

An important problem neglected by neuroscientists is the problem of meaning. Neuroscientists are apt to assume that if they can see that a ’s firing is roughly correlated with some aspect of the visual scene, such as an oriented line, then that firing must be part of the neural correlate of the seen line. However, it is necessary to explain how meaning can be expressed in neural terms as well as how the firing of neurons is connected to the perception of a face or person.

Imagery

Imagery is associated with memory, perception, and thought. Imagery occurs in all sensory modes. However, most work on imagery has neglected all but visual imagery. Concerns with imagery go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato and Aristotle, for example, compared memory to a block of wax into which one’s thoughts and perceptions stamp impressions. Aristotle gave imagery an important place in cognition and argued that people think in mental images. Early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt, carried on this notion of cognition.

Around 1901, Oswald Külpe and his students at the University of Würzburg in Germany challenged these assumptions. However, these experiments employed introspective techniques, which Wundt and others attacked as being inconclusive. The controversy led to a rejection of mental imagery, introspection, and the study of consciousness itself. In the twentieth century, a movement toward seeing language as the primary analytical tool and a rejection of the old dominance of imagery came into fashion. The of French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre also led to a decline of interest in imagery.

A revival of research on imagery followed the cognitive science revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing greatly to the rising scientific interest in mental representations. This revival stemmed from research on sensory deprivation and on hallucinogenic drugs. Studies in the role of imagery also contributed to this reemergence of imagery studies.

Conclusion

As the concept of a direct, simple linkage between environment and behavior became unsatisfactory in the late twentieth century, the interest in altered states of consciousness helped spark new interest in consciousness. People are actively involved in their own behavior, not passive puppets of external forces. Environments, rewards, and are not simply defined by their physical character. There are mental involved in each of these. People organize their memories. They do not merely store them. Cognitive psychology, a new division of the field, has emerged to deal with these interests.

Thanks to the work of developmental psychologists such as Piaget, great attention is being given to the manner in which people understand, or perceive, the world at different ages. There are advances in the area of animal behavior stressing the importance of inherent characteristics that arise from the way in which a species has been shaped to respond adaptively to the environment. There has also been the emergence of humanistic psychologists, concerned with the importance of and growth. Clinical and industrial psychology have demonstrated that a person’s state of consciousness in terms of current feelings and thoughts is of obvious importance. Although the role of consciousness was often neglected in favor of unconscious needs and motivations, there are clear signs that researchers are interested in emphasizing once more the nature of states of consciousness.

• Key Concepts
• awareness
• alternate state of consciousness
• developmental aspects of consciousness
• evolution of consciousness
• history of consciousness study

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