Blog #7 - Consciousness

     After reading Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, we had a class discussion about about consciousness. It prompted me to think, "Where does consciousness happen? Where does it come from? Are my thoughts real? Am I really seeing what I think I'm seeing?" 

     In my opinion, everyone views consciousness differently. Everyone looks at it from their very own perspective, they see what they see, and describe it. But in some cases, they may only be describing what they THINK they see, as opposed to what's really going on. Is consciousness abstract, or is it really a thing? For instance, objects are concrete things that can have a location. So what does this mean to be human and to have thoughts? Are our thoughts and what we perceive concrete things?  

     Steven Pinker, of Time magazine, says that consciousness does not depend on language or self-awareness. He says, "At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold." So when we're knocked out cold, are we still conscious? To me, the answer is yes.

"Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them." -Steven Pinker

     Even while we're knocked out cold (knocked out meaning literally being knocked out, sleeping, or in a coma), we can still process thoughts and what other people are telling us. According to Pinker, Belgian and Russian scientists performed an experiment on a woman who had been involved in a car crash that was in a vegetative state. They asked her to perform various activities, such as imagining the rooms in her house or playing tennis. As they did so, the appropriate parts of her brain "lit up." Even though she was considered a vegetable, she still had glimmerings of consciousness and her brain scan was barely different from a healthy, active person's brain.  Our consciousness also happens in our sleep and we perceive it as dreams. Sometimes, our dreams can be so real to us that we wake up and have to wonder if it actually happened or not. I know that's happened to myself a couple of times, and it's a really strange sensation. Funny how the brain works, right?  

     Are we really in control of our own consciousness? Yes, and no. Although we might go through life thinking we can control our own awareness and consciousness, that's not really all true. While we can control some of our thoughts, certain things like brain surgeries and drugs can cause changes in the chemicals in our brain and cause us to perceive things that aren't really there. Pinker says, "...the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along."


     I also find it interesting that we could consider optical illusions to be a part of consciousness, in a sense. Our eyes have ways of tricking us to make us believe that we are seeing something when we really aren't. Pinker says, "Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness." This could explain why people say they have seen UFOs and claim to have been kidnapped by "aliens." It could all be just in their mind, but their consciousness makes them think it's legitimately happening. 

     The brain works in strange ways... And in reality, we will probably never really know how or why the brain works the way it does. It's scary, really, to think about, how powerful the organ inside our head is.