Our awareness of internal and external stimuli is referred to as consciousness. Internal sensations include pain, hunger, thirst, tiredness, and awareness of our thoughts and emotions. External stimuli include witnessing the light of the sun, feeling the warmth of a room, and hearing a friend’s voice.
On a daily basis, we experience many states of consciousness and levels of awareness. We could even describe consciousness as a spectrum ranging from full awareness to deep sleep. Sleep is a state distinguished from periods of rest that occur during alertness by relatively low levels of physical activity and lower sensory awareness. High degrees of sensory awareness, thinking, and behaviour characterise wakefulness.
States of consciousness associated with daydreaming, intoxication as a result of alcohol or other drug use, contemplative states, hypnotic states, and altered states of consciousness following sleep deprivation fall between these extremes. We may also enter unconscious states as a result of drug-induced anaesthesia for medical causes. Even when we are fully awake, we are not always totally aware of our surroundings. Have you ever daydreamed whilst driving down the road or school without actually thinking about the drive? Even though you were unaware of it, you were capable of doing all of the complicated duties associated with operating a motor vehicle. Many of these processes, like most psychological activity, have biological roots.
Consciousness Quotient
The Consciousness Quotient is a psychological construct that includes qualities, skills, and talents that enable us to explore and optimise our conscious experience.
The Consciousness Quotient includes 15 patterns and aspects of conscious experience: perspective-taking, discrimination clarity, experience quality, spirituality-harmony, global identity, language use, physical self, energy self, cognition self, non-conceptual self, sociocultural interconnectivity, inner growth, multi-modal integration, habitual styles, awakening skills.
Being conscious entails having a degree of witnessing consciousness as well as a degree of freedom of choice while thinking, feeling, sensing, and interacting with others and the environment. Intentionality is a necessary component of conscious experience because it allows a person to choose what activity to engage in and what attitude to allow and choose.
The daily Consciousness Quotient is the habitual degree of consciousness felt in the morning, one hour after waking up and after a restful night’s sleep, without being subjected to any substantial stimuli (coffee, TV, radio, music, talking, or psychological stress, social interactions, food).
A higher Consciousness Quotient indicates a greater degree of witnessing awareness and less automatic thinking, feeling, experiencing, and interacting with others and the environment, as well as a greater degree of choice when commencing an activity. It also implies a greater ability to connect with life and experience new aliveness through the body.
Consciousness Types
A variety of factors can produce shifts or variations in awareness. Some of these occur naturally, while others are the result of factors such as medications or brain trauma. Changes in consciousness can lead to shifts in perception, reasoning, understanding, and interpretation of the world.
Among the various states of consciousness are:
- Dreams
- Hallucinations
- Hypnosis
- Meditation
- Sleep
- Psychoactive drug-induced states
History of Consciousness
For thousands of years, philosophers dominated the study of human consciousness. The concept of mind-body dualism, or the idea that the mind and body are separate but interact, was developed by the French philosopher Rene Descartes.
The study of conscious experience was one of the first areas explored by early psychologists once psychology was formed as a separate discipline from philosophy and biology.
Structuralists analysed and reported conscious feelings, thoughts, and experiences using a technique called introspection. Trained observers would examine the contents of their own minds with great attention. Obviously, this was a highly subjective procedure, but it sparked greater interest in the scientific study of consciousness.
Consciousness, according to the American psychologist William James, is like a stream—unbroken and continuous despite incessant shifts and changes. Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalyst, focused on knowing the significance of the unconscious and conscious mind.
While much of psychology research switched to solely observable behaviours in the first half of the twentieth century, research on human consciousness has developed considerably since the 1950s.
Conclusion
Consciousness refers to your awareness of your own ideas, memories, feelings, sensations, and surroundings. Your consciousness is essentially your awareness about yourself and the world around you. This awareness is personal and unique to you. If you can describe what you’re feeling in words, it’s a part of your consciousness.
Your conscious experiences are altering and changing all the time. For example, you may be focused on reading this article at one point. Your attention may then be drawn to a recollection of a previous conversation you had with a coworker. Following that, you may realise how uncomfortable your chair is, or you may be thinking of arranging dinner.