There is no single ‘normal’ state of consciousness. Every person experiences a huge range of mental conditions every day as the brain adapts to changing circumstances.
The dividing line between conscious and unconscious care is not sharp. Even within consciousness, there are different degrees. ln dreamless sleep, you may not be conscious of anything at all or maybe just of vague thoughts or feelings. When you are day dreaming, you may not be conscious of some of the things in your environment. For example, someone may be talking quite close by, and yet you are unaware of it. A racing driver is acutely conscious of hiemironment – of the bends in the track, the speed of the car, the position of other cars. But he is probably not very conscious of what is going on in his own mind because he does not have time to notice whether he is feeling afraid or to think about his thoughts. The driver is conscious of his environment but not self-conscious.
Three degrees of awareness
The various states of consciousness can be divided according to the degree of awareness they involve. According to philosopher David Rosenthal from New York, we can describe three main types.
The first and most basic state is when we perceive things through our senses but do not have any thoughts about these perceptions. This happens when you react to, say, a visual stimulus without being consciously aware that you have perceived anything. Think of those times when you carry out familiar routines – driving home from work, for example – without conscious awareness of what you are doing. If something alerts you to your state, you may realize that you have driven through several sets of traffic lights with no memory of their color. You assume that you noticed the lights because you reacted to them appropriately, but you have no actual memory of them, so you can’t be sure. So how did you negotiate the lights safely? The answer is that you reacted quite unconsciously, perceiving the lights without being aware that you were perceiving them. The same unconscious brain mechanisms that allow us to do this also guide our actions in many other activities.
The next type of consciousness is the direct awareness of whatever is taking your attention. In this state, you are consciously aware of the contents of your mind – whether these are inner thoughts, such as what to buy for dinner, or more sensory experiences, such as trying to walk fast against driving rain. However, you are not reflecting on the thoughts in your mind, so your sense of ‘self’ is kept in the background. A mountain climber who is completely absorbed in climbing a rock face is intensely conscious of this way. Operating just at this level of awareness, the climber is living in the moment, simply experiencing the flow of the climb and not consciously’ owning’ the experience. The loss of self in such ‘flow ‘experiences (and similarly in meditation) appears to produce intense happiness.
Finally, there is the third type, known as reflective consciousness, in which you are aware of yourself as having the experience. In this case, you are consciously aware not just of what you are perceiving but also that it is you perceiving it: your sense of self is brought to the fore. So you do not simply have a thought; you also think about it as though looking at it from the outside. We use reflective consciousness in many different ways: in thinking about whether we have perceived something correctly or not, whether we should believe some information, or whether our recall of an event is accurate. This type of consciousness enables us to reflect on our perceptions, beliefs, and memories as though they are ‘objects’ in our minds. Reflective consciousness is also useful in social thinking, such as deciding whether to trust others – or even ourselves – but it can have a downside: thinking too much about what we are doing, such as when giving a talk or making a move in sports, can actually hind er our performance.
Conscious operations?
We often carry out very familiar routines in a state that is like being on autopilot. Although operating efficiently, we are not consciously aware of what we are doing.
Keeping a Consciousness Diary
To monitor your own consciousness, set a kitchen timer to ring at intervals of between 30 and 90 minutes. When it rings, note down what is in your mind at that moment. Class it as ‘reflective’ consciousness if you are thinking about your own thoughts or as ‘aware’ consciousness if you are simply aware of what you are thinking or experiencing without reflecting on it. Do this at intervals for the next eight hours.
The next day, set the timer to ring as before. This time, when it rings, jot down all the thoughts you can recall since it last went off. You will probably find that there are far more introspective thoughts in the recall diary than in the one made at the time – an indication of how knowledge of our own consciousness is distorted by memory.
