Let me open this article with the famous saying of Martin Luther King, Jr. that: “Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” Even though there is no scientific basis for his statement, what we witness daily in our localities serve as testimonies to that. People just abandon their conscious brain and leave everything to luck. Dr. Matt James also noticed this in 2016 by lamenting that “But it’s occurred to me lately that a lot of people have stopped accessing the power of their conscious minds. Rather than using their conscious minds to think, analyze, weigh choices and set goals for themselves, too many people have defaulted to absorbing and regurgitating the thoughts, prejudices, goals and conclusions of others” (James, 2016).
General Psychology defines conscious behavior as “any behavior that the person is aware of (ex. walking, eating, etc). Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself (Gulick, 2004). It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something “that it is like” to “have” or “be” it, and the executive control system of the mind (Farthing, 1992). Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”(Velmans & Schneider, 2008).
In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the conscious mind consists of everything inside of our awareness. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about in a rational way. The conscious mind includes such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling, and fantasies inside of our current awareness. Closely allied with the conscious mind is the preconscious, which includes the things that we are not thinking of at the moment but which we can easily draw into conscious awareness (Cherry, 2018).
Freud often used the metaphor of an iceberg to describe the two major aspects of human personality. The tip of the iceberg that extends above the water represents the conscious mind. The conscious mind is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Beneath the water is the much larger bulk of the iceberg, which represents the unconscious. While the conscious and preconscious are important, Freud believed that they were far less vital than the unconscious. The things that are hidden from awareness, he believed, exerted the greatest influence over our personalities and behaviors (Cherry, 2018).
While trying to explain the difference between conscious and preconscious minds, Cherry notes that the conscious mind involves all of the things that you are currently aware of and thinking about. It is somewhat akin to short-term memory and is limited in terms of capacity. Your awareness of yourself and the world around you are part of your consciousness. The preconscious mind, also known as the subconscious mind, includes things that we might not be presently aware of but that we can pull into conscious awareness when needed. You might not presently be thinking about how to do long-division, but you can access the information and bring it into conscious awareness when you are faced with a math problem (Cherry, 2018).
The preconscious mind is a part of the mind that corresponds to ordinary memory. These memories are not conscious, but we can retrieve them to conscious awareness at any time. While these memories are not part of your immediate awareness, they can be quickly brought into awareness through conscious effort. For example, if you were asked what television show you watched last night or what you had for breakfast this morning, you would be pulling that information out of your preconscious. A helpful way to think of the preconscious is that it acts as a sort of gatekeeper between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. It allows only certain pieces of information to pass through and enter conscious awareness (Cherry, 2018).
Your conscious mind is your objective or thinking mind. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time. This mind has four essential functions. First, it identifies incoming information. This is information received through any of the six senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or feeling. Your conscious mind is continually observing and categorizing what is going on around you. To illustrate, imagine that you are walking along the sidewalk and you decide to cross the street. You step off the curb. At that moment, you hear the roar of an automobile engine. You immediately turn and look in the direction of the moving automobile to identify the sound and where it is coming from. This is the first function (Tracy, 2018).
The second function of your conscious mind is comparison. The information about the car that you have seen and heard goes immediately to your subconscious mind. There, it is compared with all of your previously stored information and experiences with moving automobiles. f the car, for example, is a block away, and moving at thirty miles per hour, your subconscious memory bank will tell you that there is no danger and that you can continue walking. If, on the other hand, the car is moving toward you at sixty miles per hour and is only 100 yards away, you will get a “danger” message that will stimulate further action on your part (Tracy, 2018).
The third function of your conscious mind is analysis, and analysis always precedes the fourth function, deciding. Your conscious mind functions very much like a binary computer, performing two functions: It accepts or rejects data in making choices and decisions. It can deal with only one thought at a time, positive or negative, “yes” or “no.” (Tracy, 2018).
References
Cherry, K (2018). The Role of the Conscious Mind. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-conscious-mind-2794984
General Psychology (2018). Definition of Psychology and Importance of it. Retrieved from https://generalpsychology.wordpress.com/tag/conscious-behavior/
James, M (2016). Tap into your Conscious Mind. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/focus-forgiveness/201611/tap-your-conscious-mind
Tracy, B (2018). Understanding Your Conscious Mind. Retrieved from https://www.briantracy.com/blog/general/understanding-your-conscious-mind/
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(C) 2021, Alan Elangovan, All Copy Rights Reserved.