What is Consciousness?

Consciousness is our awareness of ourselves and our environment.  Did you know that daydreaming, sleeping, meditating, and even drug-induced hallucinating are all different forms of being conscious?  What throws us into these different states of mind?

There are some states that are spontaneous: daydreaming, drowsiness, dreaming
Some states are physiologically induced: hallucinations, orgasms, food/oxygen starvation
And some are psychologically induced: sensory deprivation, hypnosis, meditation

The field that studies the brain's activity associated with perception, thinking, memory and language, is called cognitive neuroscience.  Here is an incredible example of a study done by someone working in this field to show how testing can measure consciousness:

There was a 23 year old woman who was in a car accident that showed no outward signs of being conscious.  However, when researchers asked her to imagine playing tennis.  While doing a brain scan they realized that the parts of her brain that were active were the parts of the brain that normally control arm and leg movements.  They repeated the study with 22 other patients in a vegetative state and three more showed signs of consciousness.

Another crazy thing that our minds do, is called dual processing.  Dual processing really just means that we know more than we think we know.  For example, if a bird flies by and you think, "Oh that's a hummingbird!" You know you know you just saw a hummingbird, but you might not be thinking about the color, or how far away it is, or how fast it is flying, even though your mind has already processed that information.

How much information are we actually processing? Turns out, it's a lot.  Our 5 senses take in about 11,000,000 bits of information per second. 11 MILLION! Out of that 11 million, our mind only consciously processes about 40 of them, and your unconscious makes use of the rest.  A good example of this is, how much we hear when we're in a crowded room.  If you're having a conversation with someone, you think you're only hearing that person, but in reality you're also hearing each word of those around you.  Don't believe me? Well, have you ever been in a conversation and heard someone across the room say your name?  You didn't just happen to hear the one word that was your name, you heard everything then your mind brought attention to your name.