Understanding Consciousness

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Where does consciousness reside "what makes you, you" self-awareness has always been an interest of mind. The idea of consciousness amazes me, how does it happen?
Why is it unique to everyone? And where does it reside? Marcus de Sautoy and BBC's The Secret You did a wonderful job asking these questions and showing us the modern approaches we use to solve these big questions. The Secret You tries to explain where consciousness resides and explains that the cortex, located on the outer part of the brain, allows us to be self-aware. e5f557bfe90197e1ee0a485bb8eb39bd.jpegThis self-awareness comes from nerve cells in the brainstem sending projections from the thalamus out to all areas of the cortex; this constant "Activeness" is part of what makes us aware. As far as evidence the show did a great job because they had and actual brain which was really interesting to see. But after hearing these origins of consciousness I began to wonder about situations where these origins are disrupted by either disease or accidents. There are cases where people are unconsciousness for extended periods of time wake up and are back to themselves in no time, but in other cases people can loose all self-awareness. I've attached a very interesting case of Dissociative amnesia where a woman lost all sense of self-awareness for 10 months and then all of a sudden had it trigged and for the most part returned to her normal self. Cases like these amaze me and I hope to see more scientific breakthroughs in understanding the brain in the future.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294508-overview

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I think this is a really interesting topic too. The extra case studies you posted were fascinating. The one where the woman was sexually abused and had the four different identities really stuck out to me. So her self awareness came in four different forms and while one was happening the other wasn't. What is going on with the cortex, brain stem, and thalamus when that happens?

As a literary and cultural theory student, the idea of consciousness comes up throughout history. Descartes imagined separate from the body. Today we combine the ideas of mind and body, because we know such a divide does not exist. Yet, awareness and identity are still thought to be intangible and conceptual - because they exist as signifiers. It would be incredibly interesting if we studied the link between our brains and our identity/awareness.

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This page contains a single entry by Zach Zelickson published on February 25, 2012 1:36 PM.

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