A report on Consciousness and Thought

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).

Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.

Square version of the neon spread illusion

In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation.

- Thought

In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.

- Consciousness

5 related topics with Alpha

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation.

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

Mental event

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A mental event is any event that happens within the mind of a conscious individual.

Examples include thoughts, feelings, decisions, dreams, and realizations.

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Psychology

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Scientific study of mind and behavior.

One of the dogs used in Pavlov's experiment with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia

False-color representations of cerebral fiber pathways affected, per Van Horn et al.

Skinner's teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction

The Müller–Lyer illusion. Psychologists make inferences about mental processes from shared phenomena such as optical illusions.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 posited that humans have a hierarchy of needs, and it makes sense to fulfill the basic needs first (food, water etc.) before higher-order needs can be met.

Developmental psychologists would engage a child with a book and then make observations based on how the child interacts with the object.

An example of an item from a cognitive abilities test used in educational psychology.

Flowchart of four phases (enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis) of a parallel randomized trial of two groups, modified from the CONSORT 2010 Statement

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level etc.

Artificial neural network with two layers, an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

A rat undergoing a Morris water navigation test used in behavioral neuroscience to study the role of the hippocampus in spatial learning and memory.

Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior.

Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts.

Experience

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Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes.

In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining.

René Descartes

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French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra.

The house where Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine

Graduation registry for Descartes at the University of Poitiers, 1616

In Amsterdam, Descartes lived at Westermarkt 6 (Maison Descartes, left).

A Cartesian coordinates graph, using his invented x and y axes

Handwritten letter by Descartes, December 1638

Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious.

Moreover, in The Meditations, Descartes discusses a piece of wax and exposes the single most characteristic doctrine of Cartesian dualism: that the universe contained two radically different kinds of substances—the mind or soul defined as thinking, and the body defined as matter and unthinking.