Stream of consciousness (psychology)

 

 

 

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For other uses, see Stream of consciousness (disambiguation).

Stream of consciousness refers to the flow of thoughts in the conscious mind. Research studies have shown that we only experience one mental event at a time as a fast-moving mind stream.^[1][2] William James, often considered to be the father of American psychology, first coined the phrase “stream of consciousness".^[3] The full range of thoughts - that one can be aware of - can form the content of this stream.

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Buddhism
• 2 Proponents
• 3 Criticism
• 4 Literary technique
• 5 See also
• 6 References

Buddhism[edit]

The phrase "stream of consciousness" (Pali; viññāna-sota) occurs in early Buddhist scriptures.^[4] The Yogachara school of Mahayana Buddhism developed the idea into a thorough theory of mind.^[5]
The practice of mindfulness involves being aware moment-to-moment of one’s subjective conscious experience from a first-person perspective.^[6] In other words, when practising mindfulness, one becomes aware of one’s "stream of consciousness." Buddhist teachings describe six triggers that can result in the generation of different mental events.^[7] These are input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touch sensations), or a thought (relating to the past, present or the future) that happen to arise in the mind. The mental events generated as a result of these triggers are: feelings, perceptions and intentions/behavior.^[7] In Buddhist teachings, the manifestation of the "stream of consciousness” is described as being affected by physical laws, biological laws, psychological laws, volitional laws, and universal laws.^[7]
Hammalawa Saddhatissa Mahathera writes: "There is no 'self' that stands at the mentality to which characteristics and events accrue and from which they fall away, leaving it intact at death. The stream of consciousness, flowing through many lives, is as changing as a stream of water. This is the anatta doctrine of Buddhism as concerns the individual being."^[8]

Proponents[edit]

In his lectures circa 1838-1839 Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet described "thought" as "a series of acts indissolubly connected"; this comes about because of what he asserted was a fourth "law of thought" known as the "law of reason and consequent":

"The logical significance of the law of Reason and Consequent lies in this, - That in virtue of it, thought is constituted into a series of acts all indissolubly connected; each necessarily inferring the other" (Hamilton 1860:61-62).^[9]

In this context the words "necessarily infer" are synonymous with "imply".^[10] In further discussion Hamilton identified "the law" with modus ponens;^[11] thus the act of "necessarily infer" detaches the consequent for purposes of becoming the (next) antecedent in a "chain" of connected inferences.
William James^[3][12] asserts the notion as follows:

"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (James 1890:239)

He was enormously skeptical about using introspection as a technique to understand the stream of consciousness. "The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks." ^[13]
Bernard Baars has developed Global Workspace Theory^[14] which bears some resemblance to stream of consciousness.

Criticism[edit]

Susan Blackmore challenged the concept of stream of consciousness. "When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion." However she also says that a good way to observe the "stream of consciousness" may be to calm the mind in meditation.^[15]

Literary technique[edit]

Main article: Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)

In literature, stream of consciousness writing is a literary device which seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device is strongly associated with the modernist movement. The term was first applied in a literary context, transferred from psychology, in The Egoist, April 1918, by May Sinclair, in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage.^[16] Amongst other modernist novelists who used it are James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929).^[17]

See also[edit]

• Free recall
• Edmund Husserl
• Phenomenology (psychology)
• Qualia
• Train of thought
• Samyama

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Potter MC, Wyble B, Hagmann CE, McCourt ES (2014). "Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture". Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 76 (2): 270–9. doi:10.3758/s13414-013-0605-z. PMID 24374558. 
2. Jump up ^ Raymond JE, Shapiro KL, Arnell KM (1992). "Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: an attentional blink?". Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 18 (3): 849–60. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.18.3.849. PMID 1500880. 
3. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} James, William (1890). The principles of psychology. New York, NY: Henry Holt. 
4. Jump up ^ Specifically, in the Digha Nikaya. See Steven Collins, Selfless Persons; Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 1982, page 257.
5. Jump up ^ Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-shih Lun. Routledge 2002, page 193.
6. Jump up ^ (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 4)" - Mindfulness Training as a Clinical Intervention: A Conceptual and Empirical Review, by Ruth A. Baer, available at http://www.wisebrain.org/papers/MindfulnessPsyTx.pdf
7. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b c} Karunamuni ND (May 2015). "The Five-Aggregate Model of the Mind". SAGE Open 5 (2). doi:10.1177/2158244015583860. 
8. Jump up ^ Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics. Wisdom Publications, 1997, page 23.
9. Jump up ^ Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, (Henry L. Mansel and John Veitch, ed.), 1860 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, in Two Volumes. Vol. II. Logic, Boston: Gould and Lincoln. Downloaded via googlebooks.
10. Jump up ^ To imply is "to involve or indicate by inference, association or necessary consequence rather than by direct statement", the contemporary use of 'infer' is slightly different. Webster's states that Sir Thomas More (1533) was the first to use the two words "in a sense close in meaning", and "Both of these uses of infer coexisted without comment until sometime around the end of World War I". cf Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Inc, Springfield, MA, ISBN 0-87779-508-8.
11. Jump up ^ Hamilton 1860:241-242
12. Jump up ^ First usage of the phrase was probably James (1890); for example, Merriam-Webster's 9th Collegiate dictionary cites 1890 as first usage. But James was not necessarily the first to assert the concept. Furthermore, whereas James uses the phrase "the stream of thought" throughout his 1890 (he dedicates an entire chapter IX to "The Stream of Thought"), in the 689 pages of text he offers just nine instances of "stream of consciousness", in particular in consideration of the "soul".
13. Jump up ^ James, William (1890), The Principles of Psychology. ed. George A. Miller, Harvard University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-674-70625-0
14. Jump up ^ Baars, Bernard (1997), In the Theater of Consciousness New York: Oxford University Press
15. Jump up ^ "There is no stream of consciousness". Retrieved 2007-11-05. 
16. Jump up ^ Wilson, Leigh, 2001. May Sinclair The Literary Encyclopedia
17. Jump up ^ Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, p.212.

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Categories:

• Consciousness studies
• Cognition

Subjective spiritual experiences can be studied objectively

February 11, 2014

by Brian Hinnes, Church of the Churchless

Someone has a vision of God. Or feels one with the universe. Or has a near-death experience that gives them a glimpse of heaven. Or comes to know that Jesus loves her.
What should we make of such experiences?
They are undeniably subjective. Yet so is everything that we humans experience as conscious beings. I have no direct access to the consciousness of any other person, nor does anyone else have access to mine.
There are two extreme answers to the question I posed.
One is to make subjectivity unquestionable. If somebody says "I've seen God!" no one else has a right to challenge them, or look into the basis for their subjective experience. The other answer is to deny subjectivity, making truth a matter of purely objective evidence that can be rigorously substantiated.
I like the middle way espoused in Stanislas Dehaene's book, "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts."
Dehaene, a neuroscientist, says that researchers into human consciousness need to take subjectivity seriously. There is a big difference between the brain experiencing something unconsciously, and consciously.

All this evidence points to an important conclusion, the third key ingredient in our budding science of consciousness: subjective reports can and should be trusted.

...Whatever information we are conscious of, we can name it, rate it, judge it, or memorize it much better than we can when it is subliminal. In other words, human observers are neither random nor whimsical about their subjective reports: when they report an honest-to-god feeling of seeing, such conscious access corresponds to a massive change in information processing, which almost always results in an enhanced performance.

But subjectivity shouldn't be accepted unquestioningly. People can be wrong, and often are, about the reality of what they experience.

This being said, we should not be naïve about introspection: while it certainly provides raw data for the psychologist, it is not a direct window into the operations of the mind. When a neurological or psychiatric patient tells us that he sees faces in the dark, we do not take him literally -- but neither should we deny that he has had this experience.

We just need to explain why he has had it -- perhaps because of a spontaneous, possibly epileptic activation of the face circuits in his temporal lobe.

Even in normal people, introspection can be demonstrably wrong. By definition, we have no access to our many unconscious processes -- but this does not prevent us from making up stories about them... Consider what happens when we try to make sense of our past actions. People often invent all sorts of contorted, after-the-fact interpretations for their decisions -- oblivious to their true unconscious motivations. 

...However, as a measure, introspection still constitutes the perfect, indeed the only, platform on which to build a science of consciousness, because it supplies a crucial half of the equation -- namely, how subjects feel about some experience (however wrong they are about the ground truth).

To attain  a scientific understanding of consciousness, we cognitive neuroscientists "just" have to determine the other half of the equation: Which objective neurobiological events systematically underlie a person's subjective experience?

Dehaene goes on to offer the example of near-death experiences. Some surgery patients report that they leave their bodies during anesthesia and are able to look down upon their inert body from on high. He asks, "Should we take them seriously? Does out-of-body flight 'really' happen?"
Experiments have shown that stimulating a part of the brain can produce an out-of-body experience. So...

Out-of-body flight "really" happens, then -- it is a real physical event, but only in the patient's brain and, as a result, in his subjective experience. The out-of-body state is, by and large, an exacerbated form of the dizziness that we all experience when our vision disagrees with our vestibular system, as on a rocking boat.

So, yes, every honestly reported subjective experience is real, because someone had the experience. But only by knowing what produced that experience, the neurological correlates, can we assess whether it was "merely" subjective or a reflection of objective reality.
Along this line, David Lane and Andrea Diem-Lane have written an interesting essay, "The Material Basis of Near-Death Experiences." Check it out. The essay addresses a similar theme: what should we make of a subjective claim about supernaturalism, when it can be explained by natural causes?

- See more at: http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2014/02/subjective-experiences-can-be-studied-objectively.html#sthash.kPQmT7Qo.dpuf

Anatomy of Thoughts...

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science






Back in the early 1980s I used to attend the Slough Writers Group. I would on occassion read out some of my manuscripts which notably included a historical novel called Hearts in Thorns (formerly entitled The Devils Dance), and a comedy about psychic research...which caused some merriment. The former was about a power struggle saga between rich nobles in late 14th Century England. It was purely fictional but with accurate period detail based on research which I had been undertaking. This novel opened with a dramatic duel which held my small audience in thrall.

The SWG attracted a small range of interesting people which included Chris Webb the poet postman who published his stuff in the local paper. Another notable was Alan Taylor a charming old boy type who had published books on DIY. He even gave me a signed copy of his paperback opus on Garden Construction. Arthur Nicklin was a prolific freelance writer for various magazines including Prediction as he had some interest in occult matters. He was a fascinating man, and I used to drive him back home after a SWG meeting. The last time I saw him in the flesh was in the high street in Slough. He was gathering information about healers by interviewing them for a book. Whether this opus came to anything is another matter. However, one of the SWG group a lawyer by trade had published a book on witchcraft in the local area if my memory serves me correctly.

Anyway, enough nostalgic rambling!

It was around this time that I began to develop a questionaire about thought structure, and contents of the human mind. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of it. But I can give some idea of the questions presented....

1. Do your thoughts appear visual most of the time?

2. If you close your eyes, and see an image what is the appearance of its surrounds. Is it fuzzy? Is it grainy? Is it firelike? etc

3. Does the surround of your image change, or not? If so, what shape manifests itself?

4. Do you feel thoughts as images enter different points of the human body? Do your thoughts of love for example enter the heart area? Do mainly intellectual
thoughts enter the top the head....et cetera.

5. Do you sense thoughts sometimes enter your head as if they were "disembodied" energies? (Here, the notion is like question 4) For example, people sometimes say that a thought just struck them, or it just came into their mind out of the blue...and so on.

The above are just some examples of the thoughts questionaire.

A member of the SWG called Miss Portsmouth actually undertook answering the questions. She found it very interesting, and incidently, she was studying psychology! She gave some intriguing answers but unfortunately I do not have a record of it.

In occult circles "thoughts are things". I recall once doing a telepathic experiment with a friend. The latters thought with the actual word sent was seen by my minds eye as it flashed into my head.

I recall too when I was in a watch repair workshop which was close to East Berks College in Windsor that I was gaining a strong mental rapport with a friend, Steven Stroud. All of a sudden I was aware for a few seconds of a coloured "field" of energy connecting me with him in a kind of telepathic link.