Some Thoughts About Consciousness

Our brains and our thinking process is is a great mystery. There are heavy philosophical treatises talking about the phenomenon of intelligence. There is also a Wikipedia article about consciousness that gives a broad overview of the issue.

In here I'm gonna give my personal view on that.

In my mind the consciousness is just its medical definition: I mean, it is a state of realizing the current point in time, space and a body orientation. That's it. Well, consider yourself, if you're accidentally falling, you're unable to think. If you got a hit in the jaw, likewise you're gonna lose your ability to think. If you're dizzy, you too won't be able to say anything coherent. So, in my opinion, consciousness is that feeling created by knowing where are we now, what the time is and our position in space.

Now, to the question of thinking. I have a very visual type of thinking. I can visualize a picture with great detail. And someday I was just trying to spin a wheel in my mind. It might seem stupid, but I just couldn't get it spinning, so it was sort of a challenge. And one day I got it: I can't really spin it continuously, only in short frames, like animation. And that got me the idea of how we really think: we are jumping, the whole brain really jumps from one state to another. The entire brain. We move from one thought to another, from one set of associations to another set.

This set of associations form, what I call, a notion. A notion is created in our mind when we read word, say water or apple. We instantly understand what the meaning (or have a notion) is because the word creates a set of associations. Speaking is too being done by quickly switching the brain from one phrase to another. And I mean a phrase, not single words. Our brains are giant associative machines. And there is a special circuitry that is responsible for directing our thoughts. This special nucleus (or maybe a gyrus, perhaps from a frontal lobe) gets all the input and chooses the next state (or notion).

A couple words about memory. First, short memory is probably just a circulating excitation. Why I think so, because, as I said, I can create picture (and other sensations really) and I noticed, that the longer I hold a certain picture, the more tighter it stays in my memory. Also I've been experiencing migraine auras and I can tell you what it is: it is a slowly traveling wave of excitation. It happens in brains with tight neuron connections. And I was really observing that wave going through my sight, and then it goes to other parts of the brain, leaving just a painful headache. It might also damage the cortex, I think. Also, if I close my eyes, just in normal state with no auras or something, I can see faint waves going every second. So I think these excitation waves are just how things are in our brains. And this is also our short memory.

About sleep. I noticed that quite often, closer to going to bed, I hear noise, real displeasing white noise. But when I get up after sleeping all is fine. So my theory, we need sleep to clean our brain tissue from leftover chemical mediators that transport signals between neurons. I think these loose mediators are accumulating while we are being awake and this is what creates noise by the end of the day.

I forgot about one more thing. I believe we have one more special circuit doing the planning work, also called imagination. This is the creative part of the brain, it is different from just thinking. But I don't have a very clear idea about that part of our mind.