1 THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is a crucial part of human experience. Our conscious awareness represents

that private intermined where we think, feel, plan, wish, pray, imagine, and quietly relive
experiences. Consider that if we did not have private thoughts and feelings we could not tell
a lie.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychology pioneer William James (1950)
described the mind as a stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of changing sensations,
images, thoughts, and feelings. The content of our awareness changes from moment to
moment. Information moves rapidly in and out of consciousness. Our minds can raise from
one topic to the next-from the person approaching us to our physical state today to the cafe
where we will have lunch to our strategy for the test tomorrow.
In his description of the stream of consciousness, James included aspects of our awareness
that he described as on the “fridge” of the stream of consciousness. This rims includes all of
the thoughts and feelings that we have about our thoughts. We are aware not only of those
things that take center stage in our mental life, those shining fish in the stream of
consciousness, but also of all the thoughts and feelings that surround those fish.
Today, psychologists use the term metacognition to describe the processes by which we
think about thinking (Norman and others 2019). This term includes our awareness of their
French elements of the conscious stream. When we read a text for instance, the difficulty for
ease with which we comprehend what is written can influence how we feel about what we
read. When written text is easy to read, we are more likely to think that what we are reading
is true and accurate.
The metacognitive experience of ease can impact our thought processes in surprising ways.
Consider the following two items, taken from a questionnaire that measures the experience
of meaning in life (speaker and others 2006). The top one is printed in a difficult to read font,
the bottom one in the clear easy to read font.
One study found that participants rated their meaning in life to be lower when the scale used
the difficult to read font (trent and others 2013). Other research has shown that when young
people experienced metacognitive difficulty thinking about their life goals, they were less
likely to believe they could reach those goals (Fisher and Oyserman 2017 Walter and others
2020). The logic behind such results is that while thinking about their life goals, the person
might reason, “if it is this hard for me to even imagine myself pursuing these goals, they
must not be very possible”.
During much of the 20th century, psychologists focused less on the study of mental
processes and more on the study of observable behavior. More recently, the study of
consciousness has regained widespread respectability in psychology. Indeed, scientists from
many different Fields are interested in consciousness.