Consciousness is the individual awareness of

your unique thoughts, memories, feelings,

sensations, and environments. Essentially, your
consciousness is your awareness of yourself and
the world around you.

This awareness is subjective and unique to you.

If you can describe something you are
experiencing in words, then it is part of your
consciousness.
Consciousness is everything you
experience. It is the tune stuck in
your head, the sweetness of
chocolate mousse, the throbbing
pain of a toothache, the fierce love
for your child and the bitter
knowledge that eventually all
feelings will end.
§According to American Psychological Association
(APA) – Consciousness is an organism’s awareness
of something either internal or external to itself.
Consciousness consists of all the sensations,
perceptions, memories and feelings you are aware of at
any instance (Farthing, 1992).
It is “the normal mental condition of the waking
state of humans, characterized by the experience of
perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the
external world, and often in humans . . . self-
awareness” (Colman, 2001, Tononi and Koch 2008)
 I. Consciousness is a psychological construct – a
concept i.e. devised to help us understand our observations or
behaviors. The construct of consciousness has several
meanings.
I. As sensory awareness: our sense organs (Eyes,
ears, nose etc.) enable us to become aware of the
environment.
II. Inner state: We are conscious of thoughts,
images, emotions and memories within ourselves. Although
they may not have physical occurrence of these aspects.
III. The waking state: consciousness is also the waking
state as opposed to sleep.
What Are the Levels of
Consciousness?
Conscious: Everything you are aware of
Preconscious/subconcious: Information
you are not currently aware of that you
can pull into awareness if needed
Unconscious: Memories that are outside
of awareness and inaccessible
SLEEP
Sleep is the balm that soothes and restores
after a long day. Sleep is largely driven by the
body’s internal clock, which takes cues from
external elements such as sunlight and
temperature.

The body’s natural sleep-and-wake cycle is

reasonably attuned to a 24-hour period.
Hypothalamus: controls onset of sleep
Hippocampus: memory region active during dreaming
Amygdala: emotion center active during dreaming
Thalamus: prevents sensory signals from reaching the
cortex
Reticular formation: regulates the transition between
sleep and wakefulness
Pons: helps initiate REM sleep. The extraocular
movements that occur during REM are due to the activity
of PPRF (paramedian pontine reticular
formation/conjugate gaze center).
Dreams are the stories the brain tells during the REM
(rapid eye movement) stage of sleep.
Dreams are images and experiences people have while they
sleep. The contents of dreams, researchers believe, are unique to
the individual. They combine fragments of a person’s
experiences, worries, and waking thoughts into new scenarios.

Most people spend around two hours dreaming every night.

Dreams may occur in any stage of sleep, but most dreaming
takes place during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Dreams
that happen during REM sleep are more vivid than dreams that
occur during other stages. Most nightmares also take place
during periods of REM sleep.
1. Intentionality: Conscious experience has representational content that must be made

accessible for further processing by the broader cognitive system.

2. Temporality: Conscious experiences generate expectations about the future that are

informed by past experience. These expectations also support the possibility of

surprise, an essential aspect of learning.

3. Adaptivity: Conscious processing facilitates learning, operant conditioning, non-

automatic problem-solving, planning, and goal-oriented control over action.

Unconscious processing, in contrast, facilitates automaticity, expertise, and massive

parallel processing.

4. Valence: Conscious experience assigns positive and negative valence to certain

internal and external intentional contents, motivating behaviors that preserve the

internal homeostasis