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Wakefulness is a daily recurring brain state and state of consciousness in which an individual is conscious and engages in coherent cognitive and behavioral responses to the external world. Being awake is the opposite of being asleep, in which most external inputs to the brain are excluded from neural processing. [1] [2] [3] [4]
This system of a sort of general activation of consciousness is called "arousal" or "wakefulness". [14] It is not necessarily accompanied by drowsiness. [16] Patients may be awake (not sleepy) yet still have a clouded consciousness (disorder of wakefulness). [17] Paradoxically, affected individuals say that they are "awake but, in another way ...
Representation of consciousness from the 17th century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician. Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. [1] However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers, scientists, and theologians.
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity , awareness , sentience , the ability to experience or to feel , wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood , and the executive control system of the mind.
Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can be used to mean self consciousness, awareness, the state of being awake, and so on. Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness: "the feeling of what it is like to be something." Consciousness, in this sense, is synonymous with experience. [31] [27]
While many sources use the terms stream of consciousness and interior monologue as synonyms, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests that "they can also be distinguished psychologically and literarily. In a psychological sense, stream of consciousness is the subject matter, while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it".
The potential richness of conscious experience appears to increase from deep sleep to drowsiness to full wakefulness, as might be quantified using notions from complexity theory that incorporate both the dimensionality as well as the granularity of conscious experience to give an integrated-information-theoretical account of consciousness. [13]
The development of consciousness is a gradual, time-consuming and lifelong process that builds upon and uses a more primitive virtual reality generator that is more definable in our dreams. [1] As such, the development of secondary consciousness during the lifetime requires a blank consciousness that during REM sleep creates an imaginary self ...