Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Introduction: Consciousness137At random times as your instructor is teaching, thevideo camera would record one-minute segmentsof the conscious mental activities occurring. Whatmight those recordings of your consciousness reveal?Here are just a few possibilities:• Focused concentration on your instructor’swords and gestures• Drifting from one fleeting thought, memory,or image to another• Awareness of physical sensations, such as thebeginnings of a headache or the lingeringsting of a paper cut• Replaying an emotionally charged conversationand thinking about what you wish you hadsaid• Romantic or sexual fantasies• Mentally rehearsing what you’ll say and howyou’ll act when you meet a friend later in the day• Wishful, grandiose daydreams about yourself in the futureMost likely, the mental video clips would reveal very different scenes, dialogues,and content as the focus of your consciousness shifted from one moment to thenext. Yet even though your conscious experience is constantly changing, you don’texperience your personal consciousness as disjointed. Rather, the subjective experienceof consciousness has a sense of continuity. One stream of conscious mentalactivity seems to blend into another, effortlessly and seamlessly.This characteristic of consciousness led the influential American psychologistWilliam James (1892) to describe consciousness as a “stream” or “river.” Althoughalways changing, consciousness is perceived as unified and unbroken, much like astream. Despite the changing focus of our awareness, our experience of consciousnessas unbroken helps provide us with a sense of personal identity that has con -tinuity from one day to the next.The nature of human consciousness was one of the first topics to be tackled bythe fledgling science of psychology in the late 1800s. In Chapter 1, we discussedhow the first psychologists tried to determine the nature of the human mindthrough introspection—verbal self-reports that tried to capture the “structure” ofconscious experiences. But because such self-reports were not objectively verifiable,many of the leading psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century rejected thestudy of consciousness. Instead, they emphasized the scientific study of overt behavior,which could be directly observed, measured, and verified.Beginning in the late 1950s, many psychologists once again turned their attentionto the study of consciousness. This shift occurred for two main reasons. First,it was becoming clear that a complete understanding of behavior would not bepossible unless psychologists considered the role of conscious mental processes inbehavior.Second, although the experience of consciousness is personal and subjective, psychologistshad devised more objective ways to study conscious experiences. Forexample, psychologists could often infer the conscious experience that seemed to beoccurring by carefully observing behavior. Technological advances in studying brainactivity were also producing intriguing correlations between brain activity and differentstates of consciousness.Today, the scientific study of consciousness is incredibly diverse. Working from avariety of perspectives, psychologists and other neuroscientists are piecing togethera picture of consciousness that takes into account the role of psychological, physiological,social, and cultural influences.Capturing the Streamof Consciousness Onethought, memory, orfantasy seems to blendseamlessly into another.It was this characteristicof conscious experiencethat led William Jamesto describe our mentallife as being like a“river” or “stream.”Consciousness, then, does not appearto itself chopped up in bits. . . . It isnothing jointed; it flows. A “river”or a “stream” are the metaphors bywhich it is most naturally described.In talking of it hereafter, let us call itthe stream of thought, or conscious -ness, of subjective life.WILLIAM JAMES (1892)