When We Understand Consciousness .... Awareness of Being Different

Consciousness is one's alertness to events that occur in the environment . Often we do activities into our daily routine but we are not aware of the little things that we have just experienced , felt , or we see . It shows that when we do an activity that has become routine in daily life , the level of awareness we often also caused decreased because of what is commonly practiced every day .
The problem also makes us decreased level of consciousness is when the taste or feeling at that time was owned by being in a state of emotional or angry about something , then it will greatly affect an individual 's consciousness itself .
As well as that I often encounter in everyday life , where every child who is in a relationship or can be referred to as courtship , often face a problem in the relationship between paasangannya . In this relationship they are " people who are dating " often wrong in taking the decision to straighten their relationship . The cause of the error in the decisions that they are experiencing is due to a lack of awareness in them to take a decision that is good and true .
Here is the framework can be called consciousness or awareness.
Attention ( attention ) is a focusing of mental resources to things external and internal . In consciousness , attention is needed to create awareness itself where if we do become our routine activities such as lectures every day , if in the course we are not concerned with what we learned in class when we could be called the unconscious . Because if our attention then we will get what we learned when the lecture took place .
Wakefulness ( alertness ) is a continuum from sleep to waking consciousness , as a condition of readiness . To obtain consciousness itself we can be assisted by a compound contained in beverages such as coffee , when we drink coffee then we will awake . Here is one form of waking consciousness as well .
Architecture ( architecture ) is a physical location or physiological structures ( and processes associated with these structures ) that supports awareness . It is assumed that consciousness is centered in the brain and can be identified through the investigation of the neural correlation of consciousness .
Recall of Knowledge ( recall of knowledge ) is an information retrieval process of the individual concerned with the world around him . This process is carried out mainly with the help of attentional processes are carried out internally and externally .
Emotive ( emotive ) an affective components associated with consciousness . Sentience is a conscious state , which is often regarded as a form of feeling or emotion (as opposed to the mind or perception ) . Thus , when we observe an art painting could lead to a sense of joy or disgust - depending on the observer .
May be useful : D
Source: Solso , Robert L. et al . ( 2007) . Cognitive Psychology . Erland . Jakarta .

I Do not Remember That I Intend To forget you

Not easy to forget what is most important for us to forget about including others . Where at first the figure of the person is a person that is important for our lives , when we are hard - happy , wherever - whenever , sick or healthy person's shadow always comes to mind . This indicates that the person is the person most in desire in our lives . None of the vices that appear on that person , when the person who we deem as important for us .
Although in the end people are considered important in our lives do not conform to what we want ( rejection ) . But is not that easy to forget that person in our mind . the more we try to forget the person we are increasingly difficult to forget . Here is one of the functions of our brain working system .
Vice versa when we hate someone that's when we definitely do not want to remember that person - even his face was all . But the more we try to forget about it the more you will want to remember that person .
Have you ever felt anything like it . ? I think any normal human being living in this world is never not feel it. Therefore I will try to explain a little bit about forgetfulness and Given .
Each stimulus or information that we can always get into our sensory system . where the function of the sensory system itself to encode and enter the information into memory . Here information or stimulus that we can only survive while , if we do not immediately save it into memory and shor - teem no immediate repetition of the stimulus or information that we may be missing . After we save into STM and we have done the repetition of information that we can then be stored in long - term memory . LTM function itself is to recall or use the information that we can .
While we often remember or repeat a picture of the person who we think are important or we hate where the times when we have been doing the repetitions which serve to recall a picture of that person in our lives . That is why when we want to remove the picture in our memory just the opposite can not be lost in our thoughts . as well as on the contrary the more we hate it more difficult for us to forget . That's why when we want it to be forgotten even the more we thought about it .
It's hard to forget not mean it can not be forgotten . Here are a few tips or ways to forget what we want to forget .
1 . Do not remember the things you want to forget .
2 . Fill with new memories about new things .
3 . Do not talk about what you want to forget the others.
4 . Repression is the act of pushing the thoughts , memories , feelings that threaten out of consciousness .
Source: Solso , Robert L. et al . ( 2007) . Cognitive Psychology . Erland . Jakarta .

Stress

          Stress is a medical term for a wide range of strong external stimuli, both physiological and psychological, which can cause a physiological response called the general adaptation syndrome. Historically, it was gradually realized that such concepts as anxiety, antagonism, exhaustion, frustration, distress, despair, overwork, pre-menstrual tension, over-focusing, confusion, mourning, and fear could all come together in a general broad term, stress.

 

          The use of the term stress in serious and recognized cases, such as those of post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosomatic illness, has scarcely helped clear analysis of the generalized "stress" phenomenon. Nonetheless, some varieties of stress from negative life events (distress) and from positive life events (eustress) can clearly have a serious physical impact distinct from the troubles of what psychotherapists call the "worried well." Stress activates the sympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system and the release of stress hormones including epinephrine, and cortisol. Sympathetic nervous output produces the fight-or-flight response, causing the body to divert bloodflow to large muscles as the body prepares to run away from or fight something.

 

          Less blood flows to the digestive system and other organs that do not assist in fleeing or fighting, producing dry mouth, motor agitation, sweating, pallor, enlarged pupils and over the long term, insomnia.

Modern stressors can cause continual sympathetic nervous system activation with very little opportunity for the parasympathetic nervous system to activate.

          When the parasympathetic system is active, the bowel and other non-muscle organs receive good blood-flow, the pupils constrict, and the glands all function well and secrete their various compounds.

Wikipedia.org

Physical fitness boosts brainpower in kids, study finds

Elementary school children who were physically fit performed better on… (Damon Winter )

Forget that stereotype about the dumb jock. A new study reveals that kids who are more physically fit score higher on geography tests, too.

Previous research has found that out-of-shape kids get lower grades in school and perform worse on tasks involving memory and other types of cognitive function. In addition, mice that exercise have better spatial learning and memory than sedentary mice.

For the new study, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wondered whether there was a correlation between physical fitness and learning. So they recruited 48 kids who were 9 or 10 years old and asked them to learn the names of 10 fictional regions on a made-up map.

Half of the children in the study ranked in the top 30% of fitness (as measured by a treadmill test) for kids their age and gender; the other half ranked in the bottom 30%. Other than that, the kids in both groups were basically the same in terms of socioeconomic status, ADHD symptoms and scores on an intelligence test. In both groups, about half were boys and half were girls.

The children spent one day using iPads to learn the geography of the fictitious maps. In some cases, the learning was reinforced by short quizzes; in others, there was only memorization. Their recall was tested the following day.

Overall, the kids who were physically fit got an average score of 54.2% and the kids who were not fit got an average score of 44.2%. The difference was more pronounced when children were asked to remember the map they had learned without the benefit of quizzes – the fit kids scored 43% on average, while the unfit kids scored 25.8% on average.

Those results suggested to the researchers that “higher levels of fitness have their greatest impact in the most challenging situations.” They also speculated that most of the benefits of being physically fit come into play when a child is committing new information to memory, and not as much when that information is recalled later.

Teenagers: Why Do They Rebel?

Teenagers: Why Do They Rebel?

Driving fast, breaking curfew, arguing, shoplifting. Teenagers can push your patience, but unfortunately, some kids go as far as blatantly flouting rules or breaking the law, often with tragic results. What's with this rebellious streak? How can parents funnel it into less risky business?

Recommended Related to Children 

All teens go through similar phases -- the need for independence, a separate identity, testing authority. It's part of growing up; it's also linked to developmental changes in the brain that will eventually help them become analytical adults.

But today's teens get an extra whammy -- social pressures come earlier than in previous generations.

To understand this complex picture, WebMD turned to two of the nation's experts.

David Elkind, PhD, is the author of All Grown Up and No Place to Go, and is a professor of child development at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Amy Bobrow, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Child Study Center at New York University School of Medicine in Manhattan.

Brain: Under Construction

During the teenage years, the area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex is developing. This is the part of your brain that is behind your forehead. It's your thinking cap and judgment center, Elkind explains, which means kids can now develop their own ideals and ideas.

Whereas younger children don't see the flaws in their parents, adolescents suddenly see the world more realistically. "They construct an ideal of what parents should be, based on their friends' parents, on media parents. When they compare their own parents to the ideal, they find them wanting. Their parents don't know how dress, walk, talk; they're embarrassing," he tells WebMD.

All the arguments -- they're also the result of the prefrontal cortex at work, Elkind says. As a child evolves into a teenager, the brain becomes able to synthesize information into ideas. Teens want to exercise their new skill -- and they tend to practice on their parents. "It may seem that they argue for the sake of arguing. But really, they're practicing their new abilities."

Going Social

Whereas wild clothes and make-up used to be a rite of passage into adolescence, that's not true today, says Elkind. The preadolescent 11- and 12-year-olds -- the Britney Spears generation -- are pushing that fashion envelope.

Body piercing, tattoos, and music are today's "markers" of adolescence. "No self-respecting 15-year-old is going to listen to Britney Spears," he says.

Another dynamic: first love, first sex, first drugs, first drinking. In earlier generations, kids weren't expected to be sexually active -- or experiment with alcohol or drugs -- until they turned 17 or 18, when they were better able to resist peer pressure, says Elkind. "Now they're getting pressure at 13 and 14, when they're too young to resist. It's not that child development has changed, it's that the demands are coming at earlier ages."

What are dreams? Psychology, neuroscience try to explain them

What are dreams, exactly?
One explanation that was highly influential in the first half of the 20th century was put forward by Sigmund Freud and other psychologists. In Freud's “The Interpretation of Dreams,” published in 1900, he asserted that dreams are the manifestations of urges and desires that we keep suppressed in the realm of our subconscious, and the practice of dream analysis based on this theory subsequently gained popularity.

According to Freud, our subconscious desires include those that we don't want to admit, such as sexual urges. For that reason, tools, rooms, and other objects, and behaviors including flying, appear symbolically in our dreams. It is thought that if we can unravel the correspondent relationship these symbols have with issues in our waking lives, we can understand these subconscious desires.

While Swiss psychologist Carl Jung criticized Freud's theory as being too preoccupied with sexual desires, he systematized the theory stating that dreams are messages from our subconscious. Jungian dream analysis is still used widely today in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

In contrast, in the latter half of the 20th century, a movement emerged in psychology that took a different approach to dreams: research from the perspective of neurophysiology, which tries to decode activity in our brain and nervous system.

Harvard Medical School professor emeritus Allan Hobson, 79, has long been regarded as one of the front-runners in this field. When I visited him at the massive farm where he lives in the state of Vermont, he declared that he is “the first person to ever study dreams scientifically.” In his view, the theories of Freud and Jung have no scientific basis.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Hobson worked as a resident in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Boston. This was a time when Freudian psychoanalysis was all the rage. However, Hobson began to harbor serious doubts regarding the practice of psychology and its disinterest in the actual workings of the brain.

Let's focus on the workings of the brain, instead of probing the content of dreams--using this approach, Hobson pursued his own research and put forward a new theory in the 1970s.

It asserts that when we enter REM sleep, the state in which we dream the most, a signal is sent out from the brain stem located farthest below the brain, and the area of it responsible for visual perception becomes active. During sleep, we cease to input information from the outside world, so the brain takes memory fragments and pieces them together to create a story: a dream. The part of the brain that handles caution and judgment is not fully active at this time, which results in incoherent stories.

Hobson says that this is why our dreams have no "meaning" that we can decipher. He himself often has dreams in which he is on a farm.

“I own the farm, so of course, I’m worried about it. I don’t think that’s true that I have some sort of deep symbolic drive. I think that can be misleading.”

Hobson's theory has been an established facet of neurophysiology for many years. However, in the latter half of the 1990s, University of Cape Town professor Mark Solms, 64, presented a new theory. It included aspects that could be described as a rehabilitation of Freudian thinking.

Solms has an older brother who suffered a brain injury in an accident. This was part of the reason that he began this line of research. At first he believed in Hobson's theory, but as he carried out studies of people with brain injuries, he realized that some continued to have dreams despite sustaining damage to their brain stem, which Hobson posited as the switch that activated dreams. In contrast, he discovered that people cease to have dreams when the frontal part of the brain controlling urges is damaged.

Solms theorized that dreams originate with the urge to do something, which is expressed using information stored in the brain. In other words, dreams are manifestations of urges, meaning that Freud's theory was not incorrect.

Hobson and Solms have subsequently continued to argue over this issue, and their conflict has taken on a strong "pro-Freud versus anti-Freud" quality.

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Giulio Tononi, 51, a neuroscientist who has gained attention for his research into defining consciousness, has followed Hobson and Solms' dispute with interest. In his understanding, Hobson's theory views dreams as an activity close to a sensory perception in response to some form of stimulation. On the other hand, Solms' definition of dreams as manifestations of urges sees them as an activity akin to closing your eyes and picturing something, which is to say that they are closely related to our imagination. Tononi believes that Hobson and Solms' tug of war between sensory perception and imagination is worthwhile, but regards its overemphasis on Freud as unproductive.

Now that things have come this far, it seems that they are approaching some kind of common ground. In a recent thesis, Hobson claims that in the middle of REM sleep, “the brain is prepared to activate consciousness right after we awake,” and describes this state as “protoconsciousness.” Dreams are virtual experiences created from visual information stored in the brain that is connected together during protoconsciousness. “When I read it, I thought, ‘This is 90 percent the same as my own theory,' ” says Solms.

Tononi also sees the argument as moving toward an understanding that “dreaming is more closely related to imagination than it is to perception.”

Even so, this does not mean it is possible to analyze the content of dreams, as Freud once asserted. This is because there are major obstacles to scientific research into dream content. We have to rely on a person's verbal testimony as to what they dreamed about, and there are limitations to experimentation with human subjects. Even if we carried out experiments on animals, they could not tell us what they saw in their dreams.

“We are fantastically ignorant about something as basic as the dreaming state of consciousness.”

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/globe/feature/dream/aj201208260022