Thursday, 29 March 2012

How do we develop consciousness?

To understand my theory you must know how many times you are being touched or are being touching someone or something.First, you already know that how many times you touch and are being touched by someone or something(don't count it, just think it and it will give a very big result) and that's an evidence that sensation plays an important role in consciousness. That is same with a baby, they are also touched, and the first time their brain receive the sensory signal from any body part,(eye, ear, skin, tongue, nose) our brain starts thinking about what it is and whom do it belong to. And when they are touched, their brain starts thinking about that sensation and tries to understand it.When the child opens his/her eyes for the first time, he see's many things and this puts his/her brain in more work. The baby's brain then tries to understand all this things and we must remember that the baby's almost all part are being touched by their parents whether it's legs, hands, face etc. at the time they feed them or they bath the baby. And we all know how much developed our human brain is and our brain, after getting or receiving all this sensations from sensory organs, but we should remember that the brain dies not get the sensation only one time but again and again. So, our brain might take the help of cerebellum, the part of our brain which is highly involved in maintaining balance of our body and movements to create neural maps of our body. Or in simple words, our brain at the time we were baby stores the sensory feelings in the brain and gives it a particular position and I call it a neural map, but remember that their are not only one sensation, their are many of them, they all form neural maps, then our brain with the help of cerebellum tries to join the neural maps to from neural assemblies, the neural assemblies are a type of blueprint of our body that is created by our brain, but the thing does not end here, there are more things that are done which create consciousness, even after neural assembly or the blueprint of our body is created, our sensory organs still send sensory signals to our brain and our brain then tries to associate the signals to the blueprint that it created that is of "our" body, the word our is equal to self, so the neural assemblies are just one step towards consciousness, so our brain associated the signal to neural assembly of self and it understood that this part is controlled by the self and now the brain has really understood that this something that is self and the sense that it receives from the sensory organs are a part of self. This creates the sense of self or consciousness. The time when a baby starts walking, at that time, we can conclude that his/her brain has understood that this is something that can be controlled by self and has successfully created consciousness. But we should not forget how our brain differentiates us from other thing and create consciousness or self because if our brain does not differentiate us from other things, we will not be able to create consciousness. In that part, eyes play an important role, they see the objects and send the signals to our brain and then our brain processes that item and states that it is not a part of the neural assembly it created because it might not have the same color that we have or it might not have done any type of movement in the whole time, and through many other signs our brain understands that that item is not our part. Another question that might emerge in your brain is that how do our brain know during creating neural assemblies that where a part of body? There' a simple answer to this that it is because we also see other person during the time our brain is creating neural assembly and our brain understands that we should have some similar shape as they have and then it creates the neural assembly for our body. But what about the people who are blind from their birth, they have an special ability to use their visual cortex to process sound and senses, this way they might develop consciousness. The people who are blind from their birth use their senses to create consciousness in an effectice way and they use their visual cortex to create consciousness. Their brain might first sense the feelings and then it might hear the words which might lead it to distinguish it self from others to create consciousness. Also there is one more theory that can be created from my experiments that is at the time of birth, the first time our brain receives the signal from our sensory organs, the sensory cortices might not give attention to it, but when it will receive it many a time, our brain will notice it and try to understand it, at the same time when we open our eyes, we will be seeing other things which as I have said, our brain will differentiate that things from us by their color and their motion and we will see our self in other persons hand and our brain, which is the intelligest of all, will then try to mix up both the data(visual and sensory) and then try to state that we are different from them, as we are not connected to them and our brain might understand it by trying to give their limbs to move but when they don't move, it will understand that they are not our part and when it tries to take control on our limbs and when our limbs move, our brain then will understand that this part is the part which is controlled by us and we are just different from everything else, we are something that is known as self and our brain will take some time to understand it and as it is receiving the signals from our sensory organs, it will then with the help of cerebellum, the part mostly involved in motion, will try to create and recognize the space of out body parts, and in this operation, the endings of the sensory nerves, which take the sensory information to the brain can also help as our brain might calculate their endings which are joining the skin and this will surely help our brain to create neural maps and then join them to create neural assemblies. This neural assemblies are just a part of what we called consciousness. And this is the way I think consciousness starts.
This article is written by Rajan Choudhary.