Man has no wings, no fast legs, no terrible teeth and claws. The main thing that we inherited from nature for survival is a unique mental phenomenon - consciousness. It is this that allows a person to feel like a separate person. It seems that it has always been with us … But how does consciousness work? How do its main mechanisms work?
If we, people, have a developed psyche, consciousness, intellect, then all this should have some evolutionary significance. Otherwise, natural selection would simply not allow all of these phenomena to develop. Homo sapiens have a brain that weighs about 2% of the total body weight, but it is an incredibly energy-intensive organ that consumes about a quarter of all energy consumed by the body. Why do we need such a complex and voracious device? After all, it is obvious that in the animal world there are many creatures that do not have a developed psyche, and at the same time are perfectly adapted and have already survived more than one geological era. Take echinoderms, for example. The starfish can be cut in half and two starfish grow out of the pieces. We could only dream of such a thing - it's almost immortality. But insects solve the problem of adaptation differently: they change generations very quickly,effectively manipulating your genome. A single individual can live for only a few hours, but more and more organisms allow the population as a whole to perfectly adapt to the changed conditions.
The greatest car in the world
This is impossible for a human being. Our body is much more complex than the body of a fly or a moth, it grows and develops for many years, and this is too valuable resource to "squander" it the way insects do. Of course, the change of generations also plays a certain evolutionary role in the life of mankind - for this there is an aging mechanism, but our strength as a population is in something else. The advantage that our long-growing and long-lived body needs is the ability to adapt very quickly. A person can instantly assess a changed situation and figure out how to adapt to it, while remaining alive and healthy. It is thanks to consciousness that we succeed in all this. According to the famous Russian neurophysiologist, academician Natalia Bekhtereva, "the brain is the greatest machine that can process the real into the ideal." It means,that the most important property of human consciousness is the ability to create and keep inside oneself a picture of the surrounding world. The benefits of this skill are enormous. When encountering a phenomenon or a problem, we do not have to solve or comprehend them from scratch - we just need to compare the new information with the idea of the world that we have already formed.
Sound is just vibrations of air, even if these vibrations of air are caused by trembling of a violin string, but our brain in some incomprehensible way transforms these vibrations into Mozart's music, from which a feeling of bright joy arises or tears come to our eyes. The brain somehow connects the physical world with our absolutely ideal non-physical psyche. However, not a single scientific fact that would demonstrate this process is known. Yes, neuroscientists conduct experiments in which they try to find the area in the brain that responds to a specific stimulus: for example, a photograph of a grandmother or Marilyn Monroe. But this, alas, does not give us anything for understanding the mechanism of emotional and psychological perception by a person of his own grandmother or a famous actress. I have to admitthat there is an information gap between the phenomena of neurophysiology and psychology, and it seems that closing this gap will be as difficult as comprehending the mysteries of the Universe.
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The history of human development from almost zero psyche in infancy to the diverse experience of a mature personality is a constant accumulation of adaptive information, addition and correction of the individual picture of the world. And the activity of human consciousness is nothing more than an incessant filtering of new information through acquired experience. I must say that the Russian word "consciousness" very successfully reflects the essence of the phenomenon: consciousness is life "with knowledge." To do this, evolution has endowed man with a unique computing resource - the brain, which allows you to continuously compare the new reality with the previous experience.
According to the famous Russian neurophysiologist, academician Natalia Bekhtereva, "The brain is the greatest machine that can process the real into the ideal."
Does our consciousness have flaws? Of course, the main one is the incompleteness and inaccuracy of any personal picture of the world. If, for example, a man meets a blonde, then, based on personal experience, he may decide that blondes are too frivolous or mercantile, and refuse a serious relationship. But, maybe, the whole point is only that he personally was once unlucky with a particular blonde, and therefore his experience is atypical. This happens all the time, and sometimes the accumulation of facts that contradict the individual picture of the world can lead to what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. At the moment of dissonance, the old picture of the world collapses, and a new one appears in its place, which is also part of our adaptive mechanism.
The abyss of the unconscious
Another drawback of consciousness is that it is not omnipotent, although it creates an illusion for us (but this is just an illusion!) That it is letting 100% of all new information pass through itself. However, he does not have such a physical opportunity. Consciousness is an evolutionarily very new instrument, which at some point was built on over the unconscious part of the psyche. In which creatures consciousness first appeared, and whether these or those animals possess consciousness is a separate, very interesting and far from understanding question. Unfortunately, there is still no scientific tool for communicating with animals - be it cats, dogs or dolphins, and therefore we cannot find out to what extent they have consciousness.
Consciousness creates the illusion that it is passing 100% of the information through itself, but this is not so.
At the same time, the unconscious, that is, the resources of the psyche that are outside of consciousness, have been preserved in a person in full. It is impossible to assess the size of the unconscious or to control its contents - consciousness does not give us access to it. It is generally accepted that the extraconscious is limitless, and this psychic resource comes to the rescue in situations where the resources of consciousness are not enough. Help is given to us in the form of processes, the results of which we notice, but the processes themselves do not. A textbook example is the periodic table of elements, which Dmitry Mendeleev, after long painful thoughts, allegedly saw in a dream.
Even if we assume that this is just a beautiful legend, it illustrates well what each of us knows from personal experience. A decision that has not been given for a long time sometimes suddenly comes as if from nowhere. Sometimes - from the realm of sleep. However, we not only cannot see the work of the unconscious, but we cannot even guarantee its connection. This archaic instrument, as already mentioned, does not obey the efforts of our will.
Where do the socks belong?
On the other hand, human consciousness also has a different reserve mechanism, not so dark and inaccessible as the unconscious. This mechanism in psychology is sometimes associated with the concept of "character", and it works like this. When a subject compares the incoming information with his picture of the world, he first of all wants to get an answer to the question: "What should I do in the current situation?" And if consciousness does not have enough concrete experience, the search for an answer to the question begins: "What do people generally do in such situations?" This question is actually addressed to childhood, to parenting. Mom and Dad give children a set of behavioral patterns (patterns) on the topic of "what is good and what is bad", but everyone's upbringing is different, and the patterns for the same case may differ significantly from person to person. For example, the husband's pattern says,that the socks can be thrown in the middle of the room; and the wife's pattern is that the dirty laundry should be immediately carried into the washing machine. This conflict has two possible outcomes.
In one case, the wife will ask her husband not to throw socks around, and he may agree with his wife. At the same time, the consciousness of two people will assess the situation "here and now", and a compromise will be the result of quick adaptation. In another case, if the husband “stubbornly”, the wife, most likely, will angrily reproach him with words like: “This is disgusting! Nobody does that! " “Nobody does” or “everyone does” - this is the “reserve airfield” of consciousness, its reserve system. Such a system plays an important adaptive role - it allows not to transfer the task to the extraconscious (there will be no control over it at all), but to leave it in consciousness. Unfortunately, at this moment, the most advantageous adaptation mode - the analysis of immediate reality - is turned off to some extent.
Mirror for the hero
So, the most important evolutionary advantage of man is the ability to constantly bring his internal picture of the world in line with reality and thus predict future events and adapt to them. But how to assess the correctness of adaptation? To do this, we have a feedback device - an emotional response system, thanks to which we enjoy something and something unpleasant. If we feel good, then nothing needs to be changed. If we feel bad, we worry, which means there is an incentive to change the adaptive model. People with weakened feedback are schizoids who have a lot of thoughts, but they are more than strange.
These people do not care at all how to apply their own various thoughts to reality, they are not very interested, since there is no positive feedback. There are, on the other hand, people of a hysterical disposition who have powerful feedback. They are constantly under the influence of emotions, only the adaptive model does not change for a long time. They go to university and don't study. They start a business and ruin it with their inaction. Hysteroids can be compared to a broken clock, which shows the exact time only twice a day. Well, schizoids are watches in which hands randomly rotate in different directions.
Which one of us is a genius?
Another evolutionary task is connected with the work of consciousness. It not only helps an individual to quickly adapt to changed circumstances, but also works for the survival of humanity as a whole. We all have our own internal picture of the world, which to some extent reflects reality. But for someone it will certainly be more adequate, and we are surprised how this person - let's call him a genius - understood what others could not understand. The more those who see the situation most adequately, the more chances of survival for the community as a whole. Therefore, the diversity of human consciousness is also very important from the point of view of the evolutionary process.
Each port has a personality
Two systems - a system of adaptation and a system of self-analysis of adaptive actions - together form a human personality. A highly developed personality can be considered a person for whom both systems work in the greatest harmony. He quickly grasps the essence of phenomena, clearly realizes them, thinks brightly, feels all-embracing. They often say about the perception of such people: “Wow, how exactly he said! I couldn't do that! The personality is like an ideal gastronomic product, in which everything is exactly as much as necessary, and unconscious, and adaptability, and introspection. Does such an integration require an excessive amount of information? Not at all. For a high speed of adaptation, you need key information that allows you to draw the right conclusion and take the right action.
In this case, the person must exactly match the place and time. Many outstanding personalities probably would not have received such a reputation if they found themselves in a different socio-cultural environment. Moreover, even in one person, under certain conditions, several personalities coexist. This can be, for example, associated with the so-called altered states of consciousness.
A state when all the resources of the psyche are turned to the external environment is considered normative, biologically significant for a person. You have to be always on the alert, constantly analyzing incoming information. But when the focus of attention is partially or completely switched to internal states, this is called an altered state. In this case, personality can also change. Everyone knows that a drunk person is capable of such actions that he could not even think of in a normal (sober) state. Yes, and everyone is aware of the stupid behavior of lovers firsthand.
American psychologist Robert Fisher proposed the concept of "ports", according to which our minds are like a sea captain who travels the world, and in every port he has a woman. But none of them knows anything about the others. So is our consciousness. In different states, it is capable of producing different personal properties, but these personalities are often completely unfamiliar with each other.
The author is a senior lecturer at the Department of Differential Psychology and Psychophysiology of the Institute of Psychology named after V. I. L. S. Vygotsky RSUH
Sergey Matz