Human consciousness is the highest form of mental reflection of the world formed in the process of social life. It manifests itself verbally and in the form of sensory images. It is the basis of the cognitive and educational activities of the individual.
Human consciousness
The main difference between a person as a species from all others is his ability to abstract thinking, planning activities, the ability to remember and reflect on past experience, giving him an assessment and drawing conclusions. All of the above is directly related to the sphere of consciousness.
Functionally, consciousness is understood as the operating system of the brain. A similar view of this concept is widely used in natural sciences, in particular, in biology and medicine. However, he is not able to fully capture the value and importance of consciousness for a person, because consciousness is much more than an ordinary physiological process.
Russian psychology defines consciousness as the highest form of reflection of the objective properties and laws of the surrounding space. Moreover, consciousness is inherent only in man - as a socio-historical subject.
Consciousness forms in a person an internal model of the external world, and this is a prerequisite for any cognitive activity and a person's desire to transform the world around him. Consciousness develops in the process of interaction of the individual with other people, in the process of gaining social experience.
The essence of all forms of human mental activity, from the simplest (reflex) to the most complex (consciousness), is that they perform the function of orienting a living organism in external space. The more complex the external environment, the more complex the organization of the psyche, which helps to successfully navigate in the surrounding space.
Cognitive processes of consciousness
For a person, consciousness is characterized mainly by cognitive activity. Cognition of a human being begins with memorizing simple elements of culture and the surrounding world. Using the knowledge gained, the child accepts and remembers the meaning and meaning contained in the surrounding objects, learns to operate with them without directly influencing the objects themselves. The form of such an operation, verbal and speech, and similar activities are a characteristic of consciousness.
The structure of consciousness includes all types of cognitive processes: sensation, memory, perception, imagination, thinking. Thanks to them, a person constantly replenishes knowledge about himself and about the world. If any of these cognitive processes are disturbed or malfunctioning, it upsets the work of the entire consciousness as a whole.
