Various depictions of meditation: The Hindu Swami Vivekananda, the Buddhist monk Hsuan Hua, Taoist Baduanjin Qigong, the Christian St Francis, the Stoic sage Epictetus and Muslim Sufis in Dhikr.
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
Scholars have found meditation difficult to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them.
Meditation has been practiced since 1500 BCE antiquity in numerous religious traditions, often as part of the path towards enlightenment and self realization. The earliest records of meditation (Dhyana), come from the Hindu traditions of Vedantism. Since the 19th century, Asian meditative techniques have spread to other cultures where they have also found application in non-spiritual contexts, such as business and health.
Meditation may be used with the aim of reducing stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and increasing peace, perception,self-concept, and well-being.
Meditation is under research to define its possible health (psychological, neurological, and cardiovascular) and other effects.
Etymology
The English meditation is derived from Old French meditacioun, in turn from Latin meditatio from a verb meditari, meaning “to think, contemplate, devise, ponder”.
The use of the term meditatio as part of a formal, stepwise process of meditation goes back to the 12th century monk Guigo II.
Apart from its historical usage, the term meditation was introduced as a translation for Eastern spiritual practices, referred to as dhyāna in Hinduism and Buddhism and which comes from the Sanskrit root dhyai, meaning to contemplate or meditate.
The term “meditation” in English may also refer to practices from Islamic Sufism,or other traditions such as Jewish Kabbalah and Christian Hesychasm.
Definitions
Meditation has proven difficult to define as it covers a wide range of dissimilar practices in different traditions. In popular usage, the word “meditation” and the phrase “meditative practice” are often used imprecisely to designate practices found across many cultures. These can include almost anything that is claimed to train the attention of mind or to teach calm or compassion.
There remains no definition of necessary and sufficient criteria for meditation that has achieved universal or widespread acceptance within the modern scientific community. In 1971, Claudio Naranjo noted that “The word ‘meditation’ has been used to designate a variety of practices that differ enough from one another so that we may find trouble in defining what meditation is.”
A 2009 study noted a “persistent lack of consensus in the literature” and a “seeming intractability of defining meditation”.
Dictionary definitions
Dictionaries give both the original Latin meaning of “think[ing] deeply about (something)” as well as the popular usage of ” focusing one’s mind for a period of time””the act of giving your attention to only one thing, either as a religious activity or as a way of becoming calm and relaxed”,and “to engage in mental exercise (such as concentrating on one’s breathing or repetition of a mantra) for the purpose of reaching a heightened level of spiritual awareness.”
Scholarly definitions
In modern psychological research, meditation has been defined and characterized in a variety of ways. Many of these emphasize the role of attention and characterize the practice of meditation as attempts to get beyond the reflexive, “discursive thinking” or “logic”mind to achieve a deeper, more devout, or more relaxed state.
Bond et al. (2009) identified criteria for defining a practice as meditation “for use in a comprehensive systematic review of the therapeutic use of meditation”, using “a 5-round Delphi study with a panel of 7 experts in meditation research” who were also trained in diverse but empirically highly studied (Eastern-derived or clinical) forms of meditation.
three main criteria as essential to any meditation practice: the use of a defined technique, logic relaxation, and a self-induced state/mode.
Other criteria deemed important [but not essential] involve a state of psychophysical relaxation, the use of a self-focus skill or anchor, the presence of a state of suspension of logical thought processes, a religious/spiritual/philosophical context, or a state of mental silence.
It is plausible that meditation is best thought of as a natural category of techniques best captured by ‘family resemblances’ or by the related ‘prototype’ model of concepts.”
Several other definitions of meditation have been used by influential modern reviews of research on meditation across multiple traditions.
Walsh & Shapiro (2006): “[M]editation refers to a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration”
Cahn & Polich (2006): “Meditation is used to describe practices that self-regulate the body and mind, thereby affecting mental events by engaging a specific attentional set…. regulation of attention is the central commonality across the many divergent methods”
Jevning et al. (1992): “We define meditation… as a stylized mental technique… repetitively practiced for the purpose of attaining a subjective experience that is frequently described as very restful, silent, and of heightened alertness, often characterized as blissful”
Goleman (1988): “the need for the meditator to retrain his attention, whether through concentration or mindfulness, is the single invariant ingredient in… every meditation system”
Separation of technique from tradition
Some of the difficulty in precisely defining meditation has been in recognizing the particularities of the many various traditions;and theories and practice can differ within a tradition. Taylor noted that even within a faith such as “Hindu” or “Buddhist”, schools and individual teachers may teach distinct types of meditation.
Ornstein noted that “Most techniques of meditation do not exist as solitary practices but are only artificially separable from an entire system of practice and belief.”For instance, while monks meditate as part of their everyday lives, they also engage the codified rules and live together in monasteries in specific cultural settings that go along with their meditative practices.
Forms and techniques-
Classifications
In the West, meditation techniques have sometimes been thought of in two broad categories: focused (or concentrative) meditation and open monitoring (or mindfulness) meditation.
Direction of mental attention… A practitioner can focus intensively on one particular object (so-called concentrative meditation), on all mental events that enter the field of awareness (so-called mindfulness meditation), or both specific focal points and the field of awareness.
Focused methods include paying attention to the breath, to an idea or feeling (such as mettā (loving-kindness)), to a kōan, or to a mantra (such as in transcendental meditation), and single point meditation.
Open monitoring methods include mindfulness, shikantaza and other awareness states.
Practices using both methods include vipassana (which uses anapanasati as a preparation), and samatha (calm-abiding).
In “No thought” methods, “the practitioner is fully alert, aware, and in control of their faculties but does not experience any unwanted thought activity.” This is in contrast to the common meditative approaches of being detached from, and non-judgmental of, thoughts, but not of aiming for thoughts to cease. In the meditation practice of the Sahaja yoga spiritual movement, the focus is on thoughts ceasing.Clear light yoga also aims at a state of no mental content, as does the no thought (wu nian) state taught by Huineng, and the teaching of Yaoshan Weiyan.
One proposal is that transcendental meditation and possibly other techniques be grouped as an “automatic self-transcending” set of techniques.
Other typologies include dividing meditation into concentrative, generative, receptive and reflective practices.
Frequency
The Transcendental Meditation technique recommends practice of 20 minutes twice per day. Some techniques suggest less time, especially when starting meditation, and Richard Davidson has quoted research saying benefits can be achieved with a practice of only 8 minutes per day.Some meditators practice for much longer, particularly when on a course or retreat. Some meditators find practice best in the hours before dawn.
Posture
(Asana)
Asanas and positions such as the full-lotus, half-lotus, Burmese, Seiza, and kneeling positions are popular in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism,although other postures such as sitting, supine (lying), and standing are also used. Meditation is also sometimes done while walking, known as kinhin, while doing a simple task mindfully, known as samu or while lying down known as savasana.
Use of prayer beads
Some religions have traditions of using prayer beads as tools in devotional meditation. Most prayer beads and Christian rosaries consist of pearls or beads linked together by a thread.The Roman Catholic rosary is a string of beads containing five sets with ten small beads. The Hindu japa mala has 108 beads (the figure 108 in itself having spiritual significance, as well as those used in Jainism and Buddhist prayer beads.
Each bead is counted once as a person recites a mantra until the person has gone all the way around the mala.The Muslim misbaha has 99 beads.
Striking the meditator
The Buddhist literature has many stories of Enlightenment being attained through disciples being struck by their masters. According to T. Griffith Foulk, the encouragement stick was an integral part of the Zen practice:
In the Rinzai monastery where I trained in the mid-1970s, according to an unspoken etiquette, monks who were sitting earnestly and well were shown respect by being hit vigorously and often; those known as laggards were ignored by the hall monitor or given little taps if they requested to be hit. Nobody asked about the ‘meaning’ of the stick, nobody explained, and nobody ever complained about its use.
Using a narrative
Richard Davidson has expressed the view that having a narrative can help maintenance of daily practice.
For instance he himself prostrates to the teachings, and meditates “not primarily for my benefit, but for the benefit of others”.
Religious and spiritual meditation
Indian religions-
Hinduism
(Hindu meditation)
A statue of Patañjali practicing dhyana in the Padma-asana at Patanjali Yogpeeth.
There are many schools and styles of meditation within Hinduism. In pre-modern and traditional Hinduism, Yoga and Dhyana are practised to realize union of one’s eternal self or soul, one’s ātman. In Advaita Vedanta this is equated with the omnipresent and non-dual Brahman. In the dualistic Yoga school and Samkhya, the Self is called Purusha, a pure consciousness separate from matter. Depending on the tradition, the liberative event is named moksha, vimukti or kaivalya.
The earliest clear references to meditation in Hindu literature are in the middle Upanishads and the Mahabharata (including the Bhagavad Gita).
According to Gavin Flood, the earlier Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is describing meditation when it states that “having become calm and concentrated, one perceives the self (ātman) within oneself”.
One of the most influential texts of classical Hindu Yoga is Patañjali’s Yoga sutras (c. 400 CE), a text associated with Yoga and Samkhya, which outlines eight limbs leading to kaivalya (“aloneness”). These are ethical discipline (yamas), rules (niyamas), physical postures (āsanas), breath control (prāṇāyama), withdrawal from the senses (pratyāhāra), one-pointedness of mind (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and finally samādhi.
Later developments in Hindu meditation include the compilation of Hatha Yoga (forceful yoga) compendiums like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the development of Bhakti yoga as a major form of meditation and Tantra. Another important Hindu yoga text is the Yoga Yajnavalkya, which makes use of Hatha Yoga and Vedanta Philosophy.
Jainism
(Jain meditation)
Jain meditation and spiritual practices system were referred to as salvation-path. It has three parts called the Ratnatraya “Three Jewels”: right perception and faith, right knowledge and right conduct.
Meditation in Jainism aims at realizing the self, attaining salvation, and taking the soul to complete freedom. It aims to reach and to remain in the pure state of soul which is believed to be pure consciousness, beyond any attachment or aversion. The practitioner strives to be just a knower-seer (Gyata-Drashta). Jain meditation can be broadly categorized to Dharmya Dhyana and Shukla Dhyana.
Jainism uses meditation techniques such as pindāstha-dhyāna, padāstha-dhyāna, rūpāstha-dhyāna, rūpātita-dhyāna, and savīrya-dhyāna. In padāstha dhyāna one focuses on a mantra.A mantra could be either a combination of core letters or words on deity or themes. There is a rich tradition of Mantra in Jainism. All Jain followers irrespective of their sect, whether Digambara or Svetambara, practice mantra. Mantra chanting is an important part of daily lives of Jain monks and followers. Mantra chanting can be done either loudly or silently in mind.
Contemplation is a very old and important meditation technique. The practitioner meditates deeply on subtle facts. In agnya vichāya, one contemplates on seven facts – life and non-life, the inflow, bondage, stoppage and removal of karmas, and the final accomplishment of liberation. In apaya vichāya, one contemplates on the incorrect insights one indulges, which eventually develops right insight. In vipaka vichāya, one reflects on the eight causes or basic types of karma. In sansathan vichāya, one thinks about the vastness of the universe and the loneliness of the soul.
Buddhism
(Buddhist meditation)
Buddhist meditation refers to the meditative practices associated with the religion and philosophy of Buddhism. Core meditation techniques have been preserved in ancient Buddhist texts and have proliferated and diversified through teacher-student transmissions. Buddhists pursue meditation as part of the path toward awakening and nirvana.
The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā,jhāna/dhyāna, and vipassana.
Buddhist meditation techniques have become popular in the wider world, with many non-Buddhists taking them up. There is considerable homogeneity across meditative practices – such as breath meditation and various recollections (anussati) – across Buddhist schools, as well as significant diversity. In the Theravāda tradition, there are over fifty methods for developing mindfulness and forty for developing concentration, while in the Tibetan tradition there are thousands of visualization meditations.Most classical and contemporary Buddhist meditation guides are school-specific.
According to the Theravada and Sarvastivada commentatorial traditions, and the Tibetan tradition,[66] the Buddha identified two paramount mental qualities that arise from wholesome meditative practice:
“serenity” or “tranquility” (Pali: samatha) which steadies, composes, unifies and concentrates the mind;
“insight” (Pali: vipassana) which enables one to see, explore and discern “formations” (conditioned phenomena based on the five aggregates).
Through the meditative development of serenity, one is able to weaken the obscuring hindrances and bring the mind to a collected, pliant and still state (samadhi). This quality of mind then supports the development of insight and wisdom (Prajñā) which is the quality of mind that can “clearly see” (vi-passana) the nature of phenomena. What exactly is to be seen varies within the Buddhist traditions.
In Theravada, all phenomena are to be seen as impermanent, suffering, not-self and empty. When this happens, one develops dispassion (viraga) for all phenomena, including all negative qualities and hindrances and lets them go. It is through the release of the hindrances and ending of craving through the meditative development of insight that one gains liberation.
In the modern era, Buddhist meditation saw increasing popularity due to the influence of Buddhist modernism on Asian Buddhism, and western lay interest in Zen and the Vipassana movement. The spread of Buddhist meditation to the Western world paralleled the spread of Buddhism in the West. The modernized concept of mindfulness (based on the Buddhist term sati) and related meditative practices have in turn led to mindfulness based therapies.
Sikhism
( Nām Japō)
In Sikhism, simran (meditation) and good deeds are both necessary to achieve the devotee’s Spiritual goals;without good deeds meditation is futile. When Sikhs meditate, they aim to feel God’s presence and emerge in the divine light.
It is only God’s divine will or order that allows a devotee to desire to begin to meditate.
Nām Japnā involves focusing one’s attention on the names or great attributes of God.
East Asian religions –
Taoism
(Daoist meditation)
Taoist meditation has developed techniques including concentration, visualization, qi cultivation, contemplation, and mindfulness meditations in its long history. Traditional Daoist meditative practices were influenced by Chinese Buddhism from around the 5th century, and influenced Traditional Chinese medicine and the Chinese martial arts.
Livia Kohn distinguishes three basic types of Taoist meditation: “concentrative”, “insight”, and “visualization”.
Ding 定 (literally means “decide; settle; stabilize”) refers to “deep concentration”, “intent contemplation”, or “perfect absorption”. Guan 觀 (lit. “watch; observe; view”) meditation seeks to merge and attain unity with the Dao. It was developed by Tang Dynasty (618–907) Taoist masters based upon the Tiantai Buddhist practice of Vipassanā “insight” or “wisdom” meditation. Cun 存 (lit. “exist; be present; survive”) has a sense of “to cause to exist; to make present” in the meditation techniques popularized by the Taoist Shangqing and Lingbao Schools. A meditator visualizes or actualizes solar and lunar essences, lights, and deities within their body, which supposedly results in health and longevity, even xian 仙/仚/僊, “immortality”.
The (late 4th century BCE) Guanzi essay Neiye “Inward training” is the oldest received writing on the subject of qi cultivation and breath-control meditation techniques.
For instance, “When you enlarge your mind and let go of it, when you relax your vital breath and expand it, when your body is calm and unmoving: And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances. … This is called “revolving the vital breath”: Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.”
The (c. 3rd century BCE) Taoist Zhuangzi records zuowang or “sitting forgetting” meditation. Confucius asked his disciple Yan Hui to explain what “sit and forget” means: “I slough off my limbs and trunk, dim my intelligence, depart from my form, leave knowledge behind, and become identical with the Transformational Thoroughfare.”
Taoist meditation practices are central to Chinese martial arts (and some Japanese martial arts), especially the qi-related neijia “internal martial arts”. Some well-known examples are daoyin “guiding and pulling”, qigong “life-energy exercises”, neigong “internal exercises”, neidan “internal alchemy”, and taijiquan “great ultimate boxing”, which is thought of as moving meditation. One common explanation contrasts “movement in stillness” referring to energetic visualization of qi circulation in qigong and zuochan “seated meditation”, versus “stillness in movement” referring to a state of meditative calm in taijiquan forms.
Abrahamic religions –
Judaism
(Jewish meditation)
Judaism has made use of meditative practices for thousands of years.
For instance, in the Torah, the patriarch Isaac is described as going “לשוח” (lasuach) in the field – a term understood by all commentators as some type of meditative practice (Genesis 24:63). Similarly, there are indications throughout the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) that the prophets meditated.
In the Old Testament, there are two Hebrew words for meditation: hāgâ (Hebrew: הגה), to sigh or murmur, but also to meditate, and sîḥâ (Hebrew: שיחה), to muse, or rehearse in one’s mind.
Classical Jewish texts espouse a wide range of meditative practices, often associated with the cultivation of kavanah or intention. The first layer of rabbinic law, the Mishnah, describes ancient sages “waiting” for an hour before their prayers, “in order to direct their hearts to the Omnipresent One (Mishnah Berakhot 5:1). Other early rabbinic texts include instructions for visualizing the Divine Presence (B. Talmud Sanhedrin 22a) and breathing with conscious gratitude for every breath (Genesis Rabba 14:9).
One of the best known types of meditation in early Jewish mysticism was the work of the Merkabah, from the root /R-K-B/ meaning “chariot” (of God).Some meditative traditions have been encouraged in Kabbalah, and some Jews have described Kabbalah as an inherently meditative field of study. Kabbalistic meditation often involves the mental visualization of the supernal realms. Aryeh Kaplan has argued that the ultimate purpose of Kabbalistic meditation is to understand and cleave to the Divine.
Meditation has been of interest to a wide variety of modern Jews. In modern Jewish practice, one of the best known meditative practices is called “hitbodedut” ( alternatively transliterated as “hisbodedus”), and is explained in Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and Mussar writings, especially the Hasidic method of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. The word derives from the Hebrew word “boded” (בודד), meaning the state of being alone. Another Hasidic system is the Habad method of “hisbonenus”, related to the Sephirah of “Binah”, Hebrew for understanding.This practice is the analytical reflective process of making oneself understand a mystical concept well, that follows and internalises its study in Hasidic writings. The Musar Movement, founded by Rabbi Israel Salanter in the middle of the nineteenth-century, emphasized meditative practices of introspection and visualization that could help to improve moral character.Conservative rabbi Alan Lew has emphasized meditation playing an important role in the process of teshuvah (repentance).Jewish Buddhists have adopted Buddhist styles of meditation.
Christianity
(Christian meditation)
Christian meditation is a term for a form of prayer in which a structured attempt is made to get in touch with and deliberately reflect upon the revelations of God. The word meditation comes from the Latin word meditari, which means to concentrate. Christian meditation is the process of deliberately focusing on specific thoughts (e.g. a biblical scene involving Jesus and the Virgin Mary) and reflecting on their meaning in the context of the love of God.Christian meditation is sometimes taken to mean the middle level in a broad three stage characterization of prayer: it then involves more reflection than first level vocal prayer, but is more structured than the multiple layers of contemplation in Christianity.
The Rosary is a devotion for the meditation of the mysteries of Jesus and Mary.
“The gentle repetition of its prayers makes it an excellent means to moving into deeper meditation. It gives us an opportunity to open ourselves to God’s word, to refine our interior gaze by turning our minds to the life of Christ. The first principle is that meditation is learned through practice. Many people who practice rosary meditation begin very simply and gradually develop a more sophisticated meditation. The meditator learns to hear an interior voice, the voice of God”.
According to Edmund P. Clowney, Christian meditation contrasts with Eastern forms of meditation as radically as the portrayal of God the Father in the Bible contrasts with depictions of Krishna or Brahman in Indian teachings. Unlike some Eastern styles, most styles of Christian meditation do not rely on the repeated use of mantras, and yet are also intended to stimulate thought and deepen meaning. Christian meditation aims to heighten the personal relationship based on the love of God that marks Christian communion.
In Aspects of Christian meditation, the Catholic Church warned of potential incompatibilities in mixing Christian and Eastern styles of meditation.
In 2003, in A Christian reflection on the New Age the Vatican announced that the “Church avoids any concept that is close to those of the New Age”.
Islam E
(Muraqaba)
Salah is a mandatory act of devotion performed by Muslims five times per day. The body goes through sets of different postures, as the mind attains a level of concentration called khushu.
A second optional type of meditation, called dhikr, meaning remembering and mentioning God, is interpreted in different meditative techniques in Sufism or Islamic mysticism. This became one of the essential elements of Sufism as it was systematized traditionally. It is juxtaposed with fikr (thinking) which leads to knowledge.By the 12th century, the practice of Sufism included specific meditative techniques, and its followers practiced breathing controls and the repetition of holy words.
Sufism uses a meditative procedure like Buddhist concentration, involving high-intensity and sharply focused introspection. In the Oveyssi-Shahmaghsoudi Sufi order, for example, muraqaba takes the form of tamarkoz, “concentration” in Persian.
Tafakkur or tadabbur in Sufism literally means reflection upon the universe: this is considered to permit access to a form of cognitive and emotional development that can emanate only from the higher level, i.e. from God. The sensation of receiving divine inspiration awakens and liberates both heart and intellect, permitting such inner growth that the apparently mundane actually takes on the quality of the infinite. Muslim teachings embrace life as a test of one’s submission to God.
Bahá’í Faith
In the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith, meditation is a primary tool for spiritual development, involving reflection on the words of God.While prayer and meditation are linked, where meditation happens generally in a prayerful attitude, prayer is seen specifically as turning toward God,and meditation is seen as a communion with one’s self where one focuses on the divine.
In Bahá’í teachings the purpose of meditation is to strengthen one’s understanding of the words of God, and to make one’s soul more susceptible to their potentially transformative power, more receptive to the need for both prayer and meditation to bring about and maintain a spiritual communion with God.
Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the religion, never specified any particular form of meditation, and thus each person is free to choose their own form.However, he did state that Bahá’ís should read a passage of the Bahá’í writings twice a day, once in the morning, and once in the evening, and meditate on it. He also encouraged people to reflect on one’s actions and worth at the end of each day.During the Nineteen Day Fast, a period of the year during which Bahá’ís adhere to a sunrise-to-sunset fast, they meditate and pray to reinvigorate their spiritual forces.
Pagan and occult
Movements which use magic, such as Wicca, Thelema, Neopaganism, and occultism, often require their adherents to meditate as a preliminary to the magical work. This is because magic is often thought to require a particular state of mind in order to make contact with spirits, or because one has to visualize one’s goal or otherwise keep intent focused for a long period during the ritual in order to see the desired outcome. Meditation practice in these religions usually revolves around visualization, absorbing energy from the universe or higher self, directing one’s internal energy, and inducing various trance states. Meditation and magic practice often overlap in these religions as meditation is often seen as merely a stepping stone to supernatural power, and the meditation sessions may be peppered with various chants and spells.
Modern spirituality
Mantra meditation, with the use of a japa mala and especially with focus on the Hare Krishna maha-mantra, is a central practice of the Gaudiya Vaishnava faith tradition and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), also known as the Hare Krishna movement. Other popular New Religious Movements include the Ramakrishna Mission, Vedanta Society, Divine Light Mission, Chinmaya Mission, Osho, Sahaja Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Oneness University, Brahma Kumaris and Vihangam Yoga.
New Age
New Age meditations are often influenced by Eastern philosophy, mysticism, yoga, Hinduism and Buddhism, yet may contain some degree of Western influence. In the West, meditation found its mainstream roots through the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the youth of the day rebelled against traditional religion as a reaction against what some perceived as the failure of Christianity to provide spiritual and ethical guidance. New Age meditation as practised by the early hippies is regarded for its techniques of blanking out the mind and releasing oneself from conscious thinking. This is often aided by repetitive chanting of a mantra, or focusing on an object.
New Age meditation evolved into a range of purposes and practices, from serenity and balance to access to other realms of consciousness to the concentration of energy in group meditation to the supreme goal of samadhi, as in the ancient yogic practice of meditation.
Clinical applications
( Mindfulness-based stress reduction and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy)
The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states that “Meditation is a mind and body practice that has a long history of use for increasing calmness and physical relaxation, improving psychological balance, coping with illness, and enhancing overall health and well-being.”
A 2014 review found that practice of mindfulness meditation for two to six months by people undergoing long-term psychiatric or medical therapy could produce small improvements in anxiety, pain, or depression.
In 2017, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement that meditation may be a reasonable adjunct practice to help reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, with the qualification that meditation needs to be better defined in higher-quality clinical research of these disorders.
Low-quality evidence indicates that meditation may help with irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia,cognitive decline in the elderly, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Meditation in the workplace
A 2010 review of the literature on spirituality and performance in organizations found an increase in corporate meditation programs.
As of 2016 around a quarter of U.S. employers were using stress reduction initiatives.
The goal was to help reduce stress and improve reactions to stress. Aetna now offers its program to its customers. Google also implements mindfulness, offering more than a dozen meditation courses, with the most prominent one, “Search Inside Yourself”, having been implemented since 2007.
General Mills offers the Mindful Leadership Program Series, a course which uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, yoga and dialogue with the intention of developing the mind’s capacity to pay attention.
Sound-based meditation
Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School conducted a series of clinical tests on meditators from various disciplines, including the Transcendental Meditation technique and Tibetan Buddhism. In 1975, Benson published a book titled The Relaxation Response where he outlined his own version of meditation for relaxation. Also in the 1970s, the American psychologist Patricia Carrington developed a similar technique called Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM).
In Norway, another sound-based method called Acem Meditation developed a psychology of meditation and has been the subject of several scientific studies.
Biofeedback has been used by many researchers since the 1950s in an effort to enter deeper states of mind.
Research
( Research on meditation)
Research on the processes and effects of meditation is a subfield of neurological research.
Modern scientific techniques, such as fMRI and EEG, were used to observe neurological responses during meditation. Concerns have been raised on the quality of meditation research, including the particular characteristics of individuals who tend to participate.
Since the 1970s, clinical psychology and psychiatry have developed meditation techniques for numerous psychological conditions.
Mindfulness practice is employed in psychology to alleviate mental and physical conditions, such as reducing depression, stress, and anxiety.
Mindfulness is also used in the treatment of drug addiction, although the quality of research has been poor. Studies demonstrate that meditation has a moderate effect to reduce pain.
There is insufficient evidence for any effect of meditation on positive mood, attention, eating habits, sleep, or body weight.
A 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of meditation on empathy, compassion, and prosocial behaviors found that meditation practices had small to medium effects on self-reported and observable outcomes, concluding that such practices can “improve positive prosocial emotions and behaviors”.
The 2012 US National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (34,525 subjects) found 8% of US adults used meditation, with lifetime and 12-month prevalence of meditation use of 5.2% and 4.1% respectively.
In the 2017 NHIS survey, meditation use among workers was 10% (up from 8% in 2002).
Criticisms
The psychologist Thomas Joiner argues that modern mindfulness meditation has been “corrupted” for commercial gain by self-help celebrities, and suggests that it encourages unhealthy narcissistic and self-obsessed mindsets.
Potential adverse effects
( Research on meditation § Potential adverse effects and limits of meditation.)
Meditation has been correlated with unpleasant experiences in some people.
In one study, published in 2019, of 1,232 regular meditators with at least two months of meditation experience, about a quarter reported having had particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences (such as anxiety, fear, distorted emotions or thoughts, altered sense of self or the world), which they thought may have been caused by their meditation practice. Meditators with high levels of repetitive negative thinking and those who only engage in deconstructive meditation were more likely to report unpleasant side effects. Adverse effects were less frequently reported in women and religious meditators.
Difficult experiences encountered in meditation are mentioned in traditional sources; and some may be considered to be just an expected part of the process: for example: seven stages of purification mentioned in Theravāda Buddhism, or possible “unwholesome or frightening visions” mentioned in a practical manual on vipassanā meditation.
Meditation, religion and drugs
Many major traditions in which meditation is practiced, such as Buddhism and Hinduism,advise members not to consume intoxicants, while others, such as the Rastafarian movements and Native American Church, view drugs as integral to their religious lifestyle.
The fifth of the five precepts of the Pancasila, the ethical code in the Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions, states that adherents must: “abstain from fermented and distilled beverages that cause heedlessness.”
On the other hand, the ingestion of psychoactives has been a central feature in the rituals of many religions, in order to produce altered states of consciousness. In several traditional shamanistic ceremonies, drugs are used as agents of ritual. In the Rastafari movement, cannabis is believed to be a gift from Jah and a sacred herb to be used regularly, while alcohol is considered to debase man. Native Americans use peyote, as part of religious ceremony, continuing today.
Alertness
Alertness is the state of active attention by high sensory awareness such as being watchful and prompt to meet danger or emergency, or being quick to perceive and act. It is related to psychology as well as to physiology. A lack of alertness is a symptom of a number of conditions, including narcolepsy, attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, Addison’s disease, or sleep deprivation. Pronounced lack of alertness can be graded as an altered level of consciousness. The word is formed from “alert”, which comes from the Italian “all’erta” (on the watch, literally, on the height; 1618)
Physiological aspects
People who have to be alert during their jobs, such as air traffic controllers or pilots, often face challenges maintaining their alertness. Research shows that for people “…engaged in attention-intensive and monotonous tasks, retaining a constant level of alertness is rare if not impossible.” If people employed in safety-related or transportation jobs have lapses in alertness, this “may lead to severe consequences in occupations ranging from air traffic control to monitoring of nuclear power plants.”
Drugs used to increase alertness
During the Second World War, US soldiers and aviators were given benzedrine, an amphetamine drug, to increase their alertness during long periods on duty. While air force pilots are able to use the drug to remain awake during combat flights, the use of amphetamines by commercial airline pilots is forbidden. British troops used 72 million amphetamine tablets in the second world war and the RAF used so many that “Methedrine won the Battle of Britain” according to one report.[3] American bomber pilots use amphetamines (“go pills”) to stay awake during long missions. The Tarnak Farm incident, in which an American F-16 pilot killed several friendly Canadian soldiers on the ground, was blamed by the pilot on his use of amphetamine. A nonjudicial hearing rejected the pilot’s claim. Amphetamines are used by college and high-school students as a study and test-taking aid. Amphetamine increases energy levels, concentration, and motivation, allowing students to study for an extended period of time. These drugs are often acquired through ADHD prescriptions to students and peers, rather than illicitly produced drugs.Cocaine is also used to increase alertness.
Eugeroics including Modafinil have recently gained popularity with the US Military.
Behavioral ecology
Vigilance is an important trait for animals in order to watch out for predators. Typically a reduction in alertness is observed for animals that live in larger groups. Studies on vigilance have been conducted on various animals including the scaly-breasted munia.
Focusing (psychotherapy)
Focusing is a psychotherapeutic process developed by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. It can be used in any kind of therapeutic situation, including peer-to-peer sessions. It involves holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. Focusing can, among other things, be used to become clear on what one feels or wants, to obtain new insights about one’s situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.
Focusing is set apart from other methods of inner awareness by three qualities: something called the “felt sense”, a quality of engaged accepting attention, and a researched-based technique that facilitates change.
Origin
At the University of Chicago, beginning in 1953, Eugene Gendlin did 15 years of research analyzing what made psychotherapy either successful or unsuccessful. The conclusion was that it is not the therapist’s technique that determines the success of psychotherapy, but rather the way the patient behaves, and what the patient does inside himself during the therapy sessions.
Gendlin found that, without exception, the successful patient intuitively focuses inside himself on a very subtle and vague internal bodily awareness—or “felt sense”—which contains information that, if attended to or focused on, holds the key to the resolution of the problems the patient is experiencing.
“Focusing” is a process and learnable skill developed by Gendlin which re-creates this successful-patient behavior in a form that can be taught to other patients.
Gendlin detailed the techniques in his book Focusing which, intended for the layperson, is written in conversational terms and describes the six steps of Focusing and how to do them. Gendlin stated: “I did not invent Focusing. I simply made some steps which help people to find Focusing.”
Felt sense” and “felt shift”
Gendlin gave the name “felt sense” to the unclear, pre-verbal sense of “something”—the inner knowledge or awareness that has not been consciously thought or verbalized—as that “something” is experienced in the body. It is not the same as an emotion. This bodily felt “something” may be an awareness of a situation or an old hurt, or of something that is “coming”—perhaps an idea or insight. Crucial to the concept, as defined by Gendlin, is that it is unclear and vague, and it is always more than any attempt to express it verbally. Gendlin also described it as “sensing an implicit complexity, a wholistic sense of what one is working on”.
According to Gendlin, the Focusing process makes a felt sense more tangible and easier to work with.[3] To help the felt sense form and to accurately identify its meaning, the focuser tries out words that might express it. These words can be tested against the felt sense: The felt sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately describe it.
Gendlin observed clients, writers, and people in ordinary life (“Focusers”) turning their attention to this not-yet-articulated knowing. As a felt sense formed, there would be long pauses together with sounds like “uh….” Once the person had accurately identified this felt sense in words, new words would come, and new insights into the situation. There would be a sense of felt movement—a “felt shift”—and the person would begin to be able to move beyond the “stuck” place, having fresh insights, and also sometimes indications of steps to take.
Learning and using Focusing
One can learn the Focusing technique from one of several books,or from a Focusing trainer or practitioner. Focusing is easiest to sense and do in the presence of a “listener”—either a Focusing trainer, a therapist, or a layperson trained in Focusing.
Gendlin’s book details the six steps of Focusing,[3] which can also be taught as a four-step process, while emphasizing that there is an essence to Focusing which is a flow that is beyond steps.
Focusing is now practiced all over the world by thousands of people—both in professional settings with Focusing trainers, and informally between laypersons.
As a stand-alone process, a Focusing session can last from approximately 30 minutes to an hour, on average—with the “focuser” being listened to, and his verbalized thoughts and feelings being reflected back to him by the “listener”. Generally speaking, but not always, the focuser has his eyes closed, in order to more accurately focus inwardly on his “felt sense” and the shifts that take place from it. Focusing can also be done alone.
Subsequent developments
In 1996, Gendlin published a comprehensive book on Focusing-oriented psychotherapy. The Focusing-oriented psychotherapist attributes a central importance to the client’s capacity to be aware of his “felt sense”, and the meaning behind his words or images. The client is encouraged to sense into feelings and meanings which are not yet formed. Other elements of Focusing are also incorporated into the therapy practice so that Focusing remains the basis of the process—allowing for inner resonance and verification of ideas and feelings, and allowing new and fresh insights to come from within the client.
Several adaptations of Gendlin’s original six-step Focusing process have been developed. The most popular and prevalent of these is the process Ann Weiser Cornell teaches, called Inner Relationship Focusing.
Other developments in Focusing include focusing alone using a journal or a sketchbook. Drawing and painting can be used with Focusing processes with children. Focusing also happens in other domains besides therapy. Attention to the felt sense naturally takes place in all manner of processes where something new is being formed: for example in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making.
Mindfulness (disambiguation).
Mindfulness is the psychological process of purposely bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without judgment, which one develops through the practice of meditation and through other training.
Mindfulness derives from sati, a significant element of Buddhist traditions,and based on Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan meditation techniques.
Though definitions and techniques of mindfulness are wide-ranging, Buddhist traditions explain what constitutes mindfulness such as how past, present and future moments arise and cease as momentary sense impressions and mental phenomena.
Individuals who have contributed to the popularity of mindfulness in the modern Western context include Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926– ), Herbert Benson (1935– ), Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944– ), and Richard J. Davidson (1951– )
Clinical psychology and psychiatry since the 1970s have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness for helping people experiencing a variety of psychological conditions.Mindfulness practice has been employed to reduce depression, to reduce stress,anxiety,and in the treatment of drug addiction.
Programs based on mindfulness models have been adopted within schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans’ centers, and other environments, and mindfulness programs have been applied for additional outcomes such as for healthy aging, weight management, athletic performance, helping children with special needs, and as an intervention during the perinatal period.
Clinical studies have documented both physical- and mental-health benefits of mindfulness in different patient categories as well as in healthy adults and children.Research studies have shown a positive relationship between trait mindfulness (see below) and psychological health.
The practice of mindfulness appears to provide therapeutic benefits to people with psychiatric disorders, including moderate benefits to those with psychosis. Studies also indicate that rumination and worry contribute to a variety of mental disorders, and that mindfulness-based interventions can reduce both rumination and worry. Further, the practice of mindfulness may be a preventive strategy to halt the development of mental-health problems.
There is also evidence that suggest engaging in mindfulness meditation may influence physical health. For example, the psychological habit of repeatedly dwelling on stressful thoughts (i.e., rumination) appears to intensify the physiological effects of the stressor (as a result of the continual activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) with the potential to lead to physical health related clinical manifestations. Studies indicate that mindfulness meditation, which brings about reductions in rumination, may alter these biological clinical pathways. Further, research indicates that mindfulness may favourably influence the immune system as well as inflammation, which can consequently impact physical health, especially considering that inflammation has been linked to the development of several chronic health conditions.[Other studies support these findings.
Additionally, mindfulness appears to bring about lowered activity of the default mode network of the brain, and thereby contribute towards a lowered risk of developing conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
However, critics have questioned both the commercialization and the over-marketing of mindfulness for health benefits – as well as emphasizing the need for more randomized controlled studies, for more methodological details in reported studies and for the use of larger sample-sizes.
Practice
Mindfulness practice involves the process of developing the skill of bringing one’s attention to whatever is happening in the present moment.
Watching the breath, body-scan and other techniques
There are several exercises designed to develop mindfulness meditation, which are aided by guided meditations “to get the hang of it”.
One method is to sit in a straight-backed chair or sit cross-legged on the floor or a cushion, close one’s eyes and bring attention to either the sensations of breathing in the proximity of one’s nostrils or to the movements of the abdomen when breathing in and out.
In this meditation practice, one does not try to control one’s breathing, but attempts to simply be aware of one’s natural breathing process/rhythm.
When engaged in this practice, the mind will often run off to other thoughts and associations, and if this happens, one passively notices that the mind has wandered, and in an accepting, non-judgmental way, returns to focusing on breathing.
In body-scan meditation the attention is directed at various areas of the body and noting body sensations that happen in the present moment.
One could also focus on sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings and actions that happen in the present.In this regard, a famous exercise, introduced by Kabat-Zinn in his MBSR program,is the mindful tasting of a raisin,
in which a raisin is being tasted and eaten mindfully. By enabling reconnection with internal hunger and satiety cues, mindful eating has been suggested to be a means of maintaining healthy and conscious eating patterns.
Other approaches include practising yoga asanas while attending to movements and body sensations, and walking meditation.
Timings
Meditators are recommended to start with short periods of 10 minutes or so of meditation practice per day. As one practices regularly, it becomes easier to keep the attention focused on breathing.
In Buddhist context; moral precepts
In a Buddhist context the keeping of moral precepts is an essential preparatory stage for mindfulness or meditation.
Vipassana also includes contemplation and reflection on phenomena as dukkha, anatta and anicca, and reflections on causation and other Buddhist teachings.
Attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. It is a state of arousal. As William James (1890) wrote, “[Attention] is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.”Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in term of the amount of data the brain can process each second, for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data (at around one megabyte per second) can enter the bottleneck,leading to inattentional blindness.
Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the sensory cues and signals that generate attention, the effects of these sensory cues and signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, and the relationship between attention and other behavioral and cognitive processes, which may include working memory and psychological vigilance. A relatively new body of research, which expands upon earlier research within psychopathology, is investigating the diagnostic symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury and its effects on attention. Attention also varies across cultures.
The relationships between attention and consciousness are complex enough that they have warranted perennial philosophical exploration. Such exploration is both ancient and continually relevant, as it can have effects in fields ranging from mental health and the study of disorders of consciousness to artificial intelligence and its domains of research.
Contemporary definition and research
Prior to the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, attention was studied in the field of philosophy. Thus, many of the discoveries in the field of attention were made by philosophers. Psychologist John B. Watson calls Juan Luis Vives the father of modern psychology because, in his book De Anima et Vita (The Soul and Life), he was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation.
In his work on memory, Vives found that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained.
By the 1990s, psychologists began using positron emission tomography (PET) and later functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain while monitoring tasks involving attention. Considering this expensive equipment was generally only available in hospitals, psychologists sought cooperation with neurologists. Psychologist Michael Posner (then already renowned for his influential work on visual selective attention) and neurologist Marcus Raichle pioneered brain imaging studies of selective attention.
Their results soon sparked interest from the neuroscience community, which until then had simply been focused on monkey brains. With the development of these technological innovations, neuroscientists became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with these new brain imaging techniques. Although the older technique of electroencephalography (EEG) had long been used to study the brain activity underlying selective attention by cognitive psychophysiologists, the ability of the newer techniques to actually measure precisely localized activity inside the brain generated renewed interest by a wider community of researchers. Neuroscientific evidence has identified a frontoparietal brain network which appears to be responsible for many attentional processes.
Selective and visual
(Selective auditory attention)
In cognitive psychology there are at least two models which describe how visual attention operates. These models may be considered metaphors which are used to describe internal processes and to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable. Generally speaking, visual attention is thought to operate as a two-stage process. In the first stage, attention is distributed uniformly over the external visual scene and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second stage, attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e., it is focused), and processing is performed in a serial fashion.
The first of these models to appear in the literature is the spotlight model. The term “spotlight” was inspired by the work of William James, who described attention as having a focus, a margin, and a fringe.
The focus is an area that extracts information from the visual scene with a high-resolution, the geometric center of which being where visual attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the fringe of attention, which extracts information in a much more crude fashion (i.e., low-resolution). This fringe extends out to a specified area, and the cut-off is called the margin.
The second model is called the zoom-lens model and was first introduced in 1986.
This model inherits all properties of the spotlight model (i.e., the focus, the fringe, and the margin), but it has the added property of changing in size. This size-change mechanism was inspired by the zoom lens one might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of processing.
The zoom-lens of attention can be described in terms of an inverse trade-off between the size of focus and the efficiency of processing: because attention resources are assumed to be fixed, then it follows that the larger the focus is, the slower processing will be of that region of the visual scene, since this fixed resource will be distributed over a larger area. It is thought that the focus of attention can subtend a minimum of 1° of visual angle,
however the maximum size has not yet been determined.
A significant debate emerged in the last decade of the 20th century in which Treisman’s 1993 Feature Integration Theory (FIT) was compared to Duncan and Humphrey’s 1989 attentional engagement theory (AET).
FIT posits that “objects are retrieved from scenes by means of selective spatial attention that picks out objects’ features, forms feature maps, and integrates those features that are found at the same location into forming objects.” Duncan and Humphrey’s AET understanding of attention maintained that “there is an initial pre-attentive parallel phase of perceptual segmentation and analysis that encompasses all of the visual items present in a scene. At this phase, descriptions of the objects in a visual scene are generated into structural units; the outcome of this parallel phase is a multiple-spatial-scale structured representation. Selective attention intervenes after this stage to select information that will be entered into visual short-term memory.” The contrast of the two theories placed a new emphasis on the separation of visual attention tasks alone and those mediated by supplementary cognitive processes. As Rastophopoulos summarizes the debate: “Against Treisman’s FIT, which posits spatial attention as a necessary condition for detection of objects, Humphreys argues that visual elements are encoded and bound together in an initial parallel phase without focal attention, and that attention serves to select among the objects that result from this initial grouping.”
Neuropsychological model
In the twentieth century, the pioneering research of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria led to the three-part model of neuropsychology defining the working brain as being represented by three co-active processes listed as Attention, Memory, and Activation. Attention is identified as one of the three major co-active processes of the working brain. A.R. Luria published his well-known book The Working Brain in 1973 as a concise adjunct volume to his previous 1962 book Higher Cortical Functions in Man. In this volume, Luria summarized his three-part global theory of the working brain as being composed of three constantly co-active processes which he described as the;
(1) Attention system,
(2) Mnestic (memory) system, and
(3) Cortical activation system. The two books together are considered by Homskaya’s account as “among Luria’s major works in neuropsychology, most fully reflecting all the aspects (theoretical, clinical, experimental) of this new discipline.”
The product of the combined research of Vygotsky and Luria have determined a large part of the contemporary understanding and definition of attention as it is understood at the start of the 21st-century.
Multitasking and divided
(Human multitasking and Distracted driving)
Multitasking can be defined as the attempt to perform two or more tasks simultaneously; however, research shows that when multitasking, people make more mistakes or perform their tasks more slowly. Attention must be divided among all of the component tasks to perform them. In divided attention, individuals attend or give attention to multiple sources of information at once or perform more than one task at the same time.
Older research involved looking at the limits of people performing simultaneous tasks like reading stories, while listening and writing something else, or listening to two separate messages through different ears (i.e., dichotic listening). Generally, classical research into attention investigated the ability of people to learn new information when there were multiple tasks to be performed, or to probe the limits of our perception (c.f. Donald Broadbent). There is also older literature on people’s performance on multiple tasks performed simultaneously, such as driving a car while tuning a radio or driving while being on the phone.
The vast majority of current research on human multitasking is based on performance of doing two tasks simultaneously, usually that involves driving while performing another task, such as texting, eating, or even speaking to passengers in the vehicle, or with a friend over a cellphone. This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process: driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their surroundings when engaged in the previously discussed tasks.
There has been little difference found between speaking on a hands-free cell phone or a hand-held cell phone,which suggests that it is the strain of attentional system that causes problems, rather than what the driver is doing with his or her hands. While speaking with a passenger is as cognitively demanding as speaking with a friend over the phone,passengers are able to change the conversation based upon the needs of the driver. For example, if traffic intensifies, a passenger may stop talking to allow the driver to navigate the increasingly difficult roadway; a conversation partner over a phone would not be aware of the change in environment.
There have been multiple theories regarding divided attention. One, conceived by Kahneman,explains that there is a single pool of attentional resources that can be freely divided among multiple tasks. This model seems oversimplified, however, due to the different modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, verbal) that are perceived. When the two simultaneous tasks use the same modality, such as listening to a radio station and writing a paper, it is much more difficult to concentrate on both because the tasks are likely to interfere with each other. The specific modality model was theorized by Navon and Gopher in 1979. However, more recent research using well controlled dual-task paradigms points at the importance of tasks. Specifically, in spatial visual-auditory as well as in spatial visual-tactile tasks interference of the two tasks is observed. In contrast, when one of the tasks involves object detection, no interference is observed.
Thus, the multi-modal advantage in attentional resources is task dependent.
As an alternative, resource theory has been proposed as a more accurate metaphor for explaining divided attention on complex tasks. Resource theory states that as each complex task is automatized, performing that task requires less of the individual’s limited-capacity attentional resources.
Other variables play a part in our ability to pay attention to and concentrate on many tasks at once. These include, but are not limited to, anxiety, arousal, task difficulty, and skills.
Alternative topics and discussions –
Overt and covert orienting
Attention may be differentiated into “overt” versus “covert” orienting.
Overt orienting is the act of selectively attending to an item or location over others by moving the eyes to point in that direction.
Overt orienting can be directly observed in the form of eye movements. Although overt eye movements are quite common, there is a distinction that can be made between two types of eye movements; reflexive and controlled. Reflexive movements are commanded by the superior colliculus of the midbrain. These movements are fast and are activated by the sudden appearance of stimuli. In contrast, controlled eye movements are commanded by areas in the frontal lobe. These movements are slow and voluntary.
Covert orienting is the act of mentally shifting one’s focus without moving one’s eyes. Simply, it is changes in attention that are not attributable to overt eye movements. Covert orienting has the potential to affect the output of perceptual processes by governing attention to particular items or locations (for example, the activity of a V4 neuron whose receptive field lies on an attended stimuli will be enhanced by covert attention) but does not influence the information that is processed by the senses. Researchers often use “filtering” tasks to study the role of covert attention of selecting information. These tasks often require participants to observe a number of stimuli, but attend to only one.
The current view is that visual covert attention is a mechanism for quickly scanning the field of view for interesting locations. This shift in covert attention is linked to eye movement circuitry that sets up a slower saccade to that location.
There are studies that suggest the mechanisms of overt and covert orienting may not be controlled separately and independently as previously believed. Central mechanisms that may control covert orienting, such as the parietal lobe, also receive input from subcortical centres involved in overt orienting.
In support of this, general theories of attention actively assume bottom-up (reflexive) processes and top-down (voluntary) processes converge on a common neural architecture, in that they control both covert and overt attentional systems.
For example, if individuals attend to the right hand corner field of view, movement of the eyes in that direction may have to be actively suppressed.
Exogenous and endogenous orienting
Orienting attention is vital and can be controlled through external (exogenous) or internal (endogenous) processes. However, comparing these two processes is challenging because external signals do not operate completely exogenously, but will only summon attention and eye movements if they are important to the subject.
Exogenous (from Greek exo, meaning “outside”, and genein, meaning “to produce”) orienting is frequently described as being under control of a stimulus.
Exogenous orienting is considered to be reflexive and automatic and is caused by a sudden change in the periphery. This often results in a reflexive saccade. Since exogenous cues are typically presented in the periphery, they are referred to as peripheral cues. Exogenous orienting can even be observed when individuals are aware that the cue will not relay reliable, accurate information about where a target is going to occur. This means that the mere presence of an exogenous cue will affect the response to other stimuli that are subsequently presented in the cue’s previous location.
Several studies have investigated the influence of valid and invalid cues.
They concluded that valid peripheral cues benefit performance, for instance when the peripheral cues are brief flashes at the relevant location before to the onset of a visual stimulus. Posner and Cohen (1984) noted a reversal of this benefit takes place when the interval between the onset of the cue and the onset of the target is longer than about 300 ms.
The phenomenon of valid cues producing longer reaction times than invalid cues is called inhibition of return.
Endogenous (from Greek endo, meaning “within” or “internally”) orienting is the intentional allocation of attentional resources to a predetermined location or space. Simply stated, endogenous orienting occurs when attention is oriented according to an observer’s goals or desires, allowing the focus of attention to be manipulated by the demands of a task. In order to have an effect, endogenous cues must be processed by the observer and acted upon purposefully. These cues are frequently referred to as central cues. This is because they are typically presented at the center of a display, where an observer’s eyes are likely to be fixated. Central cues, such as an arrow or digit presented at fixation, tell observers to attend to a specific location.
When examining differences between exogenous and endogenous orienting, some researchers suggest that there are four differences between the two kinds of cues:
exogenous orienting is less affected by cognitive load than endogenous orienting;
observers are able to ignore endogenous cues but not exogenous cues;
exogenous cues have bigger effects than endogenous cues; and
expectancies about cue validity and predictive value affects endogenous orienting more than exogenous orienting.
There exist both overlaps and differences in the areas of the brain that are responsible for endogenous and exogenous orientating.
Another approach to this discussion has been covered under the topic heading of “bottom-up” versus “top-down” orientations to attention. Researchers of this school have described two different aspects of how the mind focuses attention to items present in the environment. The first aspect is called bottom-up processing, also known as stimulus-driven attention or exogenous attention. These describe attentional processing which is driven by the properties of the objects themselves. Some processes, such as motion or a sudden loud noise, can attract our attention in a pre-conscious, or non-volitional way. We attend to them whether we want to or not.
These aspects of attention are thought to involve parietal and temporal cortices, as well as the brainstem.
More recent experimental evidence support the idea that the primary visual cortex creates a bottom-up saliency map,which is received by the superior colliculus in the midbrain area to guide attention or gaze shifts.
The second aspect is called top-down processing, also known as goal-driven, endogenous attention, attentional control or executive attention. This aspect of our attentional orienting is under the control of the person who is attending. It is mediated primarily by the frontal cortex and basal ganglia as one of the executive functions.
Research has shown that it is related to other aspects of the executive functions, such as working memory,and conflict resolution and inhibition.
Influence of processing load
A “hugely influential” theory regarding selective attention is the perceptual load theory, which states that there are two mechanisms that affect attention: cognitive and perceptual. The perceptual considers the subject’s ability to perceive or ignore stimuli, both task-related and non task-related. Studies show that if there are many stimuli present (especially if they are task-related), it is much easier to ignore the non-task related stimuli, but if there are few stimuli the mind will perceive the irrelevant stimuli as well as the relevant. The cognitive refers to the actual processing of the stimuli. Studies regarding this showed that the ability to process stimuli decreased with age, meaning that younger people were able to perceive more stimuli and fully process them, but were likely to process both relevant and irrelevant information, while older people could process fewer stimuli, but usually processed only relevant information.
Some people can process multiple stimuli, e.g. trained Morse code operators have been able to copy 100% of a message while carrying on a meaningful conversation. This relies on the reflexive response due to “overlearning” the skill of morse code reception/detection/transcription so that it is an autonomous function requiring no specific attention to perform. This overtraining of the brain comes as the “practice of a skill [surpasses] 100% accuracy,” allowing the activity to become autonomic, while your mind has room to process other actions simultaneously.
Clinical model
Attention is best described as the sustained focus of cognitive resources on information while filtering or ignoring extraneous information. Attention is a very basic function that often is a precursor to all other neurological/cognitive functions. As is frequently the case, clinical models of attention differ from investigation models. One of the most used models for the evaluation of attention in patients with very different neurologic pathologies is the model of Sohlberg and Mateer.
This hierarchic model is based in the recovering of attention processes of brain damage patients after coma. Five different kinds of activities of growing difficulty are described in the model; connecting with the activities those patients could do as their recovering process advanced.
Focused attention: The ability to respond discretely to specific visual, auditory or tactile stimuli.
Sustained attention (vigilance and concentration): The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral response during continuous and repetitive activity.
Selective attention: The ability to maintain a behavioral or cognitive set in the face of distracting or competing stimuli. Therefore, it incorporates the notion of “freedom from distractibility.”
Alternating attention: The ability of mental flexibility that allows individuals to shift their focus of attention and move between tasks having different cognitive requirements.
Divided attention: This refers to the ability to respond simultaneously to multiple tasks or multiple task demands.
This model has been shown to be very useful in evaluating attention in very different pathologies, correlates strongly with daily difficulties and is especially helpful in designing stimulation programs such as attention process training, a rehabilitation program for neurological patients of the same authors.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness has been conceptualized as a clinical model of attention.
Mindfulness practices are clinical interventions that emphasize training attention functions.
Neural correlates
Most experiments show that one neural correlate of attention is enhanced firing. If a neuron has a certain response to a stimulus when the animal is not attending to the stimulus, then when the animal does attend to the stimulus, the neuron’s response will be enhanced even if the physical characteristics of the stimulus remain the same.
In a 2007 review, Knudsen describes a more general model which identifies four core processes of attention, with working memory at the center:
Working memory temporarily stores information for detailed analysis.
Competitive selection is the process that determines which information gains access to working memory.
Through top-down sensitivity control, higher cognitive processes can regulate signal intensity in information channels that compete for access to working memory, and thus give them an advantage in the process of competitive selection. Through top-down sensitivity control, the momentary content of working memory can influence the selection of new information, and thus mediate voluntary control of attention in a recurrent loop (endogenous attention).
Bottom-up saliency filters automatically enhance the response to infrequent stimuli, or stimuli of instinctive or learned biological relevance (exogenous attention).
Neurally, at different hierarchical levels spatial maps can enhance or inhibit activity in sensory areas, and induce orienting behaviors like eye movement.
At the top of the hierarchy, the frontal eye fields (FEF) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex contain a retinocentric spatial map. Microstimulation in the FEF induces monkeys to make a saccade to the relevant location. Stimulation at levels too low to induce a saccade will nonetheless enhance cortical responses to stimuli located in the relevant area.
At the next lower level, a variety of spatial maps are found in the parietal cortex. In particular, the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) contains a saliency map and is interconnected both with the FEF and with sensory areas.
Exogenous attentional guidance in humans and monkeys is by a bottom-up saliency map in the primary visual cortex.[54][3] In lower vertebrates, this saliency map is more likely in the superior colliculus (optic tectum).
Certain automatic responses that influence attention, like orienting to a highly salient stimulus, are mediated subcortically by the superior colliculi.
At the neural network level, it is thought that processes like lateral inhibition mediate the process of competitive selection.
In many cases attention produces changes in the EEG. Many animals, including humans, produce gamma waves (40–60 Hz) when focusing attention on a particular object or activity.
Another commonly used model for the attention system has been put forth by researchers such as Michael Posner. He divides attention into three functional components: alerting, orienting, and executive attention that can also interact and influence each other.
Alerting is the process involved in becoming and staying attentive toward the surroundings. It appears to exist in the frontal and parietal lobes of the right hemisphere, and is modulated by norepinephrine.
Orienting is the directing of attention to a specific stimulus.
Executive attention is used when there is a conflict between multiple attention cues. It is essentially the same as the central executive in Baddeley’s model of working memory. The Eriksen flanker task has shown that the executive control of attention may take place in the anterior cingulate cortex.
Cultural variation
Children appear to develop patterns of attention related to the cultural practices of their families, communities, and the institutions in which they participate.
In 1955, Jules Henry suggested that there are societal differences in sensitivity to signals from many ongoing sources that call for the awareness of several levels of attention simultaneously. He tied his speculation to ethnographic observations of communities in which children are involved in a complex social community with multiple relationships.
Many Indigenous children in the Americas predominantly learn by observing and pitching in. There are several studies to support that the use of keen attention towards learning is much more common in Indigenous Communities of North and Central America than in a middle-class European-American setting.
This is a direct result of the Learning by Observing and Pitching In model.
Keen attention is both a requirement and result of learning by observing and pitching-in. Incorporating the children in the community gives them the opportunity to keenly observe and contribute to activities that were not directed towards them. It can be seen from different Indigenous communities and cultures, such as the Mayans of San Pedro, that children can simultaneously attend to multiple events.
Most Maya children have learned to pay attention to several events at once in order to make useful observations.
One example is simultaneous attention which involves uninterrupted attention to several activities occurring at the same time. Another cultural practice that may relate to simultaneous attention strategies is coordination within a group. San Pedro toddlers and caregivers frequently coordinated their activities with other members of a group in multiway engagements rather than in a dyadic fashion.
Research concludes that children with close ties to Indigenous American roots have a high tendency to be especially keen observers.
This learning by observing and pitching-in model requires active levels of attention management. The child is present while caretakers engage in daily activities and responsibilities such as: weaving, farming, and other skills necessary for survival. Being present allows the child to focus their attention on the actions being performed by their parents, elders, and/or older siblings.
In order to learn in this way, keen attention and focus is required. Eventually the child is expected to be able to perform these skills themselves.
Modelling
In the domain of computer vision, efforts have been made to model the mechanism of human attention, especially the bottom-up intentional mechanism and its semantic significance in classification of video contents. Both spatial attention and temporal attention have been incorporated in such classification efforts.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of models to mimic the bottom-up salience mechanism in static images. One way is based on the spatial contrast analysis. For example, a center–surround mechanism has been used to define salience across scales, inspired by the putative neural mechanism.
It has also been hypothesized that some visual inputs are intrinsically salient in certain background contexts and that these are actually task-independent. This model has established itself as the exemplar for salience detection and consistently used for comparison in the literature;the other way is based on the frequency domain analysis. This method was first proposed by Hou et al.,
this method was called SR, and then PQFT method was also introduced. Both SR and PQFT only use the phase information.
In 2012, the HFT method was introduced, and both the amplitude and the phase information are made use of.
Hemispatial neglect
Hemispatial neglect, also called unilateral neglect, often occurs when people have damage to their right hemisphere.
This damage often leads to a tendency to ignore the left side of one’s body or even the left side of an object that can be seen. Damage to the left side of the brain (the left hemisphere) rarely yields significant neglect of the right side of the body or object in the person’s local environments.
The effects of spatial neglect, however, may vary and differ depending on what area of the brain was damaged. Damage to different neural substrates can result in different types of neglect. Attention disorders (lateralized and nonlaterized) may also contribute to the symptoms and effects.
Much research has asserted that damage to gray matter within the brain results in spatial neglect.
New technology has yielded more information, such that there is a large, distributed network of frontal, parietal, temporal, and subcortical brain areas that have been tied to neglect.
This network can be related to other research as well; the dorsal attention network is tied to spatial orienting.
The effect of damage to this network may result in patients neglecting their left side when distracted about their right side or an object on their right side.
Attention in social contexts
Social attention is one special form of attention that involves the allocation of limited processing resources in a social context. Previous studies on social attention often regard how attention is directed toward socially relevant stimuli such as faces and gaze directions of other individuals.
In contrast to attending-to-others, a different line of researches has shown that self-related information such as own face and name automatically captures attention and is preferentially processed comparing to other-related information.
These contrasting effects between attending-to-others and attending-to-self prompt a synthetic view in a recent Opinion article proposing that social attention operates at two polarizing states: In one extreme, individual tends to attend to the self and prioritize self-related information over others’, and, in the other extreme, attention is allocated to other individuals to infer their intentions and desires. Attending-to-self and attending-to-others mark the two ends of an otherwise continuum spectrum of social attention. For a given behavioral context, the mechanisms underlying these two polarities might interact and compete with each other in order to determine a saliency map of social attention that guides our behaviors.
An imbalanced competition between these two behavioral and cognitive processes will cause cognitive disorders and neurological symptoms such as autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome.
Distracting factors
According to Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, there are two types of distracting factors affecting focus – sensory and emotional. A sensory distracting factor would be, for example, while a person is reading this article, they are neglecting the white field surrounding the text. An emotional distracting factor would be when someone is focused on answering an email, and somebody shouts their name. It would be almost impossible to neglect the voice speaking it. Attention is immediately directed toward the source.
Consciousness
Consciousness at its simplest is “awareness or sentience of internal or external existence”.
Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”.
Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists.
Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. Sometimes it is synonymous with ‘the mind’, other times just an aspect of mind. In the past it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.
Today, with modern research into the brain it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. It may be ‘awareness’, or ‘awareness of awareness’, or self-awareness.
There might be different levels or orders of consciousness,
or different kinds of consciousness, or just one kind with different features.
Other questions include whether only humans are conscious or all animals or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises doubts whether the right questions are being asked.
Examples of the range of descriptions, definitions or explanations are: simple wakefulness, one’s sense of selfhood or soul explored by “looking within”; being a metaphorical “stream” of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain; having phanera or qualia and subjectivity; being the ‘something that it is like’ to ‘have’ or ‘be’ it; being the “inner theatre” or the executive control system of the mind.
Inter-disciplinary perspectives
Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger picture of the world. These issues remain central to both continental and analytic philosophy, in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, respectively. Some basic questions include: whether consciousness is the same kind of thing as matter; whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious; how consciousness relates to language; how consciousness as Being relates to the world of experience; the role of the self in experience; whether individual thought is possible at all; and whether the concept is fundamentally coherent.
Recently, consciousness has also become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness—that is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., “tell me if you notice anything when I do this”). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.
In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.
The degree of consciousness is measured by standardized behavior observation scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale.
Etymology
John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.
Locke defined consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind”.
His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1755). “Consciousness” (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, as “the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do”.
The earliest English language uses of “conscious” and “consciousness” date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word “conscious” originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- “together” and scio “to know”), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our word—it meant “knowing with”, in other words, “having joint or common knowledge with another”.
There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as “knowing with oneself”, or in other words “sharing knowledge with oneself about something”. This phrase had the figurative meaning of “knowing that one knows”, as the modern English word “conscious” does. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word “conscious” retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote: “Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another.”
The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as “conscious to oneself” or “conscious unto oneself”. For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of “being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness”.
Locke’s definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place.
A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, “conscientia” means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero.
Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.
René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.
Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use “conscience”. In Search after Truth (Regulæ ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he says “conscience or internal testimony” (conscientiâ, vel interno testimonio).
Dictionary definitions
The dictionary meanings of the word consciousness extend through several centuries and several associated related meanings. These have ranged from formal definitions to definitions attempting to capture the less easily captured and more debated meanings and usage of the word.
One formal definition indicating the range of these related meanings is given in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary stating that consciousness is:
1.awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact: intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self.
• inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
• concerned awareness: INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun.
2.the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought: mind in the broadest possible sense: something in nature that is distinguished from the physical.
2.the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines consciousness as “the state of understanding and realizing something.” The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as “The state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings.”, “A person’s awareness or perception of something.” and “The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.”
Most definitions include awareness, but some include a more general state of being.
Medical aspects
The medical approach to consciousness is practically oriented. It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs. In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments. Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a “level” ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.
Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially neurologists and anesthesiologists. Patients may suffer from disorders of consciousness or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure. Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering general anesthesia, or inducing medical coma.
Also, bioethicists may be concerned with the ethical implications of consciousness in medical cases of patients such as the Karen Ann Quinlan case, while neuroscientists may study patients with impaired consciousness in hopes of gaining information about how the brain works.
Assessment
In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as neuropsychological assessment.
There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise. The simple procedure begins by asking whether the patient is able to move and react to physical stimuli. If so, the next question is whether the patient can respond in a meaningful way to questions and commands. If so, the patient is asked for name, current location, and current day and time. A patient who can answer all of these questions is said to be “alert and oriented times four” (sometimes denoted “A&Ox4” on a medical chart), and is usually considered fully conscious.
The more complex procedure is known as a neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a neurologist in a hospital setting. A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated use of language. The outcome may be summarized using the Glasgow Coma Scale, which yields a number in the range 3–15, with a score of 3 to 8 indicating coma, and 15 indicating full consciousness. The Glasgow Coma Scale has three subscales, measuring the best motor response (ranging from “no motor response” to “obeys commands”), the best eye response (ranging from “no eye opening” to “eyes opening spontaneously”) and the best verbal response (ranging from “no verbal response” to “fully oriented”). There is also a simpler pediatric version of the scale, for children too young to be able to use language.
In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.
Disorders of consciousness
Medical conditions that inhibit consciousness are considered disorders of consciousness.
This category generally includes minimally conscious state and persistent vegetative state, but sometimes also includes the less severe locked-in syndrome and more severe chronic coma.
Differential diagnosis of these disorders is an active area of biomedical research.
Finally, brain death results in an irreversible disruption of consciousness.
While other conditions may cause a moderate deterioration (e.g., dementia and delirium) or transient interruption (e.g., grand mal and petit mal seizures) of consciousness, they are not included in this category.
Disorder & Description
1.Locked-in syndrome,= The patient has awareness, sleep-wake cycles, and meaningful behavior (viz., eye-movement), but is isolated due to quadriplegia and pseudobulbar palsy.
2.Minimally conscious state= The patient has intermittent periods of awareness and wakefulness and displays some meaningful behavior.
3.Persistent vegetative state= The patient has sleep-wake cycles, but lacks awareness and only displays reflexive and non-purposeful behavior.
4.Chronic coma= The patient lacks awareness and sleep-wake cycles and only displays reflexive behavior.
5.Brain death =The patient lacks awareness, sleep-wake cycles, and brain-mediated reflexive behavior.
Anosognosia
One of the most striking disorders of consciousness goes by the name anosognosia, a Greek-derived term meaning ‘unawareness of disease’. This is a condition in which patients are disabled in some way, most commonly as a result of a stroke, but either misunderstand the nature of the problem or deny that there is anything wrong with them.
The most frequently occurring form is seen in people who have experienced a stroke damaging the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere of the brain, giving rise to a syndrome known as hemispatial neglect, characterized by an inability to direct action or attention toward objects located to the left with respect to their bodies. Patients with hemispatial neglect are often paralyzed on the right side of the body, but sometimes deny being unable to move. When questioned about the obvious problem, the patient may avoid giving a direct answer, or may give an explanation that doesn’t make sense. Patients with hemispatial neglect may also fail to recognize paralyzed parts of their bodies: one frequently mentioned case is of a man who repeatedly tried to throw his own paralyzed right leg out of the bed he was lying in, and when asked what he was doing, complained that somebody had put a dead leg into the bed with him. An even more striking type of anosognosia is Anton–Babinski syndrome, a rarely occurring condition in which patients become blind but claim to be able to see normally, and persist in this claim in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Spiritual approaches
To most philosophers, the word “consciousness” connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world. The mystical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between three types of consciousness: ‘Simple Consciousness’, awareness of the body, possessed by many animals; ‘Self Consciousness’, awareness of being aware, possessed only by humans; and ‘Cosmic Consciousness’, awareness of the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are enlightened.
Many more examples could be given, such as the various levels of spiritual consciousness presented by Prem Saran Satsangi and Stuart Hameroff.
The most thorough account of the spiritual approach may be Ken Wilber’s book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.
Working memory
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.
History
The term “working memory” was coined by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, and was used in the 1960s in the context of theories that likened the mind to a computer. In 1968, Atkinson and Shiffrin used the term to describe their “short-term store”. What we now call working memory was formerly referred to variously as a “short-term store” or short-term memory, primary memory, immediate memory, operant memory, and provisional memory. Short-term memory is the ability to remember information over a brief period (in the order of seconds). Most theorists today use the concept of working memory to replace or include the older concept of short-term memory, marking a stronger emphasis on the notion of manipulating information rather than mere maintenance.
The earliest mention of experiments on the neural basis of working memory can be traced back to more than 100 years ago, when Hitzig and Ferrier described ablation experiments of the prefrontal cortex (PFC); they concluded that the frontal cortex was important for cognitive rather than sensory processes.
In 1935 and 1936, Carlyle Jacobsen and colleagues were the first to show the deleterious effect of prefrontal ablation on delayed response.
Theories
Numerous models have been proposed for how working memory functions, both anatomically and cognitively. Of those, the two that have been most influential are summarized below.
The multicomponent model
(Baddeley’s model of working memory)
In 1974, Baddeley and Hitch introduced the multicomponent model of working memory. The theory proposed a model containing three components: the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuospatial sketchpad with the central executive functioning as a control center of sorts, directing info between the phonological and visuospatial components.
The central executive is responsible for, among other things, directing attention to relevant information, suppressing irrelevant information and inappropriate actions, and coordinating cognitive processes when more than one task is simultaneously performed. A “central executive” is responsible for supervising the integration of information and for coordinating “slave systems” that are responsible for the short-term maintenance of information. One slave system, the phonological loop (PL), stores phonological information (that is, the sound of language) and prevents its decay by continuously refreshing it in a rehearsal loop. It can, for example, maintain a seven-digit telephone number for as long as one repeats the number to oneself again and again.
The other slave system, the visuospatial sketchpad, stores visual and spatial information. It can be used, for example, for constructing and manipulating visual images and for representing mental maps. The sketchpad can be further broken down into a visual subsystem (dealing with such phenomena as shape, colour, and texture), and a spatial subsystem (dealing with location).
In 2000, Baddeley extended the model by adding a fourth component, the episodic buffer, which holds representations that integrate phonological, visual, and spatial information, and possibly information not covered by the slave systems (e.g., semantic information, musical information). The episodic buffer is also the link between working memory and long-term memory.
The component is episodic because it is assumed to bind information into a unitary episodic representation. The episodic buffer resembles Tulving’s concept of episodic memory, but it differs in that the episodic buffer is a temporary store.
Working memory as part of long-term memory
Anders Ericsson and Walter Kintsch have introduced the notion of “long-term working memory”, which they define as a set of “retrieval structures” in long-term memory that enable seamless access to the information relevant for everyday tasks. In this way, parts of long-term memory effectively function as working memory. In a similar vein, Cowan does not regard working memory as a separate system from long-term memory. Representations in working memory are a subset of representations in long-term memory. Working memory is organized into two embedded levels. The first consists of long-term memory representations that are activated. There can be many of these—there is theoretically no limit to the activation of representations in long-term memory. The second level is called the focus of attention. The focus is regarded as having a limited capacity and holds up to four of the activated representations.
Oberauer has extended Cowan’s model by adding a third component, a more narrow focus of attention that holds only one chunk at a time. The one-element focus is embedded in the four-element focus and serves to select a single chunk for processing. For example, four digits can be held in mind at the same time in Cowan’s “focus of attention”. When the individual wishes to perform a process on each of these digits—for example, adding the number two to each digit—separate processing is required for each digit since most individuals cannot perform several mathematical processes in parallel.Oberauer’s attentional component selects one of the digits for processing and then shifts the attentional focus to the next digit, continuing until all digits have been processed.
Capacity
Working memory is widely acknowledged as having limited capacity. An early quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the “magical number seven” suggested by Miller in 1956.
He claimed that the information-processing capacity of young adults is around seven elements, which he called “chunks”, regardless of whether the elements are digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed this number depends on the category of chunks used (e.g., span may be around seven for digits, six for letters, and five for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long than short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) depends on the phonological complexity of the content (i.e., the number of phonemes, the number of syllables),and on the lexical status of the contents (whether the contents are words known to the person or not). Several other factors affect a person’s measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and fewer in children and old adults).
Whereas most adults can repeat about seven digits in correct order, some individuals have shown impressive enlargements of their digit span—up to 80 digits. This feat is possible by extensive training on an encoding strategy by which the digits in a list are grouped (usually in groups of three to five) and these groups are encoded as a single unit (a chunk). For this to succeed, participants must be able to recognize the groups as some known string of digits. One person studied by Ericsson and his colleagues, for example, used an extensive knowledge of racing times from the history of sports in the process of coding chunks: several such chunks could then be combined into a higher-order chunk, forming a hierarchy of chunks. In this way, only some chunks at the highest level of the hierarchy must be retained in working memory, and for retrieval the chunks are unpacked. That is, the chunks in working memory act as retrieval cues that point to the digits they contain. Practicing memory skills such as these does not expand working memory capacity proper: it is the capacity to transfer (and retrieve) information from long-term memory that is improved, according to Ericsson and Kintsch (1995; see also Gobet & Simon, 2000).
Measures and correlates
Working memory capacity can be tested by a variety of tasks. A commonly used measure is a dual-task paradigm, combining a memory span measure with a concurrent processing task, sometimes referred to as “complex span”. Daneman and Carpenter invented the first version of this kind of task, the “reading span”, in 1980.
Subjects read a number of sentences (usually between two and six) and tried to remember the last word of each sentence. At the end of the list of sentences, they repeated back the words in their correct order. Other tasks that do not have this dual-task nature have also been shown to be good measures of working memory capacity.
Whereas Daneman and Carpenter believed that the combination of “storage” (maintenance) and processing is needed to measure working memory capacity, we know now that the capacity of working memory can be measured with short-term memory tasks that have no additional processing component.
Conversely, working memory capacity can also be measured with certain processing tasks that don’t involve maintenance of information.The question of what features a task must have to qualify as a good measure of working memory capacity is a topic of ongoing research.
Measures of working-memory capacity are strongly related to performance in other complex cognitive tasks, such as reading comprehension, problem solving, and with measures of intelligence quotient.
Some researchers have argued that working-memory capacity reflects the efficiency of executive functions, most notably the ability to maintain multiple task-relevant representations in the face of distracting irrelevant information; and that such tasks seem to reflect individual differences in the ability to focus and maintain attention, particularly when other events are serving to capture attention. Both working memory and executive functions rely strongly, though not exclusively, on frontal brain areas.
Other researchers have argued that the capacity of working memory is better characterized as the ability to mentally form relations between elements, or to grasp relations in given information. This idea has been advanced, among others, by Graeme Halford, who illustrated it by our limited ability to understand statistical interactions between variables.
These authors asked people to compare written statements about the relations between several variables to graphs illustrating the same or a different relation, as in the following sentence: “If the cake is from France, then it has more sugar if it is made with chocolate than if it is made with cream, but if the cake is from Italy, then it has more sugar if it is made with cream than if it is made of chocolate”. This statement describes a relation between three variables (country, ingredient, and amount of sugar), which is the maximum most individuals can understand. The capacity limit apparent here is obviously not a memory limit (all relevant information can be seen continuously) but a limit to how many relationships are discerned simultaneously.
Experimental studies of working-memory capacity
There are several hypotheses about the nature of the capacity limit. One is that a limited pool of cognitive resources is needed to keep representations active and thereby available for processing, and for carrying out processes.
Another hypothesis is that memory traces in working memory decay within a few seconds, unless refreshed through rehearsal, and because the speed of rehearsal is limited, we can maintain only a limited amount of information.
Yet another idea is that representations held in working memory interfere with each other.
Decay theories
The assumption that the contents of short-term or working memory decay over time, unless decay is prevented by rehearsal, goes back to the early days of experimental research on short-term memory.
It is also an important assumption in the multi-component theory of working memory.
The most elaborate decay-based theory of working memory to date is the “time-based resource sharing model”. This theory assumes that representations in working memory decay unless they are refreshed. Refreshing them requires an attentional mechanism that is also needed for any concurrent processing task. When there are small time intervals in which the processing task does not require attention, this time can be used to refresh memory traces. The theory therefore predicts that the amount of forgetting depends on the temporal density of attentional demands of the processing task—this density is called “cognitive load”. The cognitive load depends on two variables, the rate at which the processing task requires individual steps to be carried out, and the duration of each step. For example, if the processing task consists of adding digits, then having to add another digit every half second places a higher cognitive load on the system than having to add another digit every two seconds. In a series of experiments, Barrouillet and colleagues have shown that memory for lists of letters depends neither on the number of processing steps nor the total time of processing but on cognitive load.
Resource theories
Resource theories assume that the capacity of working memory is a limited resource that must be shared between all representations that need to be maintained in working memory simultaneously. Some resource theorists also assume that maintenance and concurrent processing share the same resource;this can explain why maintenance is typically impaired by a concurrent processing demand. Resource theories have been very successful in explaining data from tests of working memory for simple visual features, such as colors or orientations of bars. An ongoing debate is whether the resource is a continuous quantity that can be subdivided among any number of items in working memory, or whether it consists of a small number of discrete “slots”, each of which can be assigned to one memory item, so that only a limited number of about 3 items can be maintained in working memory at all.
Interference theories
Several forms of interference have been discussed by theorists. One of the oldest ideas is that new items simply replace older ones in working memory. Another form of interference is retrieval competition. For example, when the task is to remember a list of 7 words in their order, we need to start recall with the first word. While trying to retrieve the first word, the second word, which is represented in proximity, is accidentally retrieved as well, and the two compete for being recalled. Errors in serial recall tasks are often confusions of neighboring items on a memory list (so-called transpositions), showing that retrieval competition plays a role in limiting our ability to recall lists in order, and probably also in other working memory tasks. A third form of interference is the distortion of representations by superposition: When multiple representations are added on top of each other, each of them is blurred by the presence of all the others.
A fourth form of interference assumed by some authors is feature overwriting.
The idea is that each word, digit, or other item in working memory is represented as a bundle of features, and when two items share some features, one of them steals the features from the other. The more items are held in working memory, and the more their features overlap, the more each of them will be degraded by the loss of some features.
Limitations
None of these hypotheses can explain the experimental data entirely. The resource hypothesis, for example, was meant to explain the trade-off between maintenance and processing: The more information must be maintained in working memory, the slower and more error prone concurrent processes become, and with a higher demand on concurrent processing memory suffers. This trade-off has been investigated by tasks like the reading-span task described above. It has been found that the amount of trade-off depends on the similarity of the information to be remembered and the information to be processed. For example, remembering numbers while processing spatial information, or remembering spatial information while processing numbers, impair each other much less than when material of the same kind must be remembered and processed.
Also, remembering words and processing digits, or remembering digits and processing words, is easier than remembering and processing materials of the same category.
These findings are also difficult to explain for the decay hypothesis, because decay of memory representations should depend only on how long the processing task delays rehearsal or recall, not on the content of the processing task. A further problem for the decay hypothesis comes from experiments in which the recall of a list of letters was delayed, either by instructing participants to recall at a slower pace, or by instructing them to say an irrelevant word once or three times in between recall of each letter. Delaying recall had virtually no effect on recall accuracy. The interference theory seems to fare best with explaining why the similarity between memory contents and the contents of concurrent processing tasks affects how much they impair each other. More similar materials are more likely to be confused, leading to retrieval competition.
Development
The capacity of working memory increases gradually over childhood and declines gradually in old age.
Childhood
(Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development)
Measures of performance on tests of working memory increase continuously between early childhood and adolescence, while the structure of correlations between different tests remains largely constant. Starting with work in the Neo-Piagetian tradition, theorists have argued that the growth of working-memory capacity is a major driving force of cognitive development. This hypothesis has received substantial empirical support from studies showing that the capacity of working memory is a strong predictor of cognitive abilities in childhood.
Particularly strong evidence for a role of working memory for development comes from a longitudinal study showing that working-memory capacity at one age predicts reasoning ability at a later age.
Studies in the Neo-Piagetian tradition have added to this picture by analyzing the complexity of cognitive tasks in terms of the number of items or relations that have to be considered simultaneously for a solution. Across a broad range of tasks, children manage task versions of the same level of complexity at about the same age, consistent with the view that working memory capacity limits the complexity they can handle at a given age.
Although neuroscience studies support the notion that children rely on prefrontal cortex for performing various working memory tasks, an fMRI meta-analysis on children compared to adults performing the n back task revealed lack of consistent prefrontal cortex activation in children, while posterior regions including the insular cortex and cerebellum remain intact.
Aging
Working memory is among the cognitive functions most sensitive to decline in old age.
Several explanations have been offered for this decline in psychology. One is the processing speed theory of cognitive aging by Tim Salthouse.
Drawing on the finding of general slowing of cognitive processes as people grow older, Salthouse argues that slower processing leaves more time for working-memory contents to decay, thus reducing effective capacity. However, the decline of working-memory capacity cannot be entirely attributed to slowing because capacity declines more in old age than speed.Another proposal is the inhibition hypothesis advanced by Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks.
This theory assumes a general deficit in old age in the ability to inhibit irrelevant, or no-longer relevant, information. Therefore, working memory tends to be cluttered with irrelevant contents that reduce the effective capacity for relevant content. The assumption of an inhibition deficit in old age has received much empirical support[65] but, so far, it is not clear whether the decline in inhibitory ability fully explains the decline of working-memory capacity. An explanation on the neural level of the decline of working memory and other cognitive functions in old age has been proposed by West.
She argued that working memory depends to a large degree on the pre-frontal cortex, which deteriorates more than other brain regions as we grow old. Age related decline in working memory can be briefly reversed using low intensity transcranial stimulation, synchronizing rhythms in bilateral frontal and left temporal lobe areas.
Training
( Working memory training and Neurobiological effects of physical exercise § Cognitive control and memory)
Torkel Klingberg was the first to investigate whether intensive training of working memory has beneficial effects on other cognitive functions. His pioneering study suggested that working memory can be improved by training in ADHD patients through computerized programs. This study has found that a period of working memory training increases a range of cognitive abilities and increases IQ test scores. Another study of the same group[69] has shown that, after training, measured brain activity related to working memory increased in the prefrontal cortex, an area that many researchers have associated with working memory functions. It has been shown in one study that working memory training increases the density of prefrontal and parietal dopamine receptors (specifically, DRD1) in test persons.However, subsequent work with the same training program has failed to replicate the beneficial effects of training on cognitive performance. A meta-analytic summary of research with Klingberg’s training program up to 2011 shows that this training has at best a negligible effect on tests of intelligence and of attention.
In another influential study, training with a working memory task (the dual n-back task) has improved performance on a fluid intelligence test in healthy young adults.
The improvement of fluid intelligence by training with the n-back task was replicated in 2010,but two studies published in 2012 failed to reproduce the effect.
The combined evidence from about 30 experimental studies on the effectiveness of working-memory training has been evaluated by several meta-analyses.
The authors of these meta-analyses disagree in their conclusions as to whether or not working-memory training improves intelligence. Yet, these meta-analyses agree in their estimate of the size of the effect of working-memory training: If there is such an effect, it is likely to be small.
In the brain
(Neural mechanisms of maintaining information )
The first insights into the neuronal and neurotransmitter basis of working memory came from animal research. The work of Jacobsen and Fulton in the 1930s first showed that lesions to the PFC impaired spatial working memory performance in monkeys. The later work of Joaquin Fuster recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the PFC of monkeys while they were doing a delayed matching task. In that task, the monkey sees how the experimenter places a bit of food under one of two identical-looking cups. A shutter is then lowered for a variable delay period, screening off the cups from the monkey’s view. After the delay, the shutter opens and the monkey is allowed to retrieve the food from under the cups. Successful retrieval in the first attempt – something the animal can achieve after some training on the task – requires holding the location of the food in memory over the delay period. Fuster found neurons in the PFC that fired mostly during the delay period, suggesting that they were involved in representing the food location while it was invisible. Later research has shown similar delay-active neurons also in the posterior parietal cortex, the thalamus, the caudate, and the globus pallidus.
The work of Goldman-Rakic and others showed that principal sulcal, dorsolateral PFC interconnects with all of these brain regions, and that neuronal microcircuits within PFC are able to maintain information in working memory through recurrent excitatory glutamate networks of pyramidal cells that continue to fire throughout the delay period.
These circuits are tuned by lateral inhibition from GABAergic interneurons.
The neuromodulatory arousal systems markedly alter PFC working memory function; for example, either too little or too much dopamine or norepinephrine impairs PFC network firing and working memory performance.
The research described above on persistent firing of certain neurons in the delay period of working memory tasks shows that the brain has a mechanism of keeping representations active without external input. Keeping representations active, however, is not enough if the task demands maintaining more than one chunk of information. In addition, the components and features of each chunk must be bound together to prevent them from being mixed up. For example, if a red triangle and a green square must be remembered at the same time, one must make sure that “red” is bound to “triangle” and “green” is bound to “square”. One way of establishing such bindings is by having the neurons that represent features of the same chunk fire in synchrony, and those that represent features belonging to different chunks fire out of sync.
In the example, neurons representing redness would fire in synchrony with neurons representing the triangular shape, but out of sync with those representing the square shape. So far, there is no direct evidence that working memory uses this binding mechanism, and other mechanisms have been proposed as well.
It has been speculated that synchronous firing of neurons involved in working memory oscillate with frequencies in the theta band (4 to 8 Hz). Indeed, the power of theta frequency in the EEG increases with working memory load,and oscillations in the theta band measured over different parts of the skull become more coordinated when the person tries to remember the binding between two components of information.
Localization in the brain
Localization of brain functions in humans has become much easier with the advent of brain imaging methods (PET and fMRI). This research has confirmed that areas in the PFC are involved in working memory functions. During the 1990s much debate has centered on the different functions of the ventrolateral (i.e., lower areas) and the dorsolateral (higher) areas of the PFC. A human lesion study provides additional evidence for the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in working memory.
One view was that the dorsolateral areas are responsible for spatial working memory and the ventrolateral areas for non-spatial working memory. Another view proposed a functional distinction, arguing that ventrolateral areas are mostly involved in pure maintenance of information, whereas dorsolateral areas are more involved in tasks requiring some processing of the memorized material. The debate is not entirely resolved but most of the evidence supports the functional distinction.
Brain imaging has revealed that working memory functions are not limited to the PFC. A review of numerous studies shows areas of activation during working memory tasks scattered over a large part of the cortex. There is a tendency for spatial tasks to recruit more right-hemisphere areas, and for verbal and object working memory to recruit more left-hemisphere areas. The activation during verbal working memory tasks can be broken down into one component reflecting maintenance, in the left posterior parietal cortex, and a component reflecting subvocal rehearsal, in the left frontal cortex (Broca’s area, known to be involved in speech production).
There is an emerging consensus that most working memory tasks recruit a network of PFC and parietal areas. A study has shown that during a working memory task the connectivity between these areas increases.
Another study has demonstrated that these areas are necessary for working memory, and not simply activated accidentally during working memory tasks, by temporarily blocking them through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), thereby producing an impairment in task performance.
A current debate concerns the function of these brain areas. The PFC has been found to be active in a variety of tasks that require executive functions.
This has led some researchers to argue that the role of PFC in working memory is in controlling attention, selecting strategies, and manipulating information in working memory, but not in maintenance of information. The maintenance function is attributed to more posterior areas of the brain, including the parietal cortex.
Other authors interpret the activity in parietal cortex as reflecting executive functions, because the same area is also activated in other tasks requiring attention but not memory.
A 2003 meta-analysis of 60 neuroimaging studies found left frontal cortex was involved in low-task demand verbal working memory and right frontal cortex for spatial working memory. Brodmann’s areas (BAs) 6, 8, and 9, in the superior frontal cortex was involved when working memory must be continuously updated and when memory for temporal order had to be maintained. Right Brodmann 10 and 47 in the ventral frontal cortex were involved more frequently with demand for manipulation such as dual-task requirements or mental operations, and Brodmann 7 in the posterior parietal cortex was also involved in all types of executive function.
Working memory has been suggested to involve two processes with different neuroanatomical locations in the frontal and parietal lobes.
First, a selection operation that retrieves the most relevant item, and second an updating operation that changes the focus of attention made upon it. Updating the attentional focus has been found to involve the transient activation in the caudal superior frontal sulcus and posterior parietal cortex, while increasing demands on selection selectively changes activation in the rostral superior frontal sulcus and posterior cingulate/precuneus.
Articulating the differential function of brain regions involved in working memory is dependent on tasks able to distinguish these functions.
Most brain imaging studies of working memory have used recognition tasks such as delayed recognition of one or several stimuli, or the n-back task, in which each new stimulus in a long series must be compared to the one presented n steps back in the series. The advantage of recognition tasks is that they require minimal movement (just pressing one of two keys), making fixation of the head in the scanner easier. Experimental research and research on individual differences in working memory, however, has used largely recall tasks (e.g., the reading span task, see below). It is not clear to what degree recognition and recall tasks reflect the same processes and the same capacity limitations.
Brain imaging studies have been conducted with the reading span task or related tasks. Increased activation during these tasks was found in the PFC and, in several studies, also in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). People performing better on the task showed larger increase of activation in these areas, and their activation was correlated more over time, suggesting that their neural activity in these two areas was better coordinated, possibly due to stronger connectivity.
Neural models
One approach to modeling the neurophysiology and the functioning of working memory is prefrontal cortex basal ganglia working memory (PBWM). In this model, the prefrontal cortex works hand-in-hand with the basal ganglia to accomplish the tasks of working memory. Many studies have shown this to be the case. One used ablation techniques in patients who had suffered from seizures and had damage to the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia.
Researchers found that such damage resulted in decreased capacity to carry out the executive function of working memory.
Additional research conducted on patients with brain alterations due to methamphetamine use found that training working memory increases volume in the basal ganglia.
Effects of stress on neurophysiology
Working memory is impaired by acute and chronic psychological stress. This phenomenon was first discovered in animal studies by Arnsten and colleagues,
who have shown that stress-induced catecholamine release in PFC rapidly decreases PFC neuronal firing and impairs working memory performance through feedforward, intracellular signaling pathways. Exposure to chronic stress leads to more profound working memory deficits and additional architectural changes in PFC, including dendritic atrophy and spine loss, which can be prevented by inhibition of protein kinase C signaling.
fMRI research has extended this research to humans, and confirms that reduced working memory caused by acute stress links to reduced activation of the PFC, and stress increased levels of catecholamines.
Imaging studies of medical students undergoing stressful exams have also shown weakened PFC functional connectivity, consistent with the animal studies.
The marked effects of stress on PFC structure and function may help to explain how stress can cause or exacerbate mental illness. The more stress in one’s life, the lower the efficiency of working memory in performing simple cognitive tasks. Students who performed exercises that reduced the intrusion of negative thoughts showed an increase in their working memory capacity. Mood states (positive or negative) can have an influence on the neurotransmitter dopamine, which in turn can affect problem solving.
Effects of alcohol on neurophysiology
Alcohol abuse can result in brain damage which impairs working memory.
Alcohol has an effect on the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response. The BOLD response correlates increased blood oxygenation with brain activity, which makes this response a useful tool for measuring neuronal activity.
The BOLD response affects regions of the brain such as the basal ganglia and thalamus when performing a working memory task. Adolescents who start drinking at a young age show a decreased BOLD response in these brain regions. Alcohol dependent young women in particular exhibit less of a BOLD response in parietal and frontal cortices when performing a spatial working memory task. Binge drinking, specifically, can also affect one’s performance on working memory tasks, particularly visual working memory.
Additionally, there seems to be a gender difference in regards to how alcohol affects working memory. While women perform better on verbal working memory tasks after consuming alcohol compared to men, they appear to perform worse on spatial working memory tasks as indicated by less brain activity.
Finally, age seems to be an additional factor. Older adults are more susceptible than others to the effects of alcohol on working memory.
Genetics
Behavioral genetics
Individual differences in working-memory capacity are to some extent heritable; that is, about half of the variation between individuals is related to differences in their genes.
The genetic component of variability of working-memory capacity is largely shared with that of fluid intelligence.
Attempts to identify individual genes
Little is known about which genes are related to the functioning of working memory. Within the theoretical framework of the multi-component model, one candidate gene has been proposed, namely ROBO1 for the hypothetical phonological loop component of working memory.
Role in academic achievement
Working memory capacity is correlated with learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy. Initial evidence for this relation comes from the correlation between working-memory capacity and reading comprehension, as first observed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980)and confirmed in a later meta-analytic review of several studies. Subsequent work found that working memory performance in primary school children accurately predicted performance in mathematical problem solving.
One longitudinal study showed that a child’s working memory at 5 years old is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.
In a large-scale screening study, one in ten children in mainstream classrooms were identified with working memory deficits. The majority of them performed very poorly in academic achievements, independent of their IQ.
Similarly, working memory deficits have been identified in national curriculum low-achievers as young as seven years of age.
Without appropriate intervention, these children lag behind their peers. A recent study of 37 school-age children with significant learning disabilities has shown that working memory capacity at baseline measurement, but not IQ, predicts learning outcomes two years later.
This suggests that working memory impairments are associated with low learning outcomes and constitute a high risk factor for educational underachievement for children. In children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, and developmental coordination disorder, a similar pattern is evident.
Relation to attention
There is some evidence that optimal working memory performance links to the neural ability to focus attention on task-relevant information and to ignore distractions,and that practice-related improvement in working memory is due to increasing these abilities.
One line of research suggests a link between the working memory capacities of a person and their ability to control the orientation of attention to stimuli in the environment.
Such control enables people to attend to information important for their current goals, and to ignore goal-irrelevant stimuli that tend to capture their attention due to their sensory saliency (such as an ambulance siren). The direction of attention according to one’s goals is assumed to rely on “top-down” signals from the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) that biases processing in posterior cortical areas. Capture of attention by salient stimuli is assumed to be driven by “bottom-up” signals from subcortical structures and the primary sensory cortices.
The ability to override “bottom-up” capture of attention differs between individuals, and this difference has been found to correlate with their performance in a working-memory test for visual information.
Another study, however, found no correlation between the ability to override attentional capture and measures of more general working-memory capacity.
Relationship with neural disorders
An impairment of working memory functioning is normally seen in several neural disorders:
ADHD: Several authors have proposed that symptoms of ADHD arise from a primary deficit in a specific executive function (EF) domain such as working memory, response inhibition or a more general weakness in executive control.
A meta-analytical review cites several studies that found significant lower group results for ADHD in spatial and verbal working memory tasks, and in several other EF tasks. However, the authors concluded that EF weaknesses neither are necessary nor sufficient to cause all cases of ADHD.
Several neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and glutamate may be both involved in ADHD and working memory. Both are associated with the frontal brain, self-direction and self-regulation, but cause–effect have not been confirmed, so it is unclear whether working memory dysfunction leads to ADHD, or ADHD distractibility leads to poor functionality of working memory, or if there is some other connection.
Parkinson’s disease:
Patients with Parkinson’s show signs of a reduced verbal function of working memory. They wanted to find if the reduction is due to a lack of ability to focus on relevant tasks, or a low amount of memory capacity. Twenty-one patients with Parkinson’s were tested in comparison to the control group of 28 participants of the same age. The researchers found that both hypotheses were the reason working memory function is reduced which did not fully agree with their hypothesis that it is either one or the other.
Alzheimer’s disease:
As Alzheimer’s disease becomes more serious, less working memory functions. There is one study that focuses on the neural connections and fluidity of working memory in mice brains. Half of the mice were given an injection that is similar to Alzheimer’s effects, and the other half were not. Then they were expected to go through a maze that is a task to test working memory. The study help answer questions about how Alzheimer’s can deteriorate the working memory and ultimately obliterate memory functions.
Huntington’s disease:
A group of researchers hosted a study that researched the function and connectivity of working memory over a 30-month longitudinal experiment. It found that there were certain places in the brain where most connectivity was decreased in pre-Huntington diseased patients, in comparison to the control group that remained consistently functional.
SCALE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Glasgow Coma Scale
The Glasgow Coma Scale
(GCS) is a neurological scale which aims to give a reliable and objective way of recording the state of a person’s consciousness for initial as well as subsequent assessment. A person is assessed against the criteria of the scale, and the resulting points give a person’s score between 3 (indicating deep unconsciousness) and either 14 (original scale) or 15 (more widely used, modified or revised scale).
GCS was used to assess a person’s level of consciousness after a head injury, and the scale is now used by emergency medical services, nurses, and physicians as being applicable to all acute medical and trauma patients. In hospitals, it is also used in monitoring patients in intensive care units.
The scale was published in 1974 by Graham Teasdale and Bryan J. Jennett, both professors of neurosurgery at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neurological Sciences at the city’s Southern General Hospital.
GCS is used as part of several ICU scoring systems, including APACHE II, SAPS II, and SOFA, to assess the status of the central nervous system. The initial indication for use of the GCS was serial assessments of people with traumatic brain injury and coma for at least six hours in the neurosurgical ICU setting, though it is commonly used throughout hospital departments. The similar Rancho Los Amigos Scale is used to assess the recovery of traumatic brain injury.
GCS was updated following a review of the helpfulness and usefulness of the scale from clinicians. It was decided that several things required updating, like the Eye Response element, meaning that instead of responding to “Painful Stimuli” being regarded as a 2, a person that opens their eyes in response to pressure is now considered a 2 in the Eye Response element.
Elements of the scale
Note that a motor response in any limb is acceptable.
The scale is composed of three tests: eye, verbal and motor responses. The three values separately as well as their sum are considered. The lowest possible GCS (graded 1 in each element) is 3 (deep coma or death), while the highest is 15 (fully awake person).
Eye response (E)
There are four grades starting with the most severe:
1.No opening of the eye
2.Eye opening in response to pain stimulus. A peripheral pain stimulus, such as squeezing the lunula area of the person’s fingernail is more effective than a central stimulus such as a trapezius squeeze, due to a grimacing effect.
3.Eye opening to speech. Not to be confused with the awakening of a sleeping person; such people receive a score of 4, not 3.
4.Eyes opening spontaneously
Verbal response
There are five grades starting with the most severe:
1.No verbal response
2.Incomprehensible sounds. Moaning but no words.
3.Inappropriate words. Random or exclamatory articulated speech, but no conversational exchange. Speaks words but no sentences.
4.Confused. The person responds to questions coherently but there is some disorientation and confusion.
5.Oriented. Person responds coherently and appropriately to questions such as the person’s name and age, where they are and why, the year, month, etc.
Motor response (M)
There are six grades:
1.No motor response
2.Decerebrate posturing accentuated by pain (extensor response: adduction of arm, internal rotation of shoulder, pronation of forearm and extension at elbow, flexion of wrist and fingers, leg extension, plantarflexion of foot)
3.Decorticate posturing accentuated by pain (flexor response: internal rotation of shoulder, flexion of forearm and wrist with clenched fist, leg extension, plantarflexion of foot)
4.Withdrawal from pain (absence of abnormal posturing; unable to lift hand past chin with supraorbital pain but does pull away when nailbed is pinched)
5.Localizes to pain (purposeful movements towards painful stimuli; e.g., brings hand up beyond chin when supraorbital pressure applied)
6.Obeys commands (the person does simple things as asked)
Interpretation
Individual elements as well as the sum of the score are important.
Hence, the score is expressed in the form “GCS 9 = E2 V4 M3 at 07:35”.
Generally, brain injury is classified as:
Severe, GCS < 8–9
Moderate, GCS 8 or 9–12 (controversial)
Minor, GCS ≥ 13.
Tracheal intubation and severe facial/eye swelling or damage make it impossible to test the verbal and eye responses. In these circumstances, the score is given as 1 with a modifier attached (e.g. “E1c”, where “c” = closed, or “V1t” where t = tube). Often the 1 is left out, so the scale reads Ec or Vt. A composite might be “GCS 5tc”. This would mean, for example, eyes closed because of swelling = 1, intubated = 1, leaving a motor score of 3 for “abnormal flexion”.
The GCS has limited applicability to children, especially below the age of 36 months (where the verbal performance of even a healthy child would be expected to be poor).
Consequently, the Paediatric Glasgow Coma Scale was developed for assessing younger children.
APACHE II Scoring Systems
APACHE II (“Acute Physiology And Chronic Health Evaluation II”) is a severity-of-disease classification system (Knaus et al., 1985),
one of several ICU scoring systems. It is applied within 24 hours of admission of a patient to an intensive care unit (ICU): an integer score from 0 to 71 is computed based on several measurements; higher scores correspond to more severe disease and a higher risk of death. The first APACHE model was presented by Knaus et al. in 1981.
Application
APACHE II was designed to measure the severity of disease for adult patients admitted to intensive care units. It has not been validated for use in children or young people aged under 16.
This scoring system is used in many ways which include:
1.Some procedures or some medicine is only given to patients with a certain APACHE II score
2.APACHE II score can be used to describe the morbidity of a patient when comparing the outcome with other patients.
3.Predicted mortalities are averaged for groups of patients in order to specify the group’s morbidity.
Even though newer scoring systems, such as APACHE III, have replaced APACHE II in many places, APACHE II continues to be used extensively because so much documentation is based on it.
Calculation
The point score is calculated from a patient’s age and 12 routine physiological measurements:
1.AaDO2 or PaO2 (depending on FiO2)
2.Temperature (rectal)
3.Mean arterial pressure
4.pH arterial
5.Heart rate
6.Respiratory rate
7.Sodium (serum)
8.Potassium (serum)
9.Creatinine
10.Hematocrit
11.White blood cell count
12.Glasgow Coma Scale
These were measured during the first 24 hours after admission, and utilized in addition to information about previous health status (recent surgery, history of severe organ insufficiency, immunocompromised state) and baseline demographics such as age. The calculation method is optimized for paper schemas, by using integer values and reducing the number of options so that data fits on a single-sheet paper form.
The score is not recalculated during the stay; it is by definition an admission score. If a patient is discharged from the ICU and readmitted, a new APACHE II score is calculated.
In the original research paper that described the APACHE II score (see references), patient prognosis (specifically, predicted mortality) was computed based on the patient’s APACHE II score in combination with the principal diagnosis at admission.
APACHE III
A method to compute a refined score known as APACHE III was published in 1991.
The score was validated on the dataset from 17,440 adult medical/surgical intensive care unit (ICU) admissions at 40 US hospitals.
The prognostic system of APACHE III has two options:
APACHE III Score
This provides an initial risk classification of severely ill hospitalized patients in defined groups.
APACHE III predictive equation
This uses APACHE III Score with a number of additional variables including the primary reason for ICU admission (from a reference list of 212 conditions classified according to etiology, major organ involved, and distinction between surgical/medical categories); age, sex, race and preexisting comorbidities; and location prior to ICU admission (operating room, recovery or emergency department, transfer or readmission from another hospital or ICU).
When possible, data about the interval time between the patient’s arrival to hospital and the ICU admission time are collected.
To measure severity of disease 20 physiologic variable were selected.
APACHE III scores range from 0 to 299.
APACHE IV
APACHE IV, published in 2006, is the latest version. The model was developed using data from 104 intensive care units (ICUs) in 45 U.S. hospitals and could be recommended to use in U.S. ICUs.
SAPS II
SAPS II is a severity of disease classification system.
Its name stands for “Simplified Acute Physiology Score”, and is one of several ICU scoring systems.
Application
SAPS II was designed to measure the severity of disease for patients admitted to Intensive care units aged 15 or more.
24 hours after admission to the ICU, the measurement has been completed and resulted in an integer point score between 0 and 163 and a predicted mortality between 0% and 100%. No new score can be calculated during the stay. If a patient is discharged from the ICU and readmitted, a new SAPS II score can be calculated.
This scoring system is mostly used to:
describe the morbidity of a patient when comparing the outcome with other patients.
describe the morbidity of a group of patients when comparing the outcome with another group of patients.
Calculation
The point score is calculated from 12 routine physiological measurements during the first 24 hours, information about previous health status and some information obtained at admission.
The parameters are:
1.Age
2.Heart Rate
3.Systolic Blood Pressure
4.Temperature
5.Glasgow Coma Scale
Mechanical Ventilation or 6.CPAP
7.PaO2
8.FiO2
9.Urine Output
10.Blood Urea Nitrogen
11.Sodium
12.Potassium
13.Bicarbonate
14.Bilirubin
15.White Blood Cell
16.Chronic diseases
17.Type of admission
The calculation method is optimized for paper schemas. In contrast to APACHE II, the resulting value is much better at comparing patients with different diseases.
The calculation method results in a predicted mortality, that is pure statistics. It does not tell the individual patient’s chance of survival. The main purpose of this calculation is to provide a value that can be averaged for a group of patients, since it gives very unprecise values to calculate an average of the scores of a group of patients.
SOFA score
The sequential organ failure assessment score (SOFA score), previously known as the sepsis-related organ failure assessment score, is used to track a person’s status during the stay in an intensive care unit (ICU) to determine the extent of a person’s organ function or rate of failure.
The score is based on six different scores, one each for the respiratory, cardiovascular, hepatic, coagulation, renal and neurological systems.
The score tables below only describe points-giving conditions. In cases where the physiological parameters do not match any row, zero points are given. In cases where the physiological parameters match more than one row, the row with most points is picked.
The quick SOFA score (qSOFA) assists health care providers in estimating the risk of morbidity and mortality due to sepsis.
Medical use
The SOFA scoring system is useful in predicting the clinical outcomes of critically ill patients. According to an observational study at an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Belgium, the mortality rate is at least 50% when the score is increased, regardless of initial score, in the first 96 hours of admission, 27% to 35% if the score remains unchanged, and less than 27% if the score is reduced.
qSOFA has also been found to be poorly sensitive though decently specific for the risk of death with SIRS possibly better for screening.
Scoring
1.Respiratory system
PaO2/FiO2 [mmHg (kPa)] SOFA score
≥ 400 (53.3) = 0
< 400 (53.3) = +1
< 300 (40) = +2
< 200 (26.7) and mechanically ventilated =+3
< 100 (13.3) and mechanically ventilated =+4
Nervous system
Glasgow coma scale SOFA score
15 =0
13–14 =+1
10–12 =+2
6–9 =+3
< 6 =+4
Cardiovascular system
Mean arterial pressure OR administration of vasopressors required SOFA score
MAP ≥ 70 mmHg= 0
MAP < 70 mmHg= +1
dopamine ≤ 5 μg/kg/min or dobutamine (any dose) =+2
dopamine > 5 μg/kg/min OR epinephrine ≤ 0.1 μg/kg/min OR norepinephrine ≤ 0.1 μg/kg/min= +3
dopamine > 15 μg/kg/min OR epinephrine > 0.1 μg/kg/min OR norepinephrine > 0.1 μg/kg/min =+4
Liver
Bilirubin (mg/dl) [μmol/L] SOFA score
< 1.2 [< 20] =0
1.2–1.9 [20-32] =+1
2.0–5.9 [33-101]= +2
6.0–11.9 [102-204] =+3
> 12.0 [> 204] =+4
Coagulation
Platelets×103/μl SOFA score
≥ 150= 0
< 150 =+1
< 100 =+2
< 50= +3
< 20= +4
Kidneys
Creatinine (mg/dl) [μmol/L] (or urine output) SOFA score
< 1.2 [< 110] =0
1.2–1.9 [110-170] =+1
2.0–3.4 [171-299] =+2
3.5–4.9 [300-440] (or < 500 ml/d) =+3
> 5.0 [> 440] (or < 200 ml/d). = +4
Quick SOFA score
The Quick SOFA Score (quickSOFA or qSOFA) was introduced by the Sepsis-3 group in February 2016 as a simplified version of the SOFA Score as an initial way to identify patients at high risk for poor outcome with an infection.
The SIRS Criteria definitions of sepsis are being replaced as they were found to possess too many limitations; the “current use of 2 or more SIRS criteria to identify sepsis was unanimously considered by the task force to be unhelpful.” The qSOFA simplifies the SOFA score drastically by only including its 3 clinical criteria and by including “any altered mentation” instead of requiring a GCS <15. qSOFA can easily and quickly be repeated serially on patients.
Assessment =qSOFA score
Low blood pressure (SBP ≤ 100 mmHg) =1
High respiratory rate (≥ 22 breaths/min) =1
Altered mentation (GCS ≤ 14) =1
The score ranges from 0 to 3 points. The presence of 2 or more qSOFA points near the onset of infection was associated with a greater risk of death or prolonged intensive care unit stay. These are outcomes that are more common in infected patients who may be septic than those with uncomplicated infection. Based upon these findings, the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis recommends qSOFA as a simple prompt to identify infected patients outside the ICU who are likely to be septic.
Rancho Los Amigos Scale
The Rancho Los Amigos Scale (RLAS), a.k.a. the Rancho Los Amigos Levels of Cognitive Functioning Scale (LOCF) or Rancho Scale, is a medical scale used to assess individuals after a closed head injury, including traumatic brain injury, based on cognitive and behavioural presentations as they emerge from coma.
It is named after the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, located in Downey, California, United States in Los Angeles County.
After being assessed based on the LOCF, individuals with brain injury receive a score from one to eight. A score of one represents non-responsive cognitive functioning, whereas a score of eight represents purposeful and appropriate functioning.
Each of the eight levels represents the typical sequential progression of recovery from brain damage. However, individuals progress at different rates and may plateau at any stage of recovery. These patients are scored based on combinations of the following criteria:
responsiveness to stimuli
ability to follow commands
presence of non-purposeful behavior
cooperation
confusion
attention to environment
focus
coherence of verbalization
appropriateness of verbalizations and actions
memory recall
orientation
judgement and reasoning
LOCF scores are used by health care professionals for standardized communication about patient status and can be used by physiatrists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, recreational therapists, and speech language pathologists as the basis for treatment planning.
This eight-level scale was found to possess test-retest and interrater reliability as well as concurrent and predictive validity.
It is widely used clinically and is often paired with the Glasgow Coma Scale in health care facilitie.
Awareness
“Aware” redirects here. For other uses, see Aware (disambiguation).
Awareness is the state of being conscious of something. More specifically, is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some information when that information is directly available to bring to bear in the direction of a wide range of behavioral actions.
The concept is often synonymous to consciousness and is also understood as being consciousness itself.
The states of awareness are also associated with the states of experience so that the structure represented in awareness is mirrored in the structure of experience.
Concept
Awareness is a relative concept. It may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception.
It is analogous to sensing something, a process distinguished from observing and perceiving (which involves a basic process of acquainting with the items we perceive).
Awareness or “to sense” can be described as something that occurs when the brain is activated in certain ways, such as when the color red is what is seen once the retina is stimulated by light waves. This conceptualization is posited amid the difficulty in developing an analytic definition of awareness or sensory awareness.
Awareness is also associated with consciousness in the sense that this concept denotes a fundamental experience such as a feeling or intuition that accompanies the experience of phenomena. Specifically, this is referred to as awareness of experience.
Self-awareness
Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes a condition of being aware of oneself (self-awareness). Modern systems theory, which offers insights into how the world works through an understanding that all systems follow system rules, approach self-awareness within its understanding of how large complex living systems work. According to Gregory Bateson, the mind is the dynamics of self-organization and that awareness is crucial in the existence of this process.
Modern systems theory maintains that humans, as living systems, have not only awareness of their environment but also self-awareness particularly with their capability for logic and curiosity.
Efforts to describe consciousness in neurological terms have focused on describing networks in the brain that develop awareness of the qualia developed by other networks. As awareness provides the materials from which one develops subjective ideas about their experience, it is said that one is aware of one’s own awareness state.
This organization of awareness of one’s own inner experience is given a central role in self-regulation .
Neuroscience
Neural systems that regulate attention serve to attenuate awareness among complex animals whose central and peripheral nervous systems provide more information than cognitive areas of the brain can assimilate. Within an attenuated system of awareness, a mind might be aware of much more than is being contemplated in a focused extended consciousness.
Basic awareness
Basic awareness of one’s internal and external world depends on the brain stem. Bjorn Merker,an independent neuroscientist in Stockholm, Sweden, argues that the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in infants with hydranencephaly. “Higher” forms of awareness including self-awareness require cortical contributions, but “primary consciousness” or “basic awareness” as an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one’s immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior, springs from the brain stem which human beings share with most of the vertebrates. Psychologist Carroll Izard emphasizes that this form of primary consciousness consists of the capacity to generate emotions and awareness of one’s surroundings, but not an ability to talk about what one has experienced. In the same way, people can become conscious of a feeling that they can’t label or describe, a phenomenon that’s especially common in pre-verbal infants.
Due to this discovery medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity face a serious challenge.
Basic interests
Throughout the brain stem, there are interconnected regions that regulate eye movement that are also involved in organizing information about what to do next, such as reaching for a piece of food or pursuing a potential mate.
Changes in awareness
The ability to consciously detect an image when presented at near-threshold stimulus varies across presentations. One factor is “baseline shifts” due to top down attention that modulates ongoing brain activity in sensory cortex areas that affects the neural processing of subsequent perceptual judgments.
Such top down biasing can occur through two distinct processes: an attention driven baseline shift in the alpha waves, and a decision bias reflected in gamma waves.
Living systems view
Outside of neuroscience biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela contributed their Santiago theory of cognition in which they wrote:
Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system.
This theory contributes a perspective that cognition is a process present at organic levels that we don’t usually consider to be aware. Given the possible relationship between awareness and cognition, and consciousness, this theory contributes an interesting perspective in the philosophical and scientific dialogue of awareness and living systems theory.
Communications and information systems
In cooperative settings, awareness is a term used to denote “knowledge created through the interaction of an agent and its environment — in simple terms ‘knowing what is going on’”.
In this setting, awareness is meant to convey how individuals monitor and perceive the information surrounding their colleagues and the environment they are in. This information is incredibly useful and critical to the performance and success of collaborations.
Awareness can be further defined by breaking it down into a set of characteristics:
It is knowledge about the state of some environment.
Environments are continually changing, therefore awareness knowledge must be constantly maintained.
Individuals interact with the environment, and maintenance of awareness is accomplished through this interaction.
It is generally part of some other activity – generally making it a secondary goal to the primary goal of the activity.
Different categories of awareness have been suggested based on the type of information being obtained or maintained:
Informal awareness is the sense of who’s around and what are they up to. E.g. Information you might know from being collocated with an individual.
Social awareness is the information you maintain about a social or conversational context. This is a subtle awareness maintained through non-verbal cues, such as eye contact, facial express, etc.
Group-structural awareness is the knowledge of others roles, responsibilities, status in a group. It is an understanding of group dynamics and the relationship another individual has to the group.
Workspace awareness – this is a focus on the workspace’s influence and mediation of awareness information, particularly the location, activity, and changes of elements within the workspace.
These categories are not mutually exclusive, as there can be significant overlap in what a particular type of awareness might be considered. Rather, these categories serve to help understand what knowledge might be conveyed by a particular type of awareness or how that knowledge might be conveyed. Workspace awareness is of particular interest to the CSCW community, due to the transition of workspaces from physical to virtual environments.
While the type of awareness above refers to knowledge a person might need in a particular situation, context awareness and location awareness refer to information a computer system might need in a particular situation. These concepts of large importance especially for AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) applications.
The term of location awareness still is gaining momentum with the growth of ubiquitous computing. First defined by networked work positions (network location awareness), it has been extended to mobile phones and other mobile communicable entities. The term covers a common interest in whereabouts of remote entities, especially individuals and their cohesion in operation. The term of context awareness is a superset including the concept of location awareness. It extends the awareness to context features of an operational target as well as to the context of an operational area.