Consciousness

Consciousness

Introduction

Susan Greenfield was born in the year 1950. She is a British broadcaster, scientist and a writer. Greenfield continued his career by studying psychology of brain and then developed a novel approach for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. She is currently working as a fellow research person at the Lincoln College. However, Greenfield has been interviewed and asked various questions about what she thinks about consciousness. In her interview she gave a thorough view about her opinion on this matter.

Discussion

How often do you ask the big questions: Why are we here, why do we think, is everything around me an illusion? Susan Blackmore takes one of these hard topics consciousness and 21 of the brightest minds in the area of study, maybe some of the brightest minds on the planet, to discuss their views on some of these topics. Susan sets out with some simple questions: What makes studying consciousness hard? Where does our concept of self come in? Is there consciousness after our body dies? Do we have free will? And has studying consciousness changed the way you look at the world. The one common theme amongst all the brilliant minds seems to be that there is no common theme yet. Wonderful studies have been done that shine the bright light on enquiry on some dark corners of our minds, like lucid dreaming and some very obvious seeming issues: does your conscious mind have control over your body? The results in all of these have been rich and astounding. Susan Greenfield further elaborates on her studies in lucid dreaming. One part of our bodies of which our control doesn't shut down when we dream is our eyes. She managed to find out exactly when someone is in a lucid dream by pre-arranging eye signals with the dreamers when they notice that they are lucid in their dreams. By looking hard left and right a few times in the dream, the researchers were able to tell exactly when the subjects were busy with their lucid dreams: in the most intense periods of REM sleep (Blackmore, 2005).

Greenfield recounts her search for links between consciousness and the quantum world. This is a very serious issue as from the physics side; the normal interpretation of quantum mechanics evokes an "observer" that to all appearances needs to be conscious. While linking brain function and quantum mechanics is not the most fashionable gang on the playground, my money is on this in the long run. The largest number of the scientists weigh in on the side that death is final and that we need our hardware to exist as sentient entities. Susan Greenfield sketches the possibility that some of the information could sublimate into the universe as a whole maybe heaven is the quantum field? Furthermore, Susan also defined consciousness by saying that it is the greatest mysteries of science. For this reason, she was asked to elaborate a bit on this view. In return, she replied that to her, consciousness is ...