The First 4 Fundamentals About Consciousness and the Brain

Every fall, new students join the lab, eager to learn about consciousness and the brain. At this time of the year, I always ask myself, "What are the fundamental ideas about consciousness and the brain that should be taught first?" I always find myself revising, updating, streamlining, and making clearer the ideas in introductory lectures and the lab manual (Morsella, 2022). Below are the four fundamentals that, over the years, have always been presented first, both in the manual and in lab discussions.

The first thing to learn is what a “conscious content” is. Any particular thing one is conscious of has been referred to as a “conscious content.” A conscious content could be the sight of a coffee cup, an afterimage, a song that keeps playing in one’s mind, a percept, an urge (e.g., to scratch a sunburn), the smell of an ice cream sundae, or an autobiographical memory (e.g., memory of last summer’s camping trip).

The term “conscious content” refers to the most basic form of consciousness: If a creature is capable of having an experience of any kind—pain, nausea, a pleasant dream, or the sound of a bell—then it possesses this basic form of consciousness (Morsella, 2022). In short, to have an experience of any kind is to have some kind of conscious content. Sometimes people refer to this kind of basic consciousness as “awareness,” which means the same thing: Being aware of a cup or ringing in the ears is to experience these conscious contents.

The second thing to learn is the term “conscious field.” The conscious field is made up of all the conscious contents that are activated at one moment in time: the sight of an ice cream sundae plus the smell of coffee plus the feeling of the chair on which one is sitting plus the song that one cannot get out of one’s mind plus the memory of the doctor reminding one to cut down on sweets.

We are not aware of, and have no conscious contents for, many things going on in the brain or body—peristalsis in the gut, how the pupils in the eye are controlled, and many other activities in the nervous system (e.g., motor and syntactic programming). These processes are said to be unconscious. There is usually no experience about them. We know of these processes mainly through reading about them in textbooks. We have no direct experience about them. In short, “unconscious events are those processes that, though capable of systematically influencing behavior, cognition, motivation, and emotion, do not influence the organism’s subjective experience in such a way that the organism can directly detect, understand, or self-report the occurrence or nature of these events” (from Morsella & Bargh, 2011).

Knowledge of unconscious process leads to the third important fundamental about consciousness and the brain: Not all brain processes and regions are associated with consciousness. Consciousness is associated with only a subset of the regions and processes. Researchers are attempting to home in on these circuits associated with consciousness (e.g., Morsella et al., 2016; Morsella, 2022).

The fourth fundamental is an observation that holds some clues about why one needs a fully operational conscious field, one in which many conscious contents are presented: Each conscious content activates brain processes, including, to some extent, behavioral inclinations. Consider the classic Stroop task (Stroop, 1935). In the task, subjects are instructed to name the color in which a word is written. When the word and color are incongruent (e.g., RED presented in blue), “response conflict” leads to increased error rates and response times. The response conflict arises because, though one intends to name only the color in which the word is printed, the stimulus (RED) activates involuntarily the “word reading” action plan (to utter “red”).

Because conscious contents can activate processes that influence behavior, it is essential that one conscious content (e.g., a tasty ice cream sundae) not be presented alone to have too much influence on behavior. Such a monopoly would not lead to adaptive behavior. Each content should be “checked” by other conscious contents (e.g., the memory that the doctor recommended cutting down on sweets). (This is called a “frame check”; Morsella et al., 2016.) Because voluntary behavior is influenced by the many conscious contents in the field, we respond to a given stimulus (the tasty sundae) not in isolation but in light of the other contents (e.g., memory of doctor) composing the conscious field.

With these four fundamentals, incoming students not only understand new terms but also begin to appreciate the important role of the conscious field in yielding adaptive actions that are context-sensitive. Over the years, these four fundamentals have consistently appeared at the beginning of the lab manual (Morsella, 2022), and I can’t foresee an introduction to the lab without them.