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Where is your consciousness? Can you describe its location? For the sake of the experiment, let’s define consciousness simply, as an awareness of oneself in the world. A lot of writers explore the location of consciousness--Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison. But how do their fictional explorations translate into the lives of real people?
This is not a scientific question. It's personal, or phenomenological (to use the philosophical term). I'm not asking where your consciousness actually is, but where it feels like it is. Because the feeling may be telling. Anecdotally, people have told me they feel their consciousness in their foreheads, in the brain itself, in the heart, the solar plexus, surrounding the body, and nowhere at all. It seems worthwhile for a group of humans interested in psychology--readers here--to compare notes about their experience of consciousness. If you're interested, use the comments section to describe the location of your consciounsess, or to reflect on the idea that consciousness does or doesn't have a location.
We talk about our inner lives. We wonder would happen if people could see into our minds? Literature professors talk about the ways novelists represent the interior lives of characters. Consciousness, we imagine, is to be found somewhere inside us. If you plug the word interiority into Google’s Ngram–an ingeniously specialized engine that will show you how often the word has been used in print over a particular number of centuries or decades–you’ll see a steady rise in its use since the 1960s, its use still increasing steadily today.
But what container holds the experience we call consciousness? Is the idea of an interior life a metaphor? Can we find consciousness in our bodies? In our brains? Might a soul or spirit have physical dimensions? Might we find consciousness in there? Or is consciousness placeless, along with its cousins memory, emotion, and mind?
Certainly we can find physical correlates for all mental phenomena in our brains and bodies. Certainly emotion happens partly in the tingling of skin, the tightening of muscle, or the sinking of stomach. But the mystery remains: Where's the rest of it, the stuff philosophers call immaterial?
I used to have a strong feeling that the center of my consciousness was about an eighth of an inch outside my forehead extending down toward my chest, but becoming more diffuse the further I get from my forehead. Where did I get this feeling? I have no idea. But it's changed. Now it feels like it travels--sometimes in my gut, surrounding my body, or under the skin.
I’ll leave you with a little Virginia Woolf, because she’s wise. And because she might help us all think about where we feel our consciousness. This is a famous passage from Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa and the shellshocked Septimus Smith–strangers to each other–seem to share a perceptual experience “drumming” through London:
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
Where is Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness? Where Septimus’s? Inside them? Outside their foreheads? Somewhere out there in the wavering world? In the vibrations of the engine in their bodies? In the scent of those sweet peas? Is Septimus’s consciousness an arsonist, threatening to set fire to the world he shares with Clarissa? Is it the collective consciounsess of World War I's brutality seeping into post-war life? Might it consciousness reside in all these possibilities--and more--at once?
*Ngram is a branded variation on the term engram, first used by memory researcher Richard Semon in the 1920s, to get at the idea that memory traces are conglomerations of tiny networks of neurons located in various parts of the brain. Each time we remember, a version of this conglomeration is activated–but with slight differences each time, which accounts for memory’s notorious malleability. The term has been revived by contemporary memory theorists, particularly Daniel L. Schacter.
