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Consciousness and the Survival of Consciousness.
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Consciousness is a subjective experience or the awareness of self. It allows you to experience “feeling" and is the executive control system of the mind. Anything that we are aware of at any given moment forms part of our consciousness or our perception of self and the dimension we function in. Consciousness in psychological and philosophical contexts implies five characteristics: subjectivity, change, continuity, selectivity and intentionality or aboutness.
To remember is the conscious recollection of vivid contextual details, such as "when" and "how" information was learned. Remembering is knowledge based and driven by a form of processing that can be influenced by many things.
Autobiographical memory is a system of episodes recollected from an individual’s life, based on a combination of personal experiences, specific objects, people and events experienced and filed into memory.
The autobiographical knowledge base contains knowledge of the self that is used to provide information on what the self is, what the self was, and what the self can be. This information is categorized into three broad areas: lifetime periods, general events, and event-specific knowledge.
Lifetime periods are composed of general knowledge about a distinguishable time in a person's life. Lifetime periods have a distinctive beginning and ending, but they can be fuzzy and overlap. Lifetime periods contain thematic knowledge about activities, relationships, or places and temporal knowledge about a time period.
General events are more specific than lifetime periods. General events group into clusters based on a common theme. When one memory of a general event is recalled, it cues the recall of other related events in memory. These clusters of memories often form around the theme of either achieving or failing to achieve personal goals. Clusters of general seem to have a particular vividness. These memories pass on important information about the self
Event-specific knowledge is vividly detailed information about individual events. Most of the time this information is in the form of visual images and sensory-perceptual images. The high levels of detail in event specific knowledge fades very quickly, though certain memories for specific events tend to last longer. Events that mark the beginning of a path towards long-term goals, events that re-direct plans from original goals, events that affirm an individual’s beliefs and past events that direct behavior in the present are all event specific memories.
Long-term memories, are maintained by stable and permanent changes in neural connections spread throughout the brain. • An important structure of the brain associated with “who we are” is found in the temporal lobe known as the hippocampus. Two important functions of the hippocampus are inhibition and memory.
The hippocampus is a major component of the brain. It plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short term memory to long term memory.
the hippocampus is studied extensively as the part of a brain responsible for behavioral inhibition and attention (LTP). LTP (long term potentiation) was discovered to occur in the hippocampus and is believed to be one of the main neural mechanisms by which memory is stored in the brain.
A neuron known as a nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signals. Estimates put the human brain at about 100 billion neurons. The cell membrane of a neuron contain voltage-gated ion channels that allow the neuron to generate an electrical signal. These signals are generated and propagated by charge-carrying ions such as sodium (Na+), potassium (K+), chloride (Cl-), and calcium (Ca2+). • The law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. A consequence of this law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another.
In physics, a phonon is an excitation in a periodic, elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules. Phonons represent an excited state in the quantum mechanics of vibrations of elastic structures of interacting particles. Two types of phonons are acoustic phonons and optical phonons.
The frequencies of acoustic phonons, which are the phonons described above, tend to zero with longer wavelength, and correspond to sound waves in the lattice. Optical phonons have a non-zero frequency, they are called optical because in ionic crystals they are excited by infrared radiation. They correspond to a mode of vibration where positive and negative ions at adjacent lattice sites swing against each other, creating a time-varying electrical dipole moment.
