Consciousness is the type of information of processing where individuals are aware of their environment, thoughts, feelings, and memory. Consciousness varies between different levels of awareness. It is divided into three components, unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. When one is unconscious, they are unaware of their surroundings and cannot create thoughts or comprehend feelings. In the subconscious state, mental processes occur below conscious awareness. Subconscious states may be induced by the use of drugs or hypnosis. Seep, and dreams occur in the subconscious state. In the conscious state, people are aware of their surroundings and interact with environmental stimuli or express thoughts and feelings on one activity. Consciousness may shift from one stimulus to another in a matter of seconds, but the experience of it seems effortless.
Selective consciousness refers to attention allocation. It occurs where individuals filter stimulus from their surroundings and choose which ones to process. Attention is a limited resource, and therefore selective attention entails allocating focus to a particular object or environmental stimulus for a selected period. Selective consciousness involves processing relevant information from the surrounding for instance when a person is sitting on a bench by the roadside reading a magazine; there are sounds of people talking, the sound of cars hooting and other different kinds of stimuli. The individual will hear all of these but selectively focus on the reading. Selective attention may occur through two channels of perception that is, auditory and visual. People in an environment with many stimuli filter the auditory messages they need to process through selective auditory attention. Similarly, a visual field is composed of very many different objects. Individuals perceive which components to visualize through selective visual attention.
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Consciousness encompasses different levels of awareness. The levels of awareness are categorized into four states. When there is little to no awareness, a person is unconscious. Examples of such a state are when a person is in a coma or under anesthesia. In the subconscious state, one is below conscious awareness but can be brought to consciousness by a significant external stimulus. A person is in the subconscious state when sleeping or dreaming. Automatic processing is a level of awareness that requires minimal conscious attention as the activities done in automatic processing are learned. Automatic processes occur when a person is fully conscious. Such processes include walking while talking on a phone, or driving while lost in thoughts. Due to the learned characteristics of the activity being done, individuals separate their attention and do an activity in the presence of another stimulus. In retrospect, controlled processes are the activities people do that require high levels of awareness and individuals focus all their attention maximum attention such as learning how to drive a car or doing an exam.
Levels of awareness apply to daily living. We pay attention to the specific stimulus that affects our physiological and psychological processes. For instance, in the morning we choose to take breakfast because of the physiological need to satisfy hunger. We practice many learned characteristics through automatic processing such as walking or driving to workplaces while thinking of other things. To illustrate the levels of consciousness, consider this, before waking up I am in the subconscious state of consciousness. I wake up and take care of all the morning chores through controlled processes of focusing on one aspect at a time. However, since some of these chores are recurring and learned, I do them using automatic processing. I get in the car consciously aware of the environment. However, once I begin driving, it being an automated process, my mind wavers into the events that happened yesterday or how I expect today to be. However, the mind wavering during driving can have detrimental effects. For one, being lost in thoughts, I could lose the attention of the road and hit someone or veer off course. Mind wandering involves a lapse in focus due to the absorption of a person in their thoughts which may affect performance (Walker, 2018).
Selective attention is needed for safe driving; distracted driving also includes activities such as operating phones while driving. The divided attention may lead to an accident if not regulated immediately. Drivers with higher instances of inattention commit a lot of errors (Montes et al., 2015). Concentrating on other things outside the area of focus on the road such as talking to the passengers also may lead to accidents, accidents that may put a passenger or me in a coma which is an unconscious state with no awareness of environmental stimuli.
Given automatic processing incorporates more than one levels of awareness, although helpful in multitasking purposes, mind wavering during indulgence of life or death situations may be critical. Given the hypothetical situation of selective consciousness, while driving, to prevent accidents and preserve human life, I would change selective consciousness to controlled such that all attention is focused on the road. If I were in a position to change the concept of automatic processing in consciousness, I would make it a controlled process such that every conscious decision requires maximum focus. This would prevent mind-wavering during driving. Evidence suggests that mind wavering episodes have a significant influence on the variability in performance (Van der Wal et al., 2018).
Selective attention is beneficial to the performance of tasks. People need to filter overload stimuli and focus on the necessary information. Knowledge of the different states of consciousness is significant to comprehend the levels of awareness we usually go through. Selective consciousness is essential for visual perceptions of all of the sensory stimuli in our optical path. The same applies to all the auditory signals we perceive from the environment. In the context of selective consciousness, while driving, I have understood that a lapse in attention may have life-threatening outcomes. Moving forward, I would take note of associating controlled processes with automatic processing while conducting activities.
Works Cited
Irrmischer, M., van der Wal, C. N., Mansvelder, H. D., & Linkenkaer-Hansen, K. (2018). Negative mood and mind wandering increase long-range temporal correlations in attention fluctuations. PloS one , 13 (5), e0196907.
H. E. Walker & Lana T. (2018)” Mind-wandering while driving: The impact of fatigue, task length, and sustained attention abilities” Science Direct https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2018.08.009
Montes S. Introzzi M. Ledesma D. and Lopez S (2015) Selective Attention and Error Proneness while Driving: Research Using a Conjunctive Visual Search Task Avances en Psicologia Latinoamericana 34(2) DOI: 10.12804/apl34.2.2016.01
