FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

experiences, including our thoughts, feelings, perceptions (visual, au-
ditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile), mental images, and sense of self.
The term consciousness is often also used in this context. By
consciousness I will mean the capacity to be aware. Aware of what? We
are aware of our mental experiences—our thoughts, feelings, and per-
ceptions. Because to have a mind is to have mental experiences, and to
have consciousness is to be aware of these mental experiences, these
definitions of mind and consciousness are very closely related. As a re-
sult, one often finds the two terms used interchangeably.
What would it mean to have thoughts and feelings without
awareness? This may happen, for example, in dreaming during sleep.
Our dreams are filled with thoughts, feelings, and other mental phe-
nomena—although we are seemingly not aware of this at the time of
dreaming. We may become aware—when we awaken and remember
a dream, or in states of lucid dreaming—but often we are not aware.
(There is the additional complication of the possibility that we are
aware during dreaming but we simply don’t remember being aware.
Clearly, the issue of awareness is subtle. We return to this in later
chapters.)
Another example would be the Freudian unconscious, Sigmund
Freud’s (1856-1939) concept of how cognitive content out of our
awareness may nonetheless have substantial impact on our behavior.
However, precisely because this content is mental, it has the poten-
tial to enter awareness. This is the task in psychoanalysis: bringing
unconscious things related to one’s behavior into consciousness,
into awareness, where they can be subjected to analysis and become
amenable to change.
In any case, to have mind or consciousness by these definitions is
to have an experience of what it is like to be a particular person, or an-
imal, or organism, or—who’s to say at this point?—thing. Thus, to ask