Consciousness of the person represents the highest form of mental reflection of the world created in the course of social life. It is shown verbally and in the form of sensual images. Is a basis of cognitive and educational activity of the individual.
Consciousness of the person
The main difference of the person as look from all others is its ability to abstract thinking, activity planning, ability to remember and reflect on past experience, giving it an assessment and drawing conclusions. All above-mentioned has a direct bearing on the sphere of consciousness.
Functionally consciousness is understood as the operating system of a brain. The similar view on this concept found wide circulation in natural sciences, in particular, in biology and medicine. However it is fully not capable to capture the value and importance of consciousness for the person, consciousness – much more, than usual physiological process.
The domestic psychology defines consciousness as the highest form of reflection of objective properties and regularities of surrounding space. And, consciousness is inherent only in the person – as to a socio-historical subject. Consciousness forms at the person internal model of the outside world, and this indispensable condition for any cognitive activity and aspiration of the person to transform the world around. Consciousness develops in the course of interaction of the individual with other people, in the course of receiving social experience. An essence of all forms of mental human activity, beginning from the simplest (reflex) and finishing with the most difficult (consciousness), is that they perform function of orientation of a living organism in external space. The external environment is more difficult, the organization of mentality is more complex that helps to be guided successfully in surrounding space.
Informative processes of consciousness
For the person the consciousness is characterized, mainly, by cognitive activity. Knowledge of the human being begins with storing of simple elements of culture and the world around. Using the gained knowledge, the child accepts and the prisoner in surrounding objects remembers sense and value, learns to operate with them without direct influence on objects. The form of such operating, verbal and speech, and similar activity are characteristic of consciousness. The structure of consciousness includes all types of informative processes: feeling, memory, perception, imagination, thinking. Thanks to them the person constantly fills up knowledge of himself and of the world. If any of these informative processes is broken or incorrectly functions, it disturbs work of all consciousness in general.