Consciousness states

Q. You had a conscious state of mind that when you were giving advice to your client you were. . . giving advice to the German government did you not ... 

Heart dominates all mental activities in the conscious state... 

In the second place, normal consciousness can, at its natural limit, be so alluringly ecstatic as to induce a craving for more of the same. Lost elation calls for its restoration or enhancement via a stimulant booster. Such conscious state properties as creativity, sexual pleasure, and learning capacity can all be pumped up by bolstering or imitating the brain s own uppers. 

When we enter the values of A, I, and M into the model, the state of the brain-mind—including its conscious aspect—is represented as a point in a three-dimensional state space. This point is constantly moving, and its location and trajectory are controlled by intrinsic and extrinsic influences. Using the AIM model measures we can—for the first time—begin to map normal and abnormal alternatives in conscious state onto a physiologically realistic schema. 

Some scientists are sure that waking is the only state of consciousness worthy of consideration because only in waking do we achieve (1) veridical awareness of the outside world, (2) veridical awareness of our own conscious state, and (3) awareness that we have other awarenesses. Dreaming, then, is an altered state of consciousness, because all three of... 

The trade-off between science and spirituality is fair and square in this formulation. We need no longer invoke disembodied spirits to account for mental life. At the same time, we can retain the notion of free will that is the basis of our ethical codes, our laws, and our self-respect. Stretching the point, we can envisage a materialist spirituality. Because conscious states include poetic wonder, awe, reverence, and numinosity, and because we know all such attributes are aspects of brain activity, we can safely say that the brain is not only conscious, but is also a spiritual self standing in appropriate awe of its own complexity, creativity, and social conscience. 

In retrospect, tampering with the brain s own conscious state control systems was bound to influence the natural complement of therapeutic psychopharmacology that is recreational psychopathology Prior to the pharmaceutical era, psychedelic chemicals were discovered accidentally, usually by making concoctions of plant leaves, stems, fruits, or seeds. Their chemistry and the mechanisms of the action on the brain were unknown. 

The three-dimensional AIM model is a first attempt to concretize and to visualize the state space concept. Because it has three dimensions, it is a space, not a plane, as are traditional representations of waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Furthermore, when realistic values are assigned to the three dimensions of the model—and with time as the fourth dimension—orbital trajectories of conscious state change emerge from the mapping. 

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you already understand our natural tendency to dissociate—to be in one conscious state but to experience in it properties of another. I will show that when amplified this normal process can lead to such exceptional states as sleep walking and hypnopompic hallucinations, and that these exceptional states can become models for understanding out of body experiences, extrasensory perceptions, or alien abductions All of these exotic experiences can— and usually do—occur in the privacy and safety of our bedrooms. 

The power of my dreaming was proportional to the power of my REM sleep—and that power was proportional to the power of my previously hypervigilant waking. It is this push-pull reciprocity—like the strength of the tide when the moon is full—that evokes the image of waking and dreaming as the poles of our conscious state cosmos. This reciprocity also mirrors a metabolic reciprocity deep in our brains that has functional implications we now only dimly perceive. 

In this hierarchical scheme, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a head ganglion for deliberate decision making, an arbiter and executor of conscious processing, and a director of what we call our will. No doubt oversimplified and minimizing for heuristic purposes what must be constant and massively parallel interactions with other parts of the system, this model is particularly attractive in the context of our conscious state paradigm. 

At stake here is not only the mechanistic basis of differential selective brain activation patterns in different conscious states, but also the deeper question of how local neuronal activity and the cerebral microcirculation (1) are co-controlled, and (2) interact cooperatively. It would be surprising if the neuromodulators did not play an integrative role in this process. 

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