Primary consciousness

Primary consciousness is a term the American biologist Gerald Edelman coined to describe the ability, found in humans and some animals, to integrate observed events with memory to create an awareness of the present and immediate past of the world around them. This form of consciousness is also sometimes called "sensory consciousness". Put another way, primary consciousness is the presence of various subjective sensory contents of consciousness such as sensations, perceptions, and mental images. For example, primary consciousness includes a person's experience of the blueness of the ocean, a bird's song, and the feeling of pain. Thus, primary consciousness refers to being mentally aware of things in the world in the present without any sense of past and future; it is composed of mental images bound to a time around the measurable present.

Conversely, higher order consciousness can be described as being "conscious of being conscious"; it includes reflective thought, a concept of the past, and speculation about the future.

Primary consciousness can be subdivided into two forms, focal awareness and peripheral awareness. Focal awareness encompasses the center of attention, whereas peripheral awareness consists of things outside the center of attention, which a person or animal is only dimly aware of.

One prominent theory for the neurophysiological basis of primary consciousness was proposed by Gerald Edelman. This theory of consciousness is premised upon three major assumptions:

Edelman's theory focuses on two nervous system organizations: the brainstem and limbic systems on one side and the thalamus and cerebral cortex on the other side. The brain stem and limbic system take care of essential body functioning and survival, while the thalamocortical system receives signals from sensory receptors and sends out signals to voluntary muscles such as those of the arms and legs. The theory asserts that the connection of these two systems during evolution helped animals learn adaptive behaviors. This connection allows past signals related to values set by the limbic-brain stem system and categorized signals from the outside world to be correlated, resulting in memory in conceptual areas. This memory is then linked to the organism's current perception, which results in an awareness of the present, or primary consciousness. In other words, Edelman posits that primary consciousness arises from the correlation of conceptual memory to a set of ongoing perceptual categorizations—a "remembered present".

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