Yesterday left me with some questions yet again, to no surprise really!

Some of these questions popped up after I braved the weather to listen to an interesting lecture at the Royal Society of London, a Francis Crick Prize lecture by Geraint Rees called ‘Decoding Consciousness‘. Now, I’m certainly no expert in the study of the workings of the human brain as you can see here so you can imagine that some of the lecture left me a bit confused.

They managed to show in scans that there is a part of the brain that fires up in response to sensory stimuli even if we consciously are unaware of this. Either I missed the point completely (which is not unthinkable!) or it was a confirmation of something I already know.

Think about it for a moment……. As you sit here reading this how consciously aware are you of the temperature of the room, the brightness of the lights, etc? Not very much probably until I just pointed your attention to it. This to me shows that what we are consciously aware of is only a small part of what is really going on in reality (reality being another question, I’ll leave this one till later!).

So, is it just me or is this the question here; Is your consciousness something to rely on to paint you a picture of ‘reality’, to tell you what is really going on, to make you feel in touch with the world?