Self-awareness
In philosophy, self-awareness is the awareness and reflection of one's own personality or individuality, including traits, feelings, and behaviors.
Ramachandran speculates that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self-awareness.
[4] In an essay written for the Edge Foundation in 2009, Ramachandran gave the following explanation of his theory: "[T]hese neurons can not only help simulate other people's behavior but can be turned 'inward'—as it were—to create second-order representations or meta-representations of your own earlier brain processes.
The main point is that the two co-evolved, mutually enriching each other to create the mature representation of self that characterizes modern humans.
[6] In health and medicine, body awareness refers to a person's ability to direct their focus on various internal sensations accurately.
[14] Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy describes "the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations."
[9] This particular type of self-development pertains to becoming conscious of one's body and one's state of mind—including thoughts, actions, ideas, feelings, and interactions with others.
As an infant moves to middle childhood and onwards to adolescence, they develop more advanced levels of self-awareness and self-description.
This transition enables a person's awareness of their past, present, and future to grow as they remember their conscious experiences more often.
Many adolescents display happiness and self-confidence around friends, but hopelessness and anger around parents due to the fear of being a disappointment.
[27] In adolescent development, self-awareness has a more complex emotional context than in the early childhood phase.
Elements can include self-image, self-concept, and self-consciousness among other traits that relate to Rochat's final level of self awareness, however self-awareness remains a distinct concept.
[29] PCRS is a 30-item self-report instrument which asks the subject to use a 5-point Likert scale to rate his or her degree of difficulty in a variety of tasks and functions.
The difference between the relatives' and patient's perceptions is considered an indirect measure of impaired self-awareness.
This is because, although individuals with mild brain injury fall within the normal range in psychological test results, they may still experience cognitive difficulties.
Simply asking a patient why they are in the hospital or what is wrong with their body can give compelling answers as to what they see and are analyzing.
[34] A key issue with this disorder is that people who do have anosognosia and suffer from certain illnesses may not be aware of them, which ultimately leads them to put themselves in dangerous positions.
[35] Higher functioning individuals on the autism spectrum disorder scale have reported that they are more self-aware when alone unless they are in sensory overload or immediately following social exposure.
[36] Self-awareness dissipates when an autistic is faced with a demanding social situation, possibly due to the behavioral inhibitory system which is responsible for self-preservation.
[37] Schizophrenia as a disease state is characterized by severe cognitive dysfunction and it is uncertain to what extent patients are aware of this deficiency.
Though it is impossible to access one's consciousness and truly understand what a schizophrenic believes, regardless in this study, patients were not aware of their cognitive dysfunctional reasoning.
During the test, the experimenter looks for the animals to undergo four stages:[40] The red-spot technique, created by Gordon G. Gallup,[41] studies self-awareness in primates.
[42] Chimpanzees and other apes—extensively studied species—are most similar to humans, with the most convincing findings and straightforward evidence of self-awareness in animals.
Diana Reiss, a psycho-biologist at the New York Aquarium discovered that bottlenose dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors.
When placed in front of a mirror, the birds with red and yellow spots began scratching at their necks, signaling the understanding of something different being on their bodies.
[47] A few slight occurrences of behavior towards the magpie's own body happened in the trial with the black mark and the mirror.
[48] In science fiction, self-awareness describes an essential human property that often (depending on the circumstances of the story) bestows personhood onto a non-human.
[50] Pope Paul VI, in his first encyclical letter, Ecclesiam Suam (1964), refers to "an increased self awareness on the part of the [Catholic] Church" as a fundamental requirement to ensure the church survived with a clear mission in the face of the changing secular context in which it operated.
[51] It has been proposed that robots which use internal models to simulate their own actions could be classified as functionally self-aware.
