What Is Consciousness? Awareness, the Brain, and the Nature of Experience

By Lindsay Goodwin, The Consciousness Medium™ & Founder of High Frequency Mind™

Consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience, the fact that seeing, sensing, feeling, remembering, or thinking feels like something from the inside. Thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions are contents that appear within consciousness; they are not necessarily the whole of consciousness itself.

That short definition gives us a useful starting point, but it does not close the question. Neuroscience can study the brain activity associated with conscious experience. Psychology can examine attention, memory, and self-awareness. Philosophy asks why experience exists at all. Spiritual traditions explore awareness directly through contemplation. Each lens contributes something, yet no single scientific theory currently explains every dimension of consciousness.

What Is Consciousness?

In everyday language, consciousness can mean being awake, being aware, or understanding what is happening. In consciousness science, the term often refers to subjective experience itself: the felt quality of seeing a color, hearing music, sensing the body, remembering a loved one, or noticing a thought.

Researchers commonly separate two dimensions:

• Level of consciousness: the overall condition of wakefulness or arousal, such as waking, dreaming, deep sleep, anesthesia, or a disorder of consciousness.
• Contents of consciousness: whatever is present in experience at a given moment—an image, sensation, emotion, idea, memory, or sense of self.

This distinction matters. A person can be awake while absorbed in automatic behavior, or asleep while having vivid dreams. Consciousness is therefore more nuanced than simply being awake or unconscious.

Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, and Thought: What Is the Difference?

These words are often used interchangeably, but separating them makes the subject clearer.

A useful way to picture the distinction is this: consciousness is the field of experience; thoughts, emotions, and sensations are events within that field; attention is the spotlight that selects some of those events; and meta-awareness is the recognition that the events are occurring.

This is a practical model, not a declaration that every discipline uses these words in exactly the same way. Consciousness research remains an active field, and even basic terminology is debated.

What Does the Brain Do in Conscious Experience?

The brain continuously receives signals from the senses, the body, memory, and its own ongoing activity. It filters, integrates, predicts, and prioritizes information. Only a small portion of that activity becomes something you can report or deliberately act upon.

Scientists study the neural correlates of consciousness: the minimum neural events or mechanisms reliably associated with a particular conscious experience. Imaging and electrophysiology have implicated interactions among sensory regions, thalamic systems, and frontoparietal networks, but there is no universally accepted single “consciousness center.” Different aspects of conscious experience may depend on different patterns across distributed systems.

That finding does not, by itself, settle the deeper question of whether the brain creates consciousness, enables it, constrains it, or participates in a relationship that science has not yet fully described. Correlation and mechanism are essential evidence, but neither automatically resolves the metaphysics of subjective experience.

Leading Scientific Theories of Consciousness

Several major theories attempt to explain when and why information becomes conscious:

Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

Global Neuronal Workspace Theory proposes that information becomes consciously accessible when it is amplified and broadly broadcast across a network, making it available to systems involved in reasoning, memory, report, and deliberate action. It is especially concerned with conscious access: how some information becomes globally usable.

Integrated Information Theory

Integrated Information Theory begins with properties of experience and asks what kind of physical system could possess them. It proposes that consciousness corresponds to a system’s intrinsic capacity to integrate information in a way that cannot be reduced to independent parts.

Recurrent Processing Theory

Recurrent Processing Theory emphasizes feedback loops within and between sensory areas. On this account, a purely feed-forward sweep may process a stimulus without producing conscious perception, while recurrent activity helps make perceptual experience possible.

Higher-Order Theories

Higher-order theories propose that a mental state becomes conscious when the system represents itself as being in that state. In simplified terms, seeing may become conscious when there is also a higher-order representation that you are seeing.

Predictive Processing

Predictive-processing approaches describe the brain as continually generating predictions about sensory causes and updating them using incoming signals. These models are influential for understanding perception and conditioning, although predictive processing is not one single, universally accepted theory of consciousness.

A large adversarial collaboration published in Nature in 2025 directly tested predictions from Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory in 256 participants using fMRI, MEG, and intracranial EEG. The findings supported some predictions while challenging important claims from both theories. That is not a failure of consciousness science; it is science doing the difficult work of making theories testable.

The responsible conclusion is not that science has found the final answer. It is that consciousness has measurable neural conditions, several serious explanatory frameworks, and unresolved foundational questions.

Is Consciousness the Same as the Mind?

Not exactly. The mind is a broader term that can include perception, memory, language, imagination, emotion, habits, decision-making, and unconscious processing. Consciousness refers more specifically to subjective experience or the state in which mental contents are present to awareness.

Much of what the mind does never enters conscious awareness. You recognize familiar shapes, interpret language, regulate movement, and generate predictions before you can describe how those processes occurred. Consciousness receives a curated version of an immense amount of activity.

This helps explain why a thought can feel immediate and authoritative even though it arose from processes you did not consciously choose.

Are You Your Thoughts?

Thoughts are real events, but they are not automatically facts, instructions, identities, or prophecies. A thought can be a memory, a protective prediction, a learned belief, a rehearsed judgment, or an imaginative possibility.

If you can notice a thought, there is a meaningful distinction between the thought and the awareness noticing it. That distinction is central to Are You Your Thoughts? and to the practice of observer consciousness.

The goal is not to eliminate thinking. Thought is one of the mind’s most valuable capacities. The shift is from automatic identification,“this thought is me and must be true”, to conscious relationship, “this thought is present; what information does it contain, and how do I want to respond?”

What Is Observer Consciousness?

Observer consciousness is the capacity to notice thoughts, emotions, sensations, and impulses without being completely fused with them. It is not emotional detachment or dissociation. Healthy observation includes the body, stays connected to the present, and creates enough space for choice.

For example, “I am a failure” collapses identity into a thought. “I notice the thought that I am a failure, and I feel tightness in my chest” adds awareness. The situation may still be painful, but awareness gives you more information and more freedom in how you meet it.

This witnessing capacity does not place you above your human experience. It helps you inhabit that experience more honestly.

How Conditioning Shapes Conscious Experience

You do not meet every moment as a blank slate. The nervous system uses past experience to anticipate what matters, what is safe, and what requires action. Family patterns, culture, attachment, repetition, reward, threat, and language all influence the meanings the mind assigns to what it encounters.

Conditioning can shape:

• what captures your attention;
• which sensations register as threatening;
• the stories you tell about other people’s behavior;
• what feels possible or impossible;
• which emotions you permit yourself to feel; and
• the response patterns that activate before reflection.

This is why two people can encounter the same event and have different conscious experiences of it. For a deeper explanation, read How Does Conditioning Shape Perception? and Why Do Subconscious Patterns Keep Repeating?

Recognizing conditioning is not about blaming the past. It is about seeing the filters clearly enough that they no longer make every decision for you.

Science and Spirituality Ask Different Questions

Science asks questions that can be operationalized and tested: What brain activity accompanies visual awareness? What changes under anesthesia? Which information becomes reportable? How do attention and memory affect experience?

Spiritual and contemplative traditions often ask questions from the first-person perspective: What remains when thought becomes quiet? Can awareness observe the sense of self? What changes when identity is no longer organized entirely around mental content?

These approaches can inform one another, but they should not be collapsed. A meaningful contemplative experience is not automatically proof of a scientific theory. A neural correlate does not automatically exhaust the meaning of an experience.

High Frequency Mind™ works at this meeting point while keeping the categories clear: science can help explain mechanisms of the Human Avatar; direct experience can reveal how awareness relates to those mechanisms; and philosophy helps us examine what we believe those observations mean.

Consciousness in the High Frequency Mind™ Framework

The High Frequency Mind™ framework describes three interrelated dimensions:

1. The Human Avatar

The Human Avatar is your embodied interface: brain, nervous system, senses, emotions, memory, identity, conditioning, and physical life. It is not an obstacle to transcend. It is the living system through which human experience occurs.

2. Pure Awareness, or the Infinite Self

Pure Awareness is Lindsay’s philosophical term for the unconditioned awareness beneath the changing contents of experience. Thoughts change. Emotions move. Roles, beliefs, and circumstances evolve. Awareness is the capacity in which those changes are known.

This is a spiritual-philosophical proposition within the framework, not a settled conclusion of neuroscience. Its value is experiential: you can explore whether recognizing awareness changes your relationship with conditioned mental activity.

3. The High Frequency Mind™, or Conscious Navigator

The Conscious Navigator is the integrated capacity to meet human experience from awareness. It does not reject the brain, body, or personality. It learns their patterns and works with them deliberately.

In this model, “higher frequency” does not mean performing positivity or avoiding difficult emotions. It means increasing the coherence between awareness, truth, the nervous system, and conscious action.

How Consciousness Becomes Embodied

An insight becomes transformational when it changes how you inhabit a real moment. Embodied consciousness is not only the ability to describe awareness; it is the ability to remain present enough to sense, discern, and choose.

1. Pause before interpretation. Give the nervous system a moment before turning sensation into story.
2. Orient to the present. Notice the room, the ground beneath you, and the signals that establish where you are now.
3. Name the content. Identify what is present: thought, emotion, body sensation, memory, impulse, or image.
4. Separate observation from conclusion. “My chest is tight” is an observation. “Something terrible will happen” is a prediction.
5. Ask what is conditioned. Does this response belong to the present, or is an earlier pattern shaping perception?
6. Listen for congruence. Notice what aligns across body, values, evidence, and deeper knowing. This can also help when distinguishing intuition from anxiety.
7. Choose one grounded action. Consciousness becomes embodied through behavior: a boundary, a conversation, a rest, a decision, or a different response.

Awareness without embodiment can become abstraction. Embodiment without awareness can become repetition. Integration brings the two together.

Can Consciousness Change?

Your basic capacity for experience and the contents of experience are not the same thing. The contents can change constantly. Attention can become more flexible. Meta-awareness can become more reliable. Conditioned reactions can become easier to recognize. Your tolerance for sensation and emotion can expand through safe, repeated practice.

People often describe this as “expanding consciousness.” A careful interpretation is that the range, clarity, and integration of conscious awareness can develop, even if the underlying nature of consciousness remains an open question.

Practices such as meditation, journaling, therapy, somatic work, contemplative inquiry, creative expression, and time in nature may help people notice experience more precisely. No practice guarantees a particular spiritual state, and persistent confusion, distress, sleep disruption, or loss of functioning deserves qualified medical or mental-health support.

Frequently Asked Questions About Consciousness

What is the simplest definition of consciousness?

Consciousness is the presence or capacity for subjective experience, the fact that an experience feels like something from the inside.

What is the difference between consciousness and awareness?

The terms overlap. A practical distinction is that consciousness is the overall presence or field of experience, while awareness is the knowing or noticing of particular experience. Different scientific and philosophical traditions define them differently.

Is consciousness created by the brain?

Brain function is tightly related to human conscious experience, and changing the brain can change consciousness. Whether the brain produces consciousness, enables it, or participates in a deeper relationship remains philosophically and scientifically unresolved.

Where is consciousness located in the brain?

There is no universally accepted single location. Research points to interacting cortical, thalamic, sensory, and frontoparietal systems, with different networks contributing to different aspects of conscious experience.

Can consciousness exist without thought?

Many people report moments of sensory presence or contemplative awareness with little verbal thought. Thought is a content of consciousness, so a reduction in thought does not necessarily mean an absence of experience.

What is pure awareness?

In the High Frequency Mind™ framework, Pure Awareness is the unconditioned knowing beneath changing thoughts, emotions, and roles. This is a spiritual-philosophical concept offered for inquiry, not a settled scientific claim.

What is the subconscious?

The subconscious is an informal term for mental processes outside current awareness, including learned associations, automatic predictions, and habitual responses. Scientists more often use terms such as nonconscious or unconscious processing.

How can I become more conscious in daily life?

Practice noticing before reacting: orient to the present, name thoughts and sensations, distinguish observations from interpretations, and choose a response aligned with evidence, values, and the body’s current reality.

Is observer consciousness dissociation?

Not when it is embodied. Observer consciousness includes present-moment sensation and connection. Dissociation commonly involves disconnection, unreality, numbness, or loss of continuity and may require professional support.

Can an artificial intelligence be conscious?

There is currently no agreed scientific test that establishes subjective experience in an AI system. Sophisticated language or behavior alone does not demonstrate that there is something it feels like to be that system.

Continue Exploring

• The High Frequency Mind™ Framework
• What Is Observer Consciousness?
• Are You Your Thoughts?
• How Does Conditioning Shape Perception?
• What Is a Spiritual Awakening?
• The High Frequency Mind™ Book

Scientific Sources and Further Reading

1. Melloni, L., et al. (2025). An adversarial collaboration testing global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness. Nature. Read the study.
2. Mashour, G. A., Roelfsema, P., Changeux, J.-P., & Dehaene, S. (2020). Conscious processing and the global neuronal workspace hypothesis. Neuron. Read the review.
3. Dehaene, S., & Changeux, J.-P. (2011). Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing. Neuron. Read the review.
4. Tononi, G., Boly, M., Massimini, M., & Koch, C. (2016). Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. View the paper.
5. Albantakis, L., et al. (2023). Integrated information theory (IIT) 4.0. PLoS Computational Biology. View the paper.

About Lindsay Goodwin

Lindsay Goodwin, known as The Consciousness Medium™, is a consciousness teacher, intuitive medium, author, speaker, natural medicine clinician, and founder of High Frequency Mind™. Across nearly two decades of clinical and intuitive work with more than 2,000 private clients, she has explored how awareness, subconscious conditioning, nervous-system responses, and inner knowing shape the way people experience themselves, relate to others, make decisions, and practice conscious leadership.

Self-mastery is central to Lindsay’s work. She invites people to remember that we are pure awareness experiencing human life, to recognize the power within themselves, and to trust their inner knowing. A near-death experience in 2017 deepened this understanding and helped shape The Architecture of the Infinite Self, her framework for exploring who we are beneath learned roles, beliefs, and patterns. Through her books, podcast, private mentorship, and speaking, Lindsay helps people awaken to themselves and bring that awareness into the choices they make every day.