What is Consciousness?

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Have you ever stopped to think about consciousness? About where your thoughts come from and where they are stored? I thought for many years that all my thoughts originated from my brain. I thought my brain was a great warehouse of everything I had ever read, heard, or experienced. I believed my thoughts consisted of data pulled from the warehouse and cobbled together in a logical (and sometimes illogical) pattern of things, then expressed in words that were consistent with those learnings; those beliefs. As I grew older and experienced a few lapses of memory, I believed it was not because the information had disappeared, but rather because I could not access it at that moment. Perhaps the neural pathways had too much information to sift through quickly. Or maybe there was just so much information clogging up the neural pathways that my ability to recall and retrieve the stored information in a timely manner, from that library-sized warehouse, was temporarily impeded or blocked. And…