The development of the psyche and consciousness briefly. Consciousness as the highest stage in the development of the psyche

abstract

Mind and consciousness

Introduction

Man has a wonderful gift - the mind. Thanks to the mind, a person received the ability to think, analyze, generalize. Since ancient times, thinkers have been intensely searching for the solution to the mystery of the phenomenon of human consciousness and psyche.

The path of development of ideas about the psyche can be divided into two periods - pre-scientific and scientific. Even in ancient times, it was discovered that along with the material, objective, external, objective world, there are non-material, internal, subjective phenomena - human feelings, desires, memories. Every person is endowed with a psychic life. The first scientific ideas about the psyche arose in the ancient world (Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome). They were reflected in the works of philosophers, physicians, teachers. It is possible to conditionally single out a number of stages in the development of a scientific understanding of the nature of the psyche and the subject matter of psychology as a science. The turning point in the development of views on the psyche was the 17th century.

In Soviet psychology, the methodological principles of determinism, the unity of consciousness and activity, and the development of the psyche in activity were established.

Psychologists, such as L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontiev, S.L. Rubinstein, D.B. Elkonin, B.G. Ananiev. In the works of the above-mentioned domestic psychologists, the problems of studying the personality as an integral systemic mental education in its multifaceted social and natural relationships and in the process of development and the psychology of education are formulated. Thus, domestic psychology has formed a rather detailed scientific picture of the psyche.

1. The problem of the psyche and consciousness of psychology

1.1 Analysis of the concept of "psyche"

consciousness psychological psyche

The psyche is a reflection of objects and phenomena of objective reality, which is a function of the brain.

The psyche is inherent in man and animals. However, the human psyche, as the highest form of the psyche, is also denoted by the concept of "consciousness". But the concept of the psyche is wider than the concept of consciousness, since the psyche includes the sphere of the subconscious and the superconscious ("Over I"). The structure of the human psyche includes: mental properties, mental processes, mental qualities and mental states.

Mental properties- these are stable manifestations that have a genetic basis, are inherited and practically do not change in the process of life.

Mental properties characterize every human personality: its interests and inclinations, its abilities, its temperament and character. It is impossible to find two people who are absolutely identical in their mental properties. Each person differs from other people in a number of features, the totality of which forms his individuality. The individuality of a person - his character, his interests and abilities - always to some extent reflects his biography, the life path that he has passed. Of central importance for the formation of a person's individuality, his interests and inclinations, his character is a worldview, i.e. a system of views on all the phenomena of nature and society surrounding a person.

mental processes- develop and form under the influence of external conditions of life. These include: sensation, perception, memory, thinking, imagination, representation, attention, will, emotions.

Mental qualities- arise and are formed under the influence of the educational process and life. The qualities of the psyche are most clearly represented in the character.

mental states- represent a relatively stable dynamic background of the activity and activity of the psyche. Mental states are divided into gnostic, emotional and volitional.

Gnostic mental states: these are curiosity, curiosity, surprise, amazement, bewilderment, etc.

Emotional mental states: joy, grief, sadness, indignation, anger, resentment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, etc.

Volitional mental states: activity, passivity, determination and indecision, confidence and uncertainty, restraint and incontinence, etc. All these states are similar to the corresponding mental processes and personality traits, in which one of the most important laws of psychology is manifested.

As an objective criterion of the psyche, A.N. Leontiev proposes to consider the ability of living organisms to respond to biologically neutral influences. If a living organism acquires the ability both to reflect biologically neutral properties and to establish their connection with biologically significant properties, then the possibilities of its survival turn out to be incomparably wider. Example: Not a single animal feeds on sound, just as animals do not die from the sound of ordinary intensity. But sounds in nature are the most important signals of living food or approaching danger. Hearing them means being able to approach food or avoid a deadly attack.

Now we need to introduce two fundamental concepts that are related to the proposed criterion: these are the concepts of "irritability" and "sensitivity".

Irritability is the ability of living organisms to respond to biologically significant influences.

Sensitivity is the ability of organisms to reflect influences that are biologically neutral, but objectively related to biotic properties. When it comes to sensitivity, "reflection", according to the hypothesis of A.N. Leontiev, has two aspects: objective and subjective.

In an objective sense, “to reflect” means to react, primarily motorically, to a given agent. The subjective aspect is expressed in the inner experience, sensation, of this agent. Irritability has no subjective aspect. .

A.N. Leontiev identifies three stages in the evolutionary development of the psyche:

The stage of the elementary, sensory psyche (the reflection of individual properties of objects is carried out, i.e. there is a sensation); those. ability to reflect properties of an object. The main form of behavior is taxis, reflexes and instincts. Instincts are an innate program of behavior or species experience of an animal.

The stage of the perceptual psyche (there is a reflection of integral objects, i.e. perception arises); the main form of reflection is objective perception, i.e. animals are able to reflect objects in the form of integral mental formations. The main form of behavior is skills.
Skills - the acquired program of behavior or personal experience of the animal. . The stage of intellect (there is a reflection of the relationship between objects):

a) sensorimotor intelligence;

b) consciousness.

Stage of elementary sensory psyche. The emergence of sensitive living organisms is associated with the complication of their vital activity. This complication lies in the fact that the processes of external activity are singled out, which mediate the relationship of organisms to those properties of the environment on which the preservation and development of their life depends. The isolation of these processes is due to the appearance of irritability to influences that perform a signal function. This is how the ability of organisms to reflect the influences of the surrounding reality in their objective connections and relationships arises - mental reflection. The development of these forms of mental reflection proceeds along with the complication of the structure of organisms and depending on the development of the activity with which they arise. Its main feature lies in the fact that it is stimulated by one or another property that affects the animal, to which it is directed at the same time, but which does not coincide with those properties on which the life of a given animal directly depends. It is determined, therefore, not by the given influencing properties of the medium in themselves, but by these properties in their relation to other properties.

Stage of perceptual psyche

Following the stage of the elementary sensory psyche, the second stage of development may be called the stage of the perceptual psyche. It is characterized by the ability to reflect external objective reality, no longer in the form of individual elementary sensations caused by individual properties or their combination, but in the form of a reflection of things. The transition to this stage in the development of the psyche is associated with a change in the structure of animal activity, which is prepared at the previous stage. This change in the structure of activity consists in the fact that its content, already outlined earlier, which objectively relates not to the very object to which the animal's activity is directed, but to the conditions in which this object is objectively given in the environment, now stands out. This content is no longer associated with what stimulates activity as a whole, but responds to special influences that cause it, which we will call an operation.

stage of intelligence. The psyche of most mammalian animals remains at the stage of the perceptual psyche, but the most highly organized of them rise to another stage of development.

This new, higher stage is usually called the stage of intellect (or "manual thinking"). Of course, animal intelligence is not at all the same as human intelligence; there is, as we shall see, an enormous qualitative difference between them. The stage of intellect is characterized by very complex activity and equally complex forms of reflection of reality.

Ontogeny (from the Greek "ontos" - being; "genesis" - origin) - the development of the individual's psyche, from the prenatal stage to death from old age. Individual development, just like the development of mankind, has its own patterns, its own periods, stages and crises. Each period of ontogenetic development is characterized by certain age characteristics. Age features form a certain complex of diverse properties, including cognitive, motivational, emotional and other characteristics of the individual. It should be immediately noted that there are a very large number of approaches to the problem of the development of the psyche. Moreover, in different approaches, different stages of development are distinguished.

Ontogenesis of the psyche is the development of the psyche of a single organism in the course of its life. Ontogenesis of the human psyche - developmental psychology (childhood, adolescence, youthfulness, youth, maturity, old age, old age). The acceleration of mental development is facilitated by training, upbringing, work, and communication. Higher mental functions are formed thanks to psychological tools (words, speech, meaning). As a result of the ontogenetic development of the human psyche, arbitrary mental functions, social needs, higher nervous feelings, abstract-logical thinking, self-consciousness and personality are formed. Social factors play a decisive role in the development of the human psyche.

A huge role and contribution was made by the domestic psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934). He developed a fundamental theory of the origin and development of higher mental functions. Based on the ideas of comparative psychology, L.S. Vygotsky began his research at the point where comparative psychology stopped before questions that were insoluble for it: it could not explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. The first version of his theoretical generalizations concerning the patterns of development of the psyche in ontogenesis, L.S. Vygotsky outlined in the work "The Development of the VPF". In this work, a scheme was presented for the formation of the human psyche in the process of using signs as a means of regulating mental activity.

Studying the problems of personality development, L.S. Vygotsky singled out the mental functions of a person, which are formed in the conditions of socialization and have some special features. In general, he defined two levels of mental processes: natural and higher. If natural functions are given to an individual as a natural being and are realized in spontaneous response, then higher mental functions (HMF) can be developed only in the process of ontogenesis during social interaction. Modern research has significantly expanded and deepened the general ideas about the patterns, essence, structure of the HMF. L.S. Vygotsky and his followers identified four main features of HMF - complexity, sociality, mediation and arbitrariness.

Complexity It is manifested in the fact that HMFs are diverse in terms of the features of formation and development. The complexity is also determined by the specifics of the relationship of some results of phylogenetic development with the results of ontogenetic development at the level of mental processes. During the historical development, man has created unique sign systems that allow comprehending, interpreting and comprehending the essence of the phenomena of the surrounding world. These systems continue to evolve and improve. Their change in a certain way affects the dynamics of the very mental processes of a person.

sociality HMF is determined by their origin. They can develop only in the process of interaction of people with each other. The main source of occurrence is internalization (the transfer of social forms of behavior to the internal plane). Internalization is carried out in the formation and development of external and internal relations of the individual. Here the HMF goes through two stages of development. First, as a form of interaction between people. Then as an internal phenomenon. Teaching a child to speak and think is a vivid example of the process of internalization.

Mediation HMF is visible in the way they function. The development of the capacity for symbolic activity and mastery of the sign is the main component of mediation. The word, image, number and other identifying signs of the phenomenon determine the semantic perspective of comprehension of the essence at the level of unity of abstraction and concretization. In this sense, thinking as operating with symbols, behind which there are representations and concepts, or creative imagination as operating with images, are the corresponding examples of the functioning of the HMF. In the process of functioning of the HMF, cognitive and emotional-volitional components of awareness are born: meanings and meanings.

Arbitrary VPF are by way of implementation. Due to mediation, a person is able to realize his functions and carry out activities in a certain direction, analyzing his experience, correcting behavior and activities. The arbitrariness of HMF is also determined by the fact that the individual is able to act purposefully, overcoming obstacles and making appropriate efforts.

Among the higher mental functions are, first of all: memory, speech, thinking and perception. Higher mental functions are complex mental processes. They are formed under the influence of biological and genetic factors, but the greatest influence on the development of higher mental functions is exerted by "social" or, as they are also called, "cultural" factors. The interaction between people has the greatest influence on the formation of higher mental functions.

1.2 Consciousness as a property of the psyche

The beginning of human history means a qualitatively new stage of development, different from the entire previous path of the biological development of living beings. New forms of the psyche are fundamentally different from the psyche of animals, this is called consciousness.

Consciousness is one of the most complex manifestations of brain activity. Although the word "consciousness" is widely used in everyday speech and scientific literature, there is no common understanding of what it means. In an elementary sense, it is simply wakefulness with the possibility of contact with the outside world and an adequate response to ongoing events. However, in scientific literature, especially in philosophy and psychology, the word "consciousness" has a different meaning. It is understood as the highest manifestation of the psyche, associated with abstraction, separation of oneself from the environment and social contacts with other people.

Consciousness has evolved along with the evolution of the psyche of animals. Over the course of millions of years, conditions were created for the emergence of a rational person; without this, the emergence of human consciousness would hardly have been possible. Initially, the initial base of the psyche arose in living organisms - reflection. Reflection reproduces the signs, characteristics and deeds of the reflected object. For example, simple organisms, as well as plants, have developed the ability to "respond" to the action of the external environment, this form of reflection is called irritability.

After many millions of years, organisms acquired the ability to sense, with the help of which a more highly organized living being, on the basis of the formed sense organs (hearing, vision, touch, smell.), Got the ability to reflect individual characteristics of objects - color, shape, temperature.

The development of human consciousness is connected with social and labor activity. In the development of labor activity lies the basic fact from which all the differences between man and animal stem. With the development of labor activity, a person influenced nature, changed it, adapting it to himself, gradually began to separate himself from nature and realize his attitude, both to nature and to other people. Through his attitude towards other people, a person began to consciously relate to himself and his own activities. His very activity became more conscious.

The emerging labor activity influenced the development of social relations, societies, developing social relations influenced the improvement of labor activity. This shift in the development of the human ancestor occurred due to a sharp change in living conditions. The catastrophic change in the environment caused great difficulties in meeting the needs - the possibilities of easy food acquisition decreased, the climate worsened. Human ancestors had to either die out or qualitatively change their behavior.

In the process of development of labor activity, tactile sensations were refined and enriched. The logic of practical actions was fixed in the head and turned into the logic of thinking: a person learned to think. And before embarking on a case, he could already mentally imagine both its result, and the method of implementation, and the means of achieving this result. Purposefulness, which is characteristic of human ore activity, is the main manifestation of human consciousness, which distinguishes his activity from the unconscious behavior of animals.

Together with the emergence of labor, man and human society were formed. Collective labor presupposes the cooperation of people and thus at least an elementary division of labor actions between its participants. The development of more advanced senses was inextricably linked with the development of sensory areas in the human brain. So the development of labor activity and the new functions that the human brain was supposed to take on were reflected in a change in its structure. Following the development of the structure, new complex functions appeared as motor, sensory, practical, cognitive. After labor, speech arose, which was a stimulus for the development of the human brain and consciousness.

Consciousness and language form a unity: in their existence they presuppose each other as an internal, logically formed ideal content presupposes its external material form. Language is the immediate reality of thought, consciousness. He participates in the process of mental activity as its sensual basis or tool. Consciousness is not only revealed, but also formed with the help of language. The connection between consciousness and language is not mechanical, but organic. They cannot be separated from each other without destroying both.

Through the language there is a transition from perceptions and ideas to concepts, the process of operating with concepts takes place. In speech, a person fixes his thoughts, feelings and, thanks to this, has the opportunity to subject them to analysis as an ideal object lying separately from him. By expressing his thoughts and feelings, a person more clearly understands them himself.

Studying the structure of individual consciousness, Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev singled out three of its components: the sensual fabric of consciousness, meaning and personal meaning.

sensual fabric of consciousness, according to A.N. For Leontiev, the sensory fabric provides reality, the authenticity of the picture of the world. This is a kind of means of fixing the surrounding world. According to A.N. Leontiev, “Consciousness forms the sensual composition of concrete images of reality, actually perceived or emerging in memory. These images differ in their modality, sensual tone, degree of clarity, greater or lesser stability. A special function of sensory images of consciousness is that they give reality to the conscious picture of the world that is revealed to the subject. That, in other words, it is precisely thanks to the sensory content of consciousness that the world appears to the subject as existing not in consciousness, but outside his consciousness - as an objective "field" and an object of his activity. Sensual tissue - the experience of a "sense of reality".

Meaning - this is the content associated with one or another expression (word, sentence, sign, etc.) of a certain language.

In other words, this is the content of words, diagrams, maps, drawings, etc., which is understandable to all people who speak the same language, belong to the same culture or close cultures, who have passed a similar historical path.

In meanings, the experience of mankind is generalized, crystallized and, thereby, preserved for future generations. Comprehending the world of meanings, a person learns this experience, joins it and can contribute to it. Meanings, wrote A.N. Leontiev, "they refract the world in the mind of a person ... the ideal form of the existence of the objective world, its properties, connections and relations, transformed and folded into the matter of language, is represented in the meanings, revealed by the cumulative social practice."

The universal language of meanings is the language of art - music, dance, painting, theater, the language of architecture.

personal meaning reflects the subjective significance of certain events, phenomena of reality to the interests, needs, motives of a person. It creates partiality of human consciousness.

The structure of consciousness is the unity of the elements of the whole and their connections. The structure of consciousness includes elements, each of which is responsible for a specific function of consciousness:

1. Cognitive processes: sensation, perception, thinking, memory. Based on them, a body of knowledge about the world around is formed.

Distinguishing subject and object: opposing oneself to the surrounding world, distinguishing "I" - "not I": self-consciousness, self-knowledge, self-esteem.

The relationship of a person to himself and the world around him: feelings, emotions, experiences.

Creative (creative) component (consciousness forms new images and concepts that were not previously in it with the help of imagination, thinking and intuition).

Formation of a temporary picture of the world: memory stores images of the past, imagination forms models of the future.

Formation of the goals of activity: based on the needs of a person, consciousness forms the goals of activity and directs a person to achieve them.

The cognitive function, with the help of which a person reflects objective reality, builds his own system of knowledge about the world;

2. Value-orientation function, with the help of which a person evaluates the phenomenon of reality, determines his attitude towards them;

A managerial function, with the help of which a person realizes his needs, sets goals, strives for them, that is, controls his behavior.

Having considered the main functions of consciousness, it can be revealed that they are all interconnected, mutually intertwined. According to these functions in the mind, there are three main areas: intellectual; emotional; motivational-volitional.

The intellectual sphere of consciousness includes such properties as thinking, memory, attention, perception. The sphere of the emotional life of the human personality includes feelings that are attitudes to external influences - (pleasure, joy, grief), mood or emotional well-being (cheerful, depressed) and affects (rage, horror, despair).

The motivational-volitional sphere contains human needs: biological, social and spiritual. They are the source of his activity when they are realized and embodied in specific aspirations - motives.

In the structure of consciousness, first of all, such moments as awareness of things, as well as experience, stand out most clearly. The development of consciousness presupposes, first of all, its enrichment with new knowledge about the surrounding world and about the person himself. Awareness of things has different levels, the depth of penetration into the object and the degree of clarity of understanding. Sensations, perceptions, ideas, concepts, thinking form the core of consciousness. However, they do not exhaust all of its structural completeness: it also includes attention as its necessary component. It is thanks to the concentration of attention that a certain circle of objects is in the focus of consciousness. Feelings and emotions are components of human consciousness. Without human emotions, there has never been, is not and cannot be a human search for truth.

Finally, the most important component of consciousness is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not just a part of consciousness; being its core, it is capable of embracing the entire consciousness as a whole. Self-consciousness is the consciousness of the subject of himself, in contrast to the other - other subjects and the world in general; this is a person's awareness of his social status and his vital needs, thoughts, feelings, motives, instincts, experiences, actions.

Thus, consciousness is an open system in which not only exact concepts, theoretical knowledge and operational actions take place, but also emotional-volitional and figurative means of reflecting the world.

There are only three components of consciousness:

The cognitive component, from (lat. cognitio - knowledge, cognition), is everything that is connected with cognition. It includes ways and methods of cognition, relatively stable features of cognitive processes, which are expressed in cognitive strategies, in particular cognitive attitudes and types of control. In addition, the cognitive component includes all the results of cognition - cognitive maps, conscious self-images, i.e. conscious structures of the self-concept, etc.

Emotional-evaluative component, it includes emotions, relationships, personal meanings, self-esteem, other affective-motivational elements of the psyche.

The behavioral-activity component includes mechanisms, methods, techniques that ensure the functioning of a person both in the external space, including the space of interpersonal relations, and in the internal, mental space.

2. Analysis of experimental studies of the psyche and consciousness

.1 Analysis of the organization of experimental studies of the psyche and consciousness

The first domestic psychologist who studied the human psyche was L.S. Vygotsky. The first version of his theoretical generalizations concerning the patterns of development of the psyche in ontogenesis, L.S. Vygotsky outlined in the work "The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions", written in 1931. According to L.S. Vygotsky, the work that created man himself "created the highest mental functions that distinguish man as a person." .

In the cultural-historical theory of human mental development created by L.S. Vygotsky in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he widely used the concept of collective activity, the presence of which quite naturally implied the concept of a collective subject (a collective of children corresponded to it, a group consisting of children and adults corresponded to it). According to L.S. Vygotsky, individual activity is derived from collective activity. The transition from one type of activity to another is a process of internalization. Thus, he wrote that mental functions “first take shape in a team in the form of relations between children, then they become mental functions of an individual.”

L.S. Vygotsky sought to reveal, first of all, the specifically human in the child's behavior and the history of the formation of this behavior; his theory required a change in the traditional approach to the process of the child's mental development. In his opinion, the one-sidedness and fallacy of the traditional view of the facts of the development of higher mental functions lies in "the inability to look at these facts as facts of historical development, in one-sided consideration of them as natural processes and formations, in the confusion and indistinguishability of natural and cultural, natural and historical , biological and social in the mental development of the child, in short, in the wrong fundamental understanding of the nature of the phenomena being studied.

L.S. Vygotsky developed a methodology for the psychological study of higher mental functions. For the first time, the Dual Stimulation Method was used in a joint study by L.S. Vygotsky and L.S. Sakharov in the study of the process of formation of concepts. The essence of the method lies in the fact that the study of higher mental functions is carried out with the help of 2 rows of stimuli, each of which plays a special role in relation to the activity of the subject. One row of stimuli performs the function of the object to which the activity of the subject is directed, and the other row - the function signs(incentives-means) with the help of which this activity is organized. The described variant The method of double stimulation is known as the "Vygotsky-Sakharov Method" (the idea of the "search method" by N. Ach was used in its development).

N. Akh tried to experimentally show that for the emergence of concepts it is not enough to establish mechanical associative connections between a word and an object, but it is necessary to have a task, the solution of which would require a person to form a concept. The Aha technique uses volumetric geometric figures that differ in shape (3 types), color (4), size (2), weight (2), - a total of 48 figures. A piece of paper with an artificial word is attached to each figure: large heavy figures are indicated by the word "gatsun", large light ones - "ras", small heavy ones - "taro", small light ones - "fal". The experiment begins with 6 figures, and their number increases from session to session, eventually reaching 48. Each session begins with the fact that the figures are placed in front of the subject and he must in turn raise all the figures, while reading their names aloud; this is repeated several times. After that, the pieces of paper are removed, the figures are mixed, and the subject is asked to select the figures on which there was a piece of paper with one of the words, and also to explain why he chose these figures; this is also repeated several times. At the last stage of the experiment, it is checked whether artificial words have acquired meaning for the subject: he is asked questions like “What is the difference between “gatsun” and “ras”?”, Asked to come up with a phrase with these words.

However, the Vygotsky-Sakharov method of double stimulation was also used in the study of the mediated processes of attention and memory (A.R. Luria, A.N. Leontiev). Therefore, the Double Stimulation Method can be considered as a whole series of methods based on the principle of sign mediation.

Figures of various shapes, colors, planar dimensions, and heights are randomly placed in front of the subject; an artificial word is written on the bottom (invisible) side of each figure. One of the figures turns over, and the subject sees its name. This figure is put aside, and from the rest of the figures the subject is asked to select all on which, in his opinion, the same word is written, and then they are offered to explain why he chose these particular figures and what the artificial word means. Then the selected figures are returned to the remaining ones (except the postponed one), another figure is opened and set aside, giving the subject additional information, and he is again asked to select from the remaining figures all on which the word is written. The experiment continues until the subject correctly selects all the figures and gives the correct definition of the word.

In the last years of his life, L.S. Vygotsky focused on studying the structure of consciousness. Exploring speech thinking, L.S. Vygotsky solves the problem of localization of higher mental functions as structural units of brain activity in a new way. Studying the development and decay of higher mental functions on the material of child psychology, defectology and psychiatry, V. comes to the conclusion that the structure of consciousness is a dynamic semantic system of affective volitional and intellectual processes that are in unity.

Although L.S. Vygotsky did not have time to create a complete theory, but the general understanding of mental development in childhood, contained in the works of the scientist, was later significantly developed, concretized and refined in the works of A.N. Leontiev.

Developing in the 20s. together with L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria cultural-historical theory, conducted a series of experimental studies that reveal the mechanism of formation of higher mental functions. At the research center of A.N. Leontiev turned out to be two most important mental processes - memory and attention. From the basic properties of memory as the highest mental function, he studied, first of all, its mediation. When analyzing this property of the HMF, A.N. Leontiev used the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky about two kinds of stimuli (stimuli-objects and stimuli-means).

In his experimental studies, L.S. Vygotsky's method of "double stimulation" (some stimuli, such as words, act as an object of memorization, others, such as pictures, act as auxiliary stimuli-means - "memory knots" - designed to facilitate memorization).

First of all, it is worth noting the fundamental nature of the experimental studies conducted by A.N. Leontiev. About 1,200 subjects of different age groups took part in memory studies alone: preschoolers, schoolchildren, adults (students). Of these, about a thousand people underwent research in all four series of the experiment, each of which involved the memorization of certain material by the test subjects.

The first series used 10 nonsense syllables ( tyam, rug, yellowetc.), in the second and subsequent - 15 meaningful words each (hand, book, bread, etc.). In the fourth series, the words differed from the words of the second and third series by a greater degree of abstraction ( rain, meeting, fire, day, fight and etc.).

In the first two series, the syllables or words were read by the experimenter, and the subject had to memorize and reproduce them in any order. In the third and fourth series, the subjects were asked to memorize the words read by the experimenter with the help of auxiliary stimuli-means. As such, cards (5 by 5 cm in size) with pictures drawn on them (30 pieces) were used.

The instructions said: "When I say the word, look at the cards, choose and set aside a card that will help you remember the word." An individual experiment was conducted with each subject, which lasted 20–30 minutes. With preschoolers, it was built in the form of a game.

One of the graphs, which visually presented the results of some conducted under the guidance of A.N. Leontiev's experiments, was called the "parallelogram of development" and was included in many psychology textbooks. This graph was a generalization of the results of the second and third series of experiments - a series of memorizing words without the use of external aids (pictures) and a series of memorizing similar words using these tools - on three groups of subjects (preschoolers, schoolchildren and students).

2.2 Analysis of the results of the study of the psyche and consciousness

Cultural-historical theory L.S. Vygotsky gave rise to the largest school in Soviet psychology, from which A.N. Leontiev, A.R. Luria, P.Ya. Galperin, A.V. Zaporozhets, P.I. Zinchenko, D.B. Elkonin and others.

Bibliography of L.S. Vygotsky has 191 works. Vygotsky's ideas received wide resonance in all sciences that study man, including linguistics, psychiatry, ethnography, and sociology. They determined a whole stage in the development of humanitarian knowledge in Russia and still retain their heuristic potential. Research school L.S. Vygotsky had not only extremely important theoretical, but also practical significance. It was found that a prerequisite for the assimilation of sign systems by a child is his joint activity with an adult.

The criterion for the results of the Vygotsky-Sakharov technique is the number of "moves" needed to form an artificial concept. When examining children using this technique, they determine the ability for purposeful and consistent actions, the ability to analyze simultaneously in several directions, to discard unsupported signs, which characterizes the course of generalization and distraction processes.

A certain disadvantage of the Vygotsky-Sakharov method is the fact that this method, due to its complexity for the subject, is usually used to study the processes of generalization in adults. In order to adapt this technique to childhood, a simplified modification of the technique was developed (A.F. Govorkova, 1962).

Thus, the child's consciousness is not formed spontaneously, but is, in a certain sense, an "artificial form" of the psyche. The question of the methods of “educating” memory was solved in a fundamentally different way than by many psychologists and teachers of that time. They adhered to the idea of the possibility of developing memory through mechanical exercises; this idea, by the way, is still widespread in the mass consciousness.

Let us briefly outline the main results of A.N. Leontiev experimental research. In preschoolers, memorization in both series was equally direct, since even with the presence of a card, the child did not know how to use it in an instrumental function (instead of choosing cards as a means of memorization - a "memory knot" - the child, for example, began to play with them); in adults, memorization, on the contrary, was equally indirect, since even without cards an adult memorized material well - only using internal means (he no longer needed cards as “memory knots”).

For schoolchildren, the process of memorization with the help of external means led to a significant increase in its efficiency, while memorization without them was not much better than for preschoolers, since they also lacked internal means of memorization.

Similar results were obtained in the experiments of A.R. Luria in the study of memory as a HMF. The technique was almost identical to the above one, with the only difference that the experiment provided for a rigid connection between the picture and the word - a well-defined card was given for each word. For preschoolers, the fulfillment of this task turned out to be even simpler than in the experiments of A.N. Leontiev, and therefore the discrepancy between the results obtained in the second and third series in preschoolers turned out to be greater than in the above experiments (almost like in schoolchildren).

Empirical studies of A.N. Leontiev convincingly confirmed the hypothesis of L.S. Vygotsky that the formation of higher forms of mental processes proceeds through the use of stimuli-signs, which in the process of development turn from external to internal. In addition, on the same empirical material, the hypothesis of L.S. Vygotsky about the systemic structure of consciousness, about the interaction of individual mental functions with each other.

Tracing the development of memory as a HMF, A.N. Leontiev established that at a certain stage of this development, memorization becomes logical, and thinking acquires a mnemonic function. In the process of development of higher forms of memory, volitional processes turn out to be just as systemically connected: “human memory really has all the signs of a volitional act - in the process of developing our memory, we master its processes, make its reproduction independent of the directly acting situation, in a word, inform our memorization of an arbitrary character".

Conclusion

Based on the studied theoretical material, it was revealed that consciousness is one of the most complex manifestations of brain activity. The development of human consciousness is connected with social and labor activity. The development of labor activity was reflected in the change in the structure of the human brain, and then new functions arose, such as motor, sensory, practical, cognitive. After labor, speech arose, which was a stimulus for the development of the human brain and consciousness. With the help of language, a person could express his thoughts and feelings, more clearly understands them himself. Since with the help of language it was possible to fix a thought, language was one of the means of forming self-consciousness. Consciousness is the highest form of reflection of the real world; a function of the brain peculiar only to humans and associated with speech. The structure and function of consciousness were studied by such psychologists as A.N. Leontiev, L.S. Vygotsky, etc.

Based on the study of experimental methods, the work considered such methods as the N. Ach method for the formation of artificial concepts, the Vygotsky-Sakharov method (double stimulation method) and the studies of A.N. Leontiev are aimed primarily at studying the two most important processes of memory and attention. The results of the study of the ongoing experiments are displayed in the appendix. Empirical studies of A.N. Leontiev convincingly confirmed the hypothesis of L.S. Vygotsky that the formation of higher forms of mental processes proceeds through the use of stimuli-signs, which in the process of development turn from external to internal. In addition, on the same empirical material, the hypothesis of L.S. Vygotsky about the systemic structure of consciousness, about the interaction of individual mental functions with each other.

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