Coherent consciousness

Coherent consciousness refers to the phenomenon where multiple individuals share a unified mental state, characterized by aligned thoughts, intentions and cognitive processes. Recent advances in neuroscientific research have highlighted the relevance of brain wave synchronization, where collaborative individuals have similar patterns of neural activity. 

Unified consciousness allows those individuals to reap the advantages of mirror neurons, letting collective creativity prosper. Consciousness as a unified experience is the notion that our experiences and perceptions form a cohesive and continuous reality. All the sensory information, knowledge and environment that we are exposed to, shape our cognition. 

There are multitude of parameters that define our cognitive process, and on this edifice, it is easy to conclude that outcomes of diverse individual cognitive processes are idiosyncratic and unique. When these diverse idiosyncratic cognitive processes merge, they form a unified field of consciousness—a creativity pool with unprecedented levels of creativity and highly enhanced problem solving. 

Neuroscience of like-minded thinking

Mirror neurons and shared mental models play a crucial role in shaping the thoughts of like-minded individuals. It can cause mirrored yawning, which is contagious. When we watch someone yawn, events of us repeating or responding to the person with the same behavior are likely. When a friend of yours cracks a joke in class—though it is not that funny and isn’t worth uncontrollable laughter—you will likely be in a situation of losing control of your behavior and responding to the situation with laughter; this laughing contagion traverses the entire class, and the person sitting on the first desk—totally unaware of the cause of laughter—responds to the circumstance with laughter too.

Mirror neurons’ ability for collective mental states could transcend to a higher degree of cognition. A friend of mine and I were working on a graph theory problem for hours—we lost count of time. Being exposed to one another’s thought process for over two years and, very recently, working on the same project trying to optimize the shortest path between two junctions, our brain could not be called anything other than synchronized brains. We didn’t have to communicate to change a line of code on our computer; no communications were required to increase junction density at specific areas; we both had the same thing in our minds, and at this point, the communication was as if made telepathically. The cognitive productivity becomes superior with diverse thoughts contributed in coherence to a single idea; the result was produced after traversing through diverse concepts of the field and aligning to multitude of theories that one puts forth. 

Advantages of coherent consciousness

The world’s best universities tend to invest tremendously in increasing diversity on campus. The reason for this is to bring ideas, backgrounds, identities, and many more from around the different corners of the world. When diverse and unique cognitive processes, fed with idiosyncratic data, bundled together, forming collective creativity, there is a pooling of creative aura. 

These universities, which are able to achieve coherence out of diversity, reap the advantage of increased creativity due to more dynamic exchange of ideas, innovative solutions, efficient problem solving, etc. They achieve strengthened social bonds, which in turn help prosper more collaboration and develop a familial environment on campus. As a result, they have the highest research activity, the highest number of publications, and the highest scholarly productivity.

Corporations tend to invest huge amounts of time and capital in their workforce to build collective intelligence. They organize multiple programs that demand collaboration, either through recreation or corporate tasks. Formation of collective awareness helps employees to not only build better social relations but also streamline decision-making and help maximize performance with productive collaboration.

Coherent consciousness transcends the limitation of geography

There are numerous examples of inventions that occurred nearly simultaneously by multiple individuals working independently on similar ideas or inventions. Most notably, the formulation of calculus is a prime instance of this phenomenon. Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed the principles of calculus in the late 17th century, each working independently of the other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed patents for the telephone in 1876. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace independently formulated the theory of natural selection in the 1850s. There are many more such examples, including the discovery of oxygen, X-rays, the law of conservation of energy, the Krebs cycle, etc. Even before the globalized era, most of the independent inventions occurred nearly at the same point in time.

Global coherent consciousness for world peace and advances in humanity 

One of the pioneers of the idea of a unified field of consciousness is the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The transcendental meditation technique is proven to have significant neural activity amelioration in a person. It is claimed to enhance individual consciousness for better collective consciousness and strengthen conscious bonds in a unified field. A key aspect of Maharishi’s theory is the notion of “super radiance,” a phenomenon suggesting that a small percentage of the population engaging in TM can influence collective consciousness on a larger scale.

On a global scale, there are multiple efforts for global coherence; for instance, in Dec 2023, nearly 11,000 participants from 139 countries congregated in Hyderabad, India, for the “10,000 for World Peace” assembly to reap advantage of coherent consciousness in achieving global ambitions of peace. Many scientific symposiums, conventions, etc. tend to bring global effort for achieving global ambition via global coherent consciousness. For instance, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, Geneva, Switzerland is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which is home to about the majority of theoretical particle physicists on this planet. The idea of concentrating professionals from around the world is to unify the consciousness of the brilliant minds to support the progress of particle physics. 

In a nutshell, the notion of consciousness is the subject of neuroscience and spirituality together. The idea of coherent consciousness is experienced by people around the globe in their daily routine; there are tremendous examples of global coherence and efforts to manifest this novel idea. This is the pathway for continuing the progress of the most powerful cognitive being on earth. Collaboration and teamwork habits should be developed in students right from kindergarten to achieve new heights for the progress of the human race. Diverse consciousness should be coalesced to pool creativity from around the globe for achieving global ambitions of prosperity for humanity.

Manish Adhikari

St Xavier’s College, Maitighar