Role of Metacognition in wisdom and consciousness
METACOGNITION is the ability or cognition process that makes us self-actualise and regulate our emotional processes towards achieving goals and missions.
The purpose of metacognition and spiritual intelligence is to actualise our potential to expand our self-consciousness and awareness of our existence, including self-perception, self-experience and self-control.
Metacognition could keep make us learn from our experiences to become aware of our thoughts, to have clear concept of our real identity, which could improve our brain plasticity, awareness, self-regulation, which in return could help us develop self-control skills of attention, stress management, impulse and emotions such as anger.
Metacognition could also help us improve our attention and memory by applying the methods of metacognition that play an important role in our spiritual development.
Brain research shows that during meditation, the brain increases its growth in frontal areas due to focus and improved attention, due to which the metacognitive state of a stable mind is achieved.
The development of spiritual intelligence in today’s societies is the most demanded methodology for improving and developing physical and mental health in any work environment, businesses, daily life, and successful leaderships.
Spiritual intelligence could create and promote better leaders and peacemakers and innovators of coming centuries.
According to T.S Elliot, spiritual intelligence is the pathway to the knowledge that we have lost and will lose in the flood of information around us in the form of global internet and artificial intelligence.
We have lost the taste of life in running for better living and we have lost our wisdom and passion in learning of non-creative and non-productive knowledge, which has a negative impact on the development and propagation of our wisdom, nobility and honesty or higher-order thinking as well as in the development of our executive brain functions like goal settings or brain planning and organisation.
The great polymath philosopher Benjamin Franklin would always keep his diary of goals and aims, which helped him bring his emotions and nerve impulses under the command of logic and reasoning.
This metacognitive ability to manage his nerves and emotions had always placed him on a higher level of intelligence and made him a highly influenced person in the history of mankind.
A recent neuroscience research shows that those who have acquired this metacognitive ability in their life had more gray matter in the anterior prefrontal cortex of their brain.
The growth in the prefrontal cortex in human brain due to executive brain functions, goal settings and organisation have made human beings more intelligent,
civilised and unique on this planet. Executive functions are those cognitive skills that are used to control and coordinate our other cognitive abilities and behaviours.
The executive functions’ deficiency in the brain causes damage to the frontal lobe and parietal lobes. The frontal lobes are the last areas of the brain to develop in the evolution of man.
This area of the brain develops very late in human beings than in the primate. It covers 40% of the human brain.
When the executive brain function system is damaged, we could face the following impairment in our brain functions:
1.Difficulty in organising our goals, aims, life and mission and purpose in life.
2. Mood swings and a lack of interest in people and other life around us.
3. Inappropriate behaviour and a lack of understanding from past actions.
According to the research published in the department of medical psychology journal in Hamburg University Germany, the metacognitive interventions were studied in patients suffering from anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders, social anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, depression and schizophrenia, chronic fatigue syndrome, body dysmorphic disorders, emotional instabilities, alcohol addiction, sexual disorder, eating disorder and personality disorders.
These metacognitive interventions in large groups of patients with various conditions have been found very effective and promising.
11.2 Self-Actualisation: Self-actualisation is the complete realisation of one’s potential and the full development of one’s abilities and appreciation for life.
Self-actualisation emerges when more basic needs are met. These are already well-accepted people of society. They have common abilities to cultivate deep loving relationships.
Self-actualisation could also be called self-realisation or self-cultivation. Abraham Maslow was the original founder of the term self-actualisation.
Self-actualisation is the ultimate goal of every organism and is referred to as the main desire of self-fulfilment. Every animal and plants have an inborn soul of self-actualisation.
If an individual is fully functional, they have moved toward the process of inward knowing or are increasingly listening to their deepest psychological and emotional being.
They have attained a greater accuracy and true self. Fully functional people are in touch with their feelings and abilities. They are able to trust their innermost urges and intuitions.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in London.
