CH. 14. Conscious Thought, Unconscious Thought Flashcards
1
Q
Blind Sight
A
BLIND SIGHT – Blind-sight patients are, by any conventional definition, truly blind, but even so they’re generally able to “guess” the color and shape of targets that (they insist) they cannot see.
- Patients with blindsight force us to distinguish between “seeing” and “having visual awareness” — because they apparently can do one but not the other.
- This suggests that consciousness is needed to “see”
- – that simply having the information through visual perception is not enough to consciously use that information.
- You must actually KNOW that you have that information in order to make conscious use of it.
- – that simply having the information through visual perception is not enough to consciously use that information.
2
Q
Cognitive Unconscious
A
THE COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS – Broad set of mental activities that you’re not aware of but that make possible your ordinary interactions with the world.
- A lot of mental work can take place without conscious supervision.
- EX: You instantly recognize the words on this page; you easily remember where you were this morning; you have no trouble deciding to have Cheddar on your sandwich, not Swiss. that make possible your ordinary interactions with the world.
- Processes and mechanisms working “behind the scenes.”
PRODUCTS – beliefs you’ve formed, conclusions you’ve reached – created and stored in your mind. This is the end result that we are AWARE OF.
PROCESSES – we are NOT always AWARE of the processes that lead to these PRODUCTS.
- You’re generally aware of your mental products but unaware of your mental processes.
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MEMORIES of the past seamlessly combine genuine recall with after-the-fact reconstruction.
- EX: when you “remember” your restaurant dinner last month, you’re probably weaving together elements that were actually recorded into memory at the time of the dinner, along with assumptions.
- Your recollection of the dinner is a mental product and is surely something you’re aware of.
- You’re unaware, though, of the process that brought you this knowledge, so you have no way of telling which bits are supplied by memory retrieval and which bits rest on inference or assumption.
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MEMORY ERRORS and ASSUMPTIONS – And, if you can’t determine which bits are which, there’s no way for you to reject the inferences or to avoid the (entirely unnoticed) assumptions.
- That’s why memory errors are often undetectable: Since the process that brings you a “memory” is unconscious, you can’t distinguish genuine recall from (potentially misguided) assumptions.
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EX: Considered a case in which research participants were briefly shown the stimulus “CORN”; we also considered a case in which participants were shown “CQRN.” Despite the different stimuli, both groups perceived the input as “CORN” — a correct perception for the first group, but an error for the second.
- Since both groups came to the same conclusion, people usually can’t tell whether they’re in the first group or the second, so they won’t be able to tell whether they’re perceiving correctly or misperceiving.
- Both groups are aware of the product created by their minds, so both groups have the conscious experience of “seeing” the word “CORN.” But they’re unaware of the processes and, specifically, are clueless about whether the stimulus was actually perceived or merely inferred.
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EX: Considered a case in which research participants were briefly shown the stimulus “CORN”; we also considered a case in which participants were shown “CQRN.” Despite the different stimuli, both groups perceived the input as “CORN” — a correct perception for the first group, but an error for the second.
- That’s why memory errors are often undetectable: Since the process that brings you a “memory” is unconscious, you can’t distinguish genuine recall from (potentially misguided) assumptions.
- These processes unfold in (what we’re now calling) the COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS and, as such, are entirely hidden from view.
3
Q
Unconscious Reasoning
A
UNCONSCIOUS REASONING:
- Imagine a witness to a crime selects the #2 person in a lineup.
- If the police say something like, “Good; the person you’ve chosen is our suspect.”, witnesses will subsequently “remember” their level of confidence PRIOR to the feedback as having been MUCH more confident than those who received no feedback.
- Note that they were referencing the confidence in their selection (‘remembering’) back to the point BEFORE the police gave any feedback. They believed that the police feedback had NO INFLUENCE on their decision. But clearly, their ‘MEMORY’ of their confidence in their selection was highly influenced by subsequent events (i.e. the police feedback.)
- But because the process that led to the INFLUENCED product was unconscious, the witness could not tell that they were being influenced by the feedback. In fact, they would swear that they were not.
- Unconsciously, after the feedback, witnesses must have been thinking something like, “The police say I got the right answer, so I guess I can set aside my doubts.” Of course, witnesses aren’t aware of making this adjustment.
- Even worse, witnesses who receive this sort of feedback also end up “remembering” that they got a closer, longer, clearer view of the perpetrator, that the lighting was good, and so on.
- Here, the witnesses seem to be thinking something like, “I chose the right person, so I guess I must have gotten a good view after all.” Once more, however, these aren’t conscious thoughts, and in this case the witnesses are being misled by some after-the-fact reconstruction.
- Note that they were referencing the confidence in their selection (‘remembering’) back to the point BEFORE the police gave any feedback. They believed that the police feedback had NO INFLUENCE on their decision. But clearly, their ‘MEMORY’ of their confidence in their selection was highly influenced by subsequent events (i.e. the police feedback.)
- If the police say something like, “Good; the person you’ve chosen is our suspect.”, witnesses will subsequently “remember” their level of confidence PRIOR to the feedback as having been MUCH more confident than those who received no feedback.
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PLACEBO EFFECT – People’s minds and bodies are profoundly affected by their expectations. That is why placebos are so powerful.
- In an experiment, subjects were given a placebo pill, told that the pill would allow them to take more amps in a shock test, but that side-effects could include shaky hands, upset stomach, etc. The pill was a placebo and had no analgesic properties, nor did it produce any of these side effects. Even so, taking this inert pill was remarkably effective:
- Participants who took the pill were willing to accept four times as much amperage as control participants.
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Why was the placebo so effective?
- Participants in the control group noticed that their hands were shaking, that their stomachs were upset, and so on. (These are, of course, common manifestations of fear — including the fearful anticipation of electric shock.) The participants then used these self-observations as evidence in judging their own states. It’s as if participants said to themselves, “Oh, look, I’m trembling! I guess I must be scared. Therefore, these shocks must really be bothering me.” This led them to terminate the shock series relatively early.
- Placebo participants, in contrast, attributed the same physical symptoms to the pill. “Oh, look, I’m trembling! That’s just what the experimenter said the pill would do. So I guess I can stop worrying about the trembling. Let me look for some other indication of whether the shock is bothering me.” As a consequence, these participants were less influenced by their own physical symptoms. In essence, they overruled the evidence of their own anxiety and misread their own internal state.
- In an experiment, subjects were given a placebo pill, told that the pill would allow them to take more amps in a shock test, but that side-effects could include shaky hands, upset stomach, etc. The pill was a placebo and had no analgesic properties, nor did it produce any of these side effects. Even so, taking this inert pill was remarkably effective:
- Let’s emphasize, though, that participants’ reasoning about the pill was entirely unconscious. In fact, the participants were asked, after the procedure, why they had accepted so much shock, and in responding they never mentioned the pill. When asked directly, “During the experiment, did you think about the pill at all?” participants said things like, “No, I was too worried about the shock to think of anything else.”
- Apparently, then, the placebo participants detected their own symptoms and made an inference about the source of the symptoms — attributing them to the pill and not to the shock.
- Then, guided by this attribution, they were willing to continue with the experiment, accepting shocks at a higher amperage. Of course, we know that the participants were misattributing their symptoms and drawing false conclusions, but that takes nothing away from what they were doing intellectually — and unconsciously.
4
Q
Mistaken Introspections
A
MISTAKEN INTROSPECTIONS – It’s impossible to distinguish between the (unconscious) processes involved in thought and the (conscious) products that result from these processes.
- Sometimes, however, the processes of thought do seem to be conscious, and you feel like you can voice the reasons for your decision or the basis for your conclusion if anyone asks. This surely sounds like a situation in which your thoughts are conscious.
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HOWEVER, this sense of ‘knowing your own thoughts may, in many cases, be an illusion.
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EX: In the Placebo/Shock experiments, participants firmly denied that their willingness to accept shock was influenced by the pill they’d taken. Instead, they offered other explanations that had nothing to do with the pill, believing that their alternate rationalization was the result of conscious processes when they clearly were not.
- They ignore factors that are crucial (the pill), highlighting factors we know to be irrelevant (alternate rationale).
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EX: In the Placebo/Shock experiments, participants firmly denied that their willingness to accept shock was influenced by the pill they’d taken. Instead, they offered other explanations that had nothing to do with the pill, believing that their alternate rationalization was the result of conscious processes when they clearly were not.
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HOWEVER, this sense of ‘knowing your own thoughts may, in many cases, be an illusion.
- To come up with explanations of behavior that SEEM conscious to the person, people often use After-the-fact-reconstruction.
AFTER-THE-FACT RECONSTRUCTION – The rationalization of why something happened AFTER it already happened.
- Roughly put, people reason in this fashion: “Why did I act that way? I have no direct information, but maybe I can draw on my broad knowledge about why, in general, people might act in certain ways in this situation. From that base, I can make some plausible inferences about why I acted as I did.”
- These after-the-fact reconstructions will often be correct.
- In cases such as this, an inference based on general knowledge is likely to be accurate.
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HOWEVER, these reconstructions can be totally wrong.
- To be clear, these after-the-fact reconstructions don’t “feel like” inferences – people honestly believe they ‘know’ or ‘remember’ these things..
- This is one more case in which people are conscious of the product and not the process. They’re aware of the conclusion (“I acted as I did because . . .”) but not aware of the process that led them to the conclusion.
- Hence, they continue to believe (falsely) that the conclusion rests on an introspection (conscious inner thoughts) when it actually rests on an after-the-fact reconstruction.
- This is one more case in which people are conscious of the product and not the process. They’re aware of the conclusion (“I acted as I did because . . .”) but not aware of the process that led them to the conclusion.
- To be clear, these after-the-fact reconstructions don’t “feel like” inferences – people honestly believe they ‘know’ or ‘remember’ these things..
- Often, we don’t know where our beliefs, emotions, or actions came from. We don’t know which of our “memories” are based on actual recall and which ones are inferences.
CONSCIOUS THOUGHTS – Even when we are aware of our own thoughts, we are heavily influenced by our cognitive unconscious, because even here a support structure is needed — one that exists at what philosophers have called the “FRINGE” or the “HORIZON” of your conscious thoughts – the border between conscious and unconscious thoughts.
- Unnoticed fringe comes from a variety of cases in which your thoughts are influenced by an “UNSEEN HAND”.
- PROBLEM-SOLVING SET— unnoticed assumptions and definitions that guide your search for the problem’s solution.
- Even when the problem solving is conscious and deliberate, even when you “think out loud” about the steps of the problem solution, you’re guided by a SET of unnoticed assumptions.
- This is usually a good thing because the SET keeps you focused, protecting you from distracting and unproductive lines of thought.
- But the SET can sometimes be an obstacle to problem-solving, and the fact that the set is unconscious makes it all the more difficult to overcome the obstacle – A problem solver cannot easily pause and reflect on the set, so she can’t alter any unconscious problematic beliefs or abandon the misleading assumptions.
- This is usually a good thing because the SET keeps you focused, protecting you from distracting and unproductive lines of thought.
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DECISION’S FRAME You might be completely focused on the decision and fully aware of your options. Nonetheless, you’ll be influenced by the (unnoticed) framing of the decision — the way the options are described and the way the question is posed. You don’t think about the framing itself, but it unmistakably colors your thoughts about the decision and plays a large role in determining which option you’ll choose.
- An unnoticed framework can guide your deliberate, conscious thinking — about problems, decisions, and more.
- This framework protects you from uncertainty and ambiguity,
- but it also governs the content and the sequence of your thoughts.
- This framework protects you from uncertainty and ambiguity,
- An unnoticed framework can guide your deliberate, conscious thinking — about problems, decisions, and more.
5
Q
Implicit Memory
A
KORSAKOFF’S SYNDROME – Patients suffering from this syndrome seem to have no conscious memory of events they’ve witnessed or things they’ve done. If asked directly about these events, the patients insist they have no recollection.
- Even so, it’s false to claim that these patients have “no memories,” because on tests of implicit memory the amnesic patients seem quite normal. They do seem to “remember” if we probe their memories indirectly.
- Memories they don’t know they have — and so, apparently, some aspects of remembering and some influences of experience can go forward even in the absence of conscious memory. This is a pattern that Jacoby & Witherspoon (1982) have referred to as “memory without awareness.”
6
Q
Conscious Perception and Blind Sight
A
BLIND SIGHT – Observed in patients who have suffered damage to the visual cortex. For all practical purposes, these patients are blind.
- Tests reveal, however, that these patients can respond with reasonable accuracy to questions about their visual environment.
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EX: They can answer questions about the shape and movement of visual targets, the orientation of lines, and even the emotional expression (sad vs. happy vs. afraid) on faces.
- In all cases, though, the patients insist they can’t see the targets, and they can offer no explanation for why their “guesses” are consistently accurate.
- However, information flow is still possible along some of the other pathways — including a pathway through the superior colliculus in the midbrain.
- And this is what enables these patients to use visual information that they cannot consciously see.
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EX: They can answer questions about the shape and movement of visual targets, the orientation of lines, and even the emotional expression (sad vs. happy vs. afraid) on faces.
- We need to distinguish between “PERCEPTION” and “CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION” because unmistakably it is possible to perceive in the absence of consciousness.
7
Q
Subliminal Perception
A
SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION – People actually CAN perceive and be influenced by visual inputs they didn’t consciously perceive.
- The key measure in this study was a brain wave called the “N400.”
- A larger N400 is observed when participants encounter a sequence of words that violates their expectations.
- In this setting, the (unconscious) prime made the (conscious) presentation of “war” unexpected, leading to the larger N400.
- Results were different, though, if the first word in the series was “not.” Here, the unconscious prime of “not happy” made the (conscious) presentation of “war” less surprising, resulting in a smaller N400.
- It seems, then, that the subliminal words were detected and influencing subsequent perception — creating a context that in some conditions made the word “war” more surprising, and in other conditions less so.
- The important finding, though, is that participants had somehow combined the successive words, with the result that the phrases “very happy” and “not happy” had opposite effects (and likewise for “very sad” and “not sad”). Apparently, subliminal perception can involve more than the reading of single words; people also seem able (at least in a limited way) to integrate subliminal inputs in a linguistically appropriate fashion.
8
Q
Limits of Unconscious Performance
A
LIMITS OF UNCONSCIOUS PERFORMANCE:
- Unconscious judgments and inferences tend to be fast, efficient, and reasonable, well-tuned, and appropriately guided by, cues in the situation – strongly guided either by the situation you’re in or by prior habit.
- Therefore, when you (unconsciously) draw a conclusion or make a selection, these steps are likely to be the ones favored by familiarity or by the setting itself.
- When you unconsciously make some response you’re likely to make a familiar response, one that’s well-practiced in that situation.
- EX: think about the inferences you rely on to fill gaps in what you remember. These inferences are often helpful, but we’ve discussed how they can lead to errors — in some cases, large and consequential errors.
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Knowing these facts about memory is no protection at all. Just as you cannot choose to avoid a perceptual illusion, you also cannot choose to avoid memory error, and you cannot “turn off” your inferences even when you want to.
- The process of making inferences is automatic and effortless, and it’s also irresistible.
- Proofreading is hard because you unconsciously “correct” what’s on the page whether you want to or not, with the result that you often fail to see the misspelling or the missing letter
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ACTION SLIPS – Cases in which you do something different from what you intend. In most cases, these slips involve doing what’s normal in a situation, rather than what you want to do on that occasion.
- EX: You’re in the car, driving to the store. You intend to turn left at the corner, but, distracted for a moment, you turn right, taking the route that you usually take on your way to school.
- Since unconscious processes can operate without “supervision,” you can run many of these processes at the same time — thereby increasing the speed and efficiency of your mental life.
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How do processes manage to run without supervision?
- Part of the answer is biological, with the steps needed for perception built into the essential structure of the nervous system.
- With practice, the steps needed for the task are still there, but you don’t think about them one by one. That’s because you’ve stored in memory a complete routine that specifies what all the steps should be and when each step should be initiated. All you need to do is launch the overall routine,
- Part of the answer is biological, with the steps needed for perception built into the essential structure of the nervous system.
9
Q
Prerequisites for Control
A
PREREQUISITES FOR CONTROL – In order to have control over a situation, you must have Executive Control.
- EXECUTIVE CONTROL – conscious thought used when you need to direct your own mental processes to rise above habit or to avoid responding to prominent cues in your surrounding.
- To perform its function, executive control needs:
- a means of launching desired actions
- a means of and overriding unwanted actions.
- To do these things, the EXECUTIVE needs an “OUTPUT” side — things it can do, actions it can initiate.
- The executive needs some way of REPRESENTING its GOALS and AGENDA so that they can serve as guides to action.
- On the “INPUT” side, the executive needs to know what’s going on in the mind.
- The executive needs to know how smoothly current processes are unfolding. If the processes are proceeding without difficulties, there’s no need to make adjustments; but if the processes are stymied, the executive would probably seek an alternative path toward the goal.
- These claims fit well with current claims about the biological basis for consciousness.
10
Q
Metacognition
A
METACOGNITION – monitoring and controlling your own mental processes.
- METAMEMORY – People’s knowledge about, awareness of, and control over their own memory.
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EX: The decisions you make about your own thinking help guide you in everyday life – imagine that you’re studying for an exam. As you look over your notes, you might decide that some facts will be easy to remember, so you’ll devote little study time to them. Other facts will be more challenging, so you’ll give them a lot of time.
- Then, while studying, you’ll need to make further decisions: “Okay, I’ve got this bit under control; I can look at something else now” versus “I’m still struggling with this; I guess I should give it more time.”
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METAMEMORY JUDGEMENTS – Forecasts for your own learning and assessments of your learning so far.
- Metamemory also includes your beliefs about memory — for example, your belief that mnemonics can be helpful or that “deep processing” is an effective way to memorize.
- Another aspect of metamemory is your ability to control your own studying — so that you use your beliefs to guide your own behavior.
- If you believe it works, it will be more effective.
METACOGNITION and EXECUTIVE CONTROL – The Link between these claims about Metacognition and our broader claims about Executive Control include, in both cases:
- a need for self-monitoring
- a need for self-control and self-direction
- you’re guided by a sense of goals
- whether those goals are generated on the spot or derived from your long-standing beliefs about how your own memory functions.
11
Q
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
A
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness:
- What changes we observe in the brain when someone becomes conscious of a stimulus.
- NEURAL CORRELATES of consciousness (or, as one author puts it, the NEURAL SIGNATURE of consciousness.
12
Q
Many Brain Areas Needed for Consciousness
A
MANY BRAIN AREAS NEEDED FOR CONSCIOUSNESS – There is NO group of neurons or someplace in the brain that’s the “consciousness center.”
- There is no brain site that functions like a light bulb that “turns on” when you’re conscious and then changes brightness when your mental state changes.
- First, some brain sites are crucial for your LEVEL of ALERTNESS or sensitivity, independent of what you’re currently sensitive to.
- The difference here is the difference that ranges from being sleepy and dimly aware of a stimulus at one extreme, and being fully awake and totally focused on a stimulus, at the other extreme.
- This aspect of consciousness is compromised when someone suffers damage to certain sites in either the thalamus or the reticular activating system in the — a system that controls the overall arousal level of the forebrain and also helps control the cycling between sleep and wakefulness
- Second, a different set of brain sites matters for the CONTENT of CONSCIOUSNESS – what you’re thinking consciously about at the time.
- These various contents for consciousness rely on different brain areas — and so cortical structures in the visual system are especially active when you’re consciously aware of sights in front of your eyes (or aware of a visual image that you’ve created); cortical structures in the forebrain are essential when you’re thinking about a stimulus that’s no longer present in your environment; and so on.
- The difference between the LEVEL of ALERTNESS and the CONTENT of CONSCIOUSNESS is helpful when we consider:
- the diversity of brain areas involved in consciousness.
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thinking about variations in consciousness
- EX: In dreaming, you’re conscious of a richly detailed scene, with its various sights and sounds and events, and so there’s a well-defined content, but your sensitivity (level of alertness) to the environment is low.
13
Q
Neuronal Workspace
A
NEURONAL WORKSPACE HYPOTHESIS – Consciousness in the brain is represented by a network activation of neurons that amplifies and sustains a neural representation of consciousness. Various brain sites need somehow to communicate with one another so that the elements can be assembled into an integrated package. After all, you don’t perceive round + red + moving; you instead perceive falling apple.
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The Neural hypothesis. – The integrated activity, made possible by the workspace neurons, provides the biological basis for consciousness.
- INTEGRATED ACTIVITY – Refers to the BINDING of elements in the environment (e.g. round & red & moving = Falling Apple)
- The workspace neurons themselves don’t carry the content of consciousness; the content — the sense of seeing something red, the sense of seeing something moving — is represented in the same neurons, the same processing modules, that analyzed the perceptual information in the first place. But what the workspace neurons do is glue these bits together, creating a unified experience and promoting the exchange of information from one module to the next.
- In earlier chapters, we referred to this as the “binding problem” — the task of linking together the different aspects of experience in order to create a coherent whole.
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ATTENTION plays a key role in solving the binding problem.
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EX: A moving stimulus in front of your eyes will trigger a response in one brain area; a red stimulus will trigger a response in another area – In the absence of attention, these two neural responses will be independent of each other.
- However, if you’re paying attention to a single stimulus that is red and moving, the neurons in these two systems fire in SYNCHRONY.
- When neurons fire in this coordinated way, the brain seems to register the activity as a linkage among the different processing areas. As a result, these attributes are bound together, so that you end up correctly perceiving the stimulus as a unified whole.
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EX: A moving stimulus in front of your eyes will trigger a response in one brain area; a red stimulus will trigger a response in another area – In the absence of attention, these two neural responses will be independent of each other.
- This synchronization requires communication so that neurons in one brain area can influence (and be influenced by) neurons in other, perhaps distant, brain areas. This communication is made possible by “WORKSPACE NEURONS” that literally connect one area of the brain to another.
- Various mechanisms create competition among different brain processes, and the “winner” (typically, the most active process) is communicated to other brain areas, while other information is not.
- When you pay ATTENTION to a stimulus, this involves (among other neural steps) activity in the PREFRONTAL CORTEX that can sustain and amplify the activity in other neural systems.
- By increasing activity in one area or another, attention ensures that this area wins the competition — and thus ensures that information from this area is broadcast to other brain sites.
- Notice, then, that the information flow from each brain area to all the others is LIMITED; this point is guaranteed by the competition. At the same time, the information flow is controllable, by virtue of what you choose to pay attention to.
14
Q
Function of the Neuronal Workspace
A
FUNCTION OF THE NEURONAL WORKSPACE – Any idea — whether it’s an idea about a stimulus in front of your eyes or an idea drawn from memory — is represented in the brain by means of a widespread pattern of activity, with different parts of the brain each representing just one of the idea’s elements.
- You become aware of that idea, though, when these various elements are linked to one another in a single overarching representation made possible by the WORKSPACE.
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This WORKSPACE linkage allows for one representation, constructed from the coordinated activity of many processing components.
- EX: you’re not aware of orange + movement + roundness + closeness. Instead, you’re aware of a single experience in which the basketball is flying toward you.
- WORKSPACE MODEL – The information carried by the workspace neurons is governed by competition (and is thus, limited) and shaped by how you focus attention.
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WORKSPACE, SUPPORTED BY ATTENTION – enables you to maintain mental representations in an active state for an extended period.
- In other words, the workspace allows you to continue thinking about a stimulus or an idea even after the trigger for that idea has been removed.
- This point enables us to link the workspace proposal to claims about working memory and to the brain areas associated with working memory’s function — specifically, the prefrontal cortex.
- This connection seems appropriate since working memory is the memory that holds materials you’re currently working on, which presumably means materials currently within your conscious awareness.
15
Q
Neuronal Workspace and Executive Control
A
NEURONAL WORKSPACE AND EXECUTIVE CONTROL – because the workspace enables you to integrate what’s going on in one neural system with what’s going on in others, it is able to identify a conflict between conscious goals and unconscious habit – allowing conscious habit to take control, overruling the unconscious process.
- This integration:
- allows you to reflect on relationships among various inputs or ideas.
- allows you to produce new combinations of ideas and new combinations of operations.
- helps you to produce novel thoughts in which you can rise above habit or routine.
- provides a plausible neural basis for executive functioning and, with this, enables you to escape the limits that seem to characterize unconscious processing.
- This means that, through the workspace, you can use conscious thought to focus on your goals when those goals conflict with your habit (which is controlled by (unconscious processes).
- By linking the various processing modules, the workspace makes it possible to compare what’s going on in one module with what’s going on elsewhere in the brain, and this activity allows you to detect conflict.
- The brain area that is crucial for this conflict detection is the ANTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX (ACC) –, a structure linked to (and slightly behind) the frontal cortex and also connected to structures (including the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and hypothalamus) that play pivotal roles in emotion, motivation, and feelings of reward.
- This means that, through the workspace, you can use conscious thought to focus on your goals when those goals conflict with your habit (which is controlled by (unconscious processes).
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NEURONAL WORKSPACE – The difference between being awake and being asleep.
- When you’re asleep (and not dreaming), you’re not conscious of the passing of time, not conscious of any ongoing stream of thought, and not conscious of many events taking place in your vicinity. This is not, however, because the brain is inactive during sleep; activity in the sleeping brain is, in fact, quite intense.
- Evidence suggests that when you’re asleep (and not dreaming), communication breaks down among different parts of the cortex so that the brain’s various activities are NOT coordinated with one another.
- Thus, communication (mediated by the neuronal workspace) is crucial for consciousness, so it makes sense that sleeping people, having temporarily lost this communication, aren’t conscious of their state or their circumstances.
