CH5 - Sleep & Consciousness Flashcards
The inability to sleep is called..
Insomnia
Explain latent content
The underlying meaning of dreams, as theorised by Sigmund Freud.
What is manifest content?
The storyline of a dream
Describe the 4 stages of sleep
Stage 1 - small irregular waves
Stage 2 - sleep spindles
Stage 3 & 4 - deep sleep, slow delta waves
REM sleep: stage of sleep characterised by darting eye movements.
Describe the preconscious mental process
Memories that are not presently conscious but can be readily brought to consciousness if the need arose.
What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
Mindfulness - A state of focused awareness of all senses — thoughts, feelings and behaviours — without judgement and without reaction.
Meditation - Developing a deep state of tranquillity by altering the normal flow of conscious thoughts.
What are psychoactive substances?
Drugs that operate on the nervous system to alter mental activity.
Define circadium rhythm
A cyclical biological process that evolved around the daily cycles of light and dark.
Explain cognitive unconsciousness
Focuses on information-processing mechanisms that operate outside of awareness, such as procedural knowledge and implicit memory.
What is the process of focusing conscious awareness, providing heightened sensitivity to a limited range of experience requiring more extensive information processing?
Attention
What is it called when the usual conscious ways of perceiving, thinking and feeling are modified or disrupted?
Altered state of consciousness
Name the process in which people divert attention from information that may be relevant but emotionally upsetting.
Selective inattention
What do stimulants do?
Increase energy, alertness and autonomic activity
Explain subliminal perception
Perception of stimuli below the threshold of consciousness.
Describe the unconscious mental process
Memories in the unconscious are inaccessible to consciousness because they would be too anxiety provoking to acknowledge and thus have been repressed.
What is the conscious mental process?
Involves subjective awareness of stimuli, feelings or ideas.
The alertness component of consciousness appears to be regulated by:
the reticular formation (neurons from r.f. through to frontal lobes)
What is William James’ theory/idea of consciousness?
That consciousness is a constantly moving stream of thoughts, feelings and perceptions.
Qualitatively different patterns of subjective experience are called…
States of consciousness
Two functions of consciousness are
Regulating thought and behaviour; and monitoring the self and environment
The cognitive unconscious primarily includes
Information processing mechanisms that operate outside of awareness
True or false: unconscious cognitive processes operate simultaneously
True
Consciousness in the sense of subjective awareness may be found in what areas of the brain?
Distributed among several neural pathways: the reticular activating system, cortex and the thalamus.
A coma/unconsciousness is caused by damage to the…
Reticular formation
In addition to the influence of light and dark, circadium rhythms are controlled by..
The hypothalamus
PET scans show that the process of conscious attention is initiated by:
The reticular formation which arouses the cortex, which focuses attention on relevant stimuli
