Chapter 3 Flashcards
What is consciousness?
Our awareness of ourselves and our environment
What is cognitive neuroscience?
The interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition (including perception, thinking, memory, and language)
What is consciousness to psychologists?
It is a fundamental yet slippery concept.
At its beginning, psychology was “the description and explanation of states of consciousness”. During the first half of the twentieth century, the difficultly of scientifically studying consciousness led many psychologists to turn to?
Direct observations of behavior. By the 1960s psychology had nearly lost consciousness and was defining itself as “the science of behavior”
What is cognition?
Mental processes
Evolutionary psychologists speculate that consciousness offers a?
Reproductive advantage
What questions are at the heart of cognitive neuroscience?
“How do brain cells jabbering to one another create our awareness of the taste of a taco, the idea of infinity, the feeling of fright?”
In addition to normal, waking awareness, consciousness comes to us in altered states including?
Daydreaming (spontaneously), sleeping, meditating (psychologically induced), and drug induced hallucinating (physiologically)
What is dual processing?
The principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks
What does blindsight mean?
A condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it
Perception, memory, thinking, language, and attitudes all operate on two levels
A conscious, deliberate “high road”, and an unconscious, automatic “low road”
The human brain is a device for converting?
Conscious into unconscious knowledge
The eye sends information simultaneously to different?
Brain areas, which support different tasks
A visual perception track enables us to?
“Think about the world”, to recognize things and to plan future actions
A visual action track guides our?
Moment to moment movements
Define selective attention
It is the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
Unconscious parallel processing is faster than?
Conscious sequential processing, but both are essential.
- Parallel processing enables your mind to take care of routine business.
- Sequential processing is skilled at solving new problems, which requires your focused attention
What are the mind’s two tracks, and what is dual processing?
Our mind has a separate conscious and unconscious tracks which perform dual processing which is organizing and interpreting information simultaneously
Describe the cocktail party effect
It is our ability to pay attention to one voice over the many others
At the level of conscious awareness, we are “blind” to all but?
A tiny sliver of visual stimuli
Inattentional blindness is a by-product of?
What we are really good at which is focusing attention on some part of our environment
What is inattentional blinds?
When we fail to see visible objects when we are focused on something else
Draw our eyes and demand our attention
Popouts
What is change blindness?
When we fail to notice changes in our environment
What is the circadian rhythm?
It is our biological clock; regular bodily rhythms (temp., and wakefulness) that occur on a 24 hr cycle
EEG recordings confirm that the brain’s auditory cortex responds to?
Sound stimuli even during sleep
True or false:
1) When people dream of performing some activity, their limbs often move in concert with the dream
2) Older adults sleep more than young adults
3) Sleep experts recommend treating insomnia with an occasional sleeping pill
4) Sleep walkers are acting out their dreams
5) Some people dream every night, others seldom dream
All of the statements are false
What does circadian mean?
From latin circa, “about”, and diem, “day”
What can alter our circadian rhythm?
Age and experience
Dolphins, porpoises, and whales sleep with?
One side of their brain at a time
What is REM sleep?
Rapid eye movement sleep; a recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams commonly occur. Also known as paradoxical sleep, because the muscles are relaxed (except for minor twitches) but other body systems are active
What are alpha waves?
The relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state
Define sleep
A periodic, natural loss of consciousness- as distinct from unconsciousness resulting from a coma, general anesthesia, or hibernation
What are hallucinations?
They are false sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus
What are delta waves?
The large, slow brain waves associated with deep sleep
About every ___ minutes, you cycle through four distinct sleep stages
90
What can you experience during the brief NREM-1 or Stage 1 sleep?
- Fantastic images resembling hallucinations
* May have a sensation of falling or floating weightlessly
After stage 1 you can begin Stage 2 for about 20 minutes with periodic sleep spindles which are?
Burst of rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity
What happens during REM state
Unlike stage 1, during REM sleep your
- heart rate rises
- breathing becomes rapid & irregular
- every half minute or so your eyes dart around in momentary bursts of activity behind closed lids
- This is when we dream
- Genitals become aroused
- Brains motor cortex is active but brainstem blocks its messages
- Cannot easily be awakened
- Sometimes called paradoxical sleep
- Paralysis
Why would communal sleeping provide added protection for those whose safety depends upon vigilance, such as soldiers?
With each soldier cycling through the sleep stages independently, it is very likely that at any given time at least one of them will be awake or easily wakened in the event of a threat