Chapter 6: States of Consciousness Flashcards
What is CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness: our moment-‐to-‐moment awareness of ourselves and our environments.
What are the 4 Characteristics of Consciousness?
- Subjective and Private
- Dynamic (every changing): continuously flowing stream of mental activity rather than disjointed perceptions and thoughts
- Self reflective and central to our sense of self: the mind is aware of its own consciousness.
- Conscience is intimately linked to selective attention: the process that focuses awareness on some stimuli to the exclusion of others.
What are the 3 Measuring States of Consciousness?
- Self Report Measures
- Behavioural Measures
- Physiological Measures
Explain Self Report Measures:
• Self Report Measures: directly ask people to describe their inner experiences:
Not always verifiable or possible to explain (e.g. whilst we are asleep)
Explain Behavioural Measures:
• Behavioural Measures: Record, among other things, performance on special tasks
BM are objective but they require us to infer the persons state of mind.
Explain Physiological Measures:
3 Characteristics
• establish the correspondence between bodily processes and mental states. Through electrodes attached to the scalp, the electroencephalograph (EEG) measures brain-‐wave patterns that reflect ongoing electrical activity of large groups of neurons.
*** Different patterns correspond to different states of consciousness’s.
*** Allows scientists to examine brain activity that underlines various mental states
***They can’t tell us what a person is experiencing subjectively but they have been invaluable for probing the inner workings of the mind.
List the 2 Levels of Consciousness:
- Freudian Viewpoint
2. Cognitive Viewpoint
Explain Freudian Viewpoint? - Levels of Consciousness
The Freudian Viewpoint:
• Generally believed unconscious processes can effect behaviour
• Sigmund Freud proposed the mind consists of three levels of awareness:
- The conscious mind: contains thoughts and perceptions of which we are currently aware
- Preconscious mental events: our outside current awareness but can not be easily recalled (e.g. memories of a friend)
- Unconscious Events: cannot be brought into conscious awareness under ordinary circumstances. Some unconscious content (e.g. an aggressive encounter) is repressed and kept out of conscious awareness because it would arouse anxiety, guilt or other negative emotions.
Explain Cognitive Viewpoint
- Levels of Consciousness
- View conscious and unconscious mental life as complementary forms of information processing that work in harmony.
- Divides behaviour into:
- CONTROLLED (CONCIOUS) PROCESSING
- AUTOMATIC (UNCONSCIOUS) PROCESSING
• With practice, performance becomes more automatic and certain brain areas involved in conscious thought become less active.
• Automatic processing also facilitates divided attention: the capacity to attend to and perform more than one activity at the same time.
—-Divided attention has limits and is more difficult when two tasks require similar mental sources
Cognitive Viewpoint - divides behaviour into
AUTOMATIC VS CONTROLLED PROCESSING — explain
—–Controlled (conscious) processing): the conscious use of attention and effort (E.g. planning a party).
Is more flexible and open to change.
—-Automatic (unconscious) processing): performed without conscious awareness and effort (E.g. writing). Flawed in that it reduces our chances of finding new ways to approach problems. Allows for tasks to be performed faster and better.
Unconscious Perception and Influence - STIMULI
Unconscious Perception and Influence:
Stimuli can be perceived without conscious awareness and influence how we behave or feel
Unconscious Perception and Influence = List the 4 Ways
- Visual Agnosia
- Blindsight
- Priming
- The Emotional Unconscious
Explain Visual Agnosia:
- When the brain accurately processes information about the various stimuli and responds accordingly without any conscious thought.
- Prosopagnosia: can visually recognize objects but not faces. Their brains are recognizing a difference between familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, but this recognition doesn’t reach conscious awareness’s.
- DF woman with Visual Agnosia could not consciously perceive the shape, size and orientation of objects, yet had little difficulty performing a card-‐insertion tasks and avoiding obstacles as she walked across the room.
Explain Blindsight:
- People who are blind in part of their visual field yet in special tests respond to stimuli in that field despite reporting that they can’t see those stimuli.
- E.g. damage to the left hemisphere means a person may be blind in the right half of the visual field yet the stimulus is still perceived unconsciously (guessing accuracy may be 80-‐100% despite patients saying they can’t see in testing)
Explain Priming:
- When exposure to a stimulus influences how you subsequently respond to that same or another stimulus.
- People who are subliminally exposed are more likely to complete the word stems with particular words (e.g. you are subliminally exposed to the word hose yet are more likely to complete the stem ho with hose rather than home)
- E.g. if people are exposed to violent images prior to an image of a person then are more likely to interpret the person from a negative perspective.
Explain Emotional Unconscious
- The belief that emotional and motivational processes operate unconsciously and influence behaviour.
- E.g. being in a bad mood do to being influenced by events in your environment of which you were not consciously aware
Why do we have consciousness?
- Koch (2004): Conscious awareness provides a summary-‐ a single mental representation-‐ of what is going on in your world at each moment and it makes this summary available to brain regions involved in planning and decision making
- Consciousness helps us override potentially dangerous behaviours governed by impulses or autonomic processing.
- Consciousness allows us to deal flexibly with novel situations and helps us plan responses to them.
- Self-‐awareness and communication enables us to express out needs to other people and coordinate actions with them.
The Neural Basis of Consciousness: WINDOWS OF THE BRAIN.
What are the 2 pathways for processing visual information?
- Vision for action pathway (neural pathway): extends from the primary visual cortex to the parietal lobe, carries information to support the unconscious guidance of movements.
- Vision for perception pathway: extends from the primary visual cortex to the temporal lobe, carries information to support the conscious recognition of objects.
How to study the neural basis of consciousness?
• One way of studying the neural basis of consciousness is through using masking to control whether people perceive a stimulus consciously or unconsciously
- – In experiments participants undergo brain imaging while exposed to masked and unmasked stimuli.
- – Allow scientists to assess how brain activity differs depending on whether the same stimuli (e.g. photos of angry faces) are consciously or unconsciously perceived.
*** E.g. if an angry face is shown for 30 milliseconds people are aware of seeing the angry face. If following the angry face a neutral face follows for 45 milliseconds people are aware of seeing the neutral face and do not consciously perceive the angry face.
• Emotionally threatening stimuli are processed consciously and unconsciously through different neural pathways.
*** Conscious recognition: prefrontal cortex
Consciousness as a global workspace - explain :
- Views the mind as a collection of largely separate but interacting information-‐processing modules that perform tasks related to sensation, perception, memory, movement, planning, problem-‐solving, emotion and so on.
- The modules process information simultaneously and independently with cross-‐talk between the (e.g. a answering a math question requires a formula from memory and problem solving skills)
- Consciousness is a global workspace that represents the unified activity of multiple modules in different areas of the brain.
- A particular subset becomes joined in unified activity that is strong enough to become a conscious perception or thought.
- Subjectively we experience consciousness as unitary rather than as a collection of modules and circuits.
What is the Circadian Rhythm?
Circadian rhythms: our daily biological clocks
Circadian rhythms: daily biological cycles
Changes in our core body temperature, certain hormonal secretions, degree alertness, sleeping patterns.
Explain the Process of the Circadian rhythm?
- Most circadian rhythms are regulated by the brains superchiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the hypothalamus
- SCN neurons have a genetically programmed cycle of activity and inactivity functioning like a biological clock
- They link to the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin, a hormone with a relaxing effect on the body.
— During the day: SCN neurons become active and reduce the glans secretion of melatonin, raising body temp and heightening alertness
— Nighttime: SCN neurons are inactive, allowing melatonin levels to increase and promoting relaxation and sleepiness
- The circadian clock is biological, but environmental cues such as the day-‐night cycle help keep SCN neurons on a 24 hour schedule (e.g. the light of day in the morning increases SCN activity and helps rest your 24 hour biological clock)
- If you were in a cave with no clock or light source you would drift into a natural wake-‐sleep cycle called a free-‐running circadian rhythm that is around 24.2 hours long.
- “Early birds” go to bed and rise earlier and their body temperature, blood pressure and alertness peak earlier in the day
Students from Colombia, India and Spain regions with warmer annual climates exhibited greater morningness than students from the US and Netherlands
What are some Environmental Disruptions Of Circadian Rhythms?
TREATMENT?
- Jet lag: often causes insomnia and decreased alertness. The body naturally adjusts about one hour or less per day to time zone changes. People typically adjust faster when flying west.
- Night-‐shift work: people work in times when your biological clock is prompting sleepiness. Daytime becomes bedtime and you sleep less overtime leading to fatigue, stress and becoming more accident-‐prone.
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): is a cyclic tendency to become psychologically depressed during certain seasons of the year. The circadian rhythms of DAF suffers may be particularly sensitive to light, so as sunrises occur later in winter, the daily onset time of their circadian clocks may be pushed back to an unusual degree.
In tropical areas SAD often occurs in summer due to excessive heat and humidity. In cooler climates it tends to occur during winter and autumn weather.
• Treatments include controlling ones exposure to light, taking oral melatonin and regulating one’s daily activity schedule.
Understand Sleep?
- Roughly every 90 minutes while asleep we cycle through different stages in which brain activity and other psychological responses change in a generally predictable way.
- EEG recordings of your brain’s electrical activity would show a pattern of BETA waves when you are awake and alert
- As you close your eyes and feel relaxed and drowsy, brain ways slow down and ALPHA waves occur.
What are the 4 stages of Sleep?
- Stage 1: As sleep begins your brain-‐wave pattern comes more irregular and slower Theta waves increase. This stage is a form of light sleep in which you can be awakened easily.
- Stage 2: Sleep becomes deeper and sleep spindles (periodic bursts of rapid brain wave activity) begin to appear. Muscles are more relaxed, breathing and heart rate decrease, dreams may occur and you are harder to awake.
- Stage 3: the regular appearance of very slow and large delta waves.-‐ slow wave sleep
- Stage 4: the delta waves begin to dominate-‐ slow wave sleep: you body has relaxed, activity in various parts of your brain has decreased, you are hard to awaken and you may have dreams
What are the 4 stages of Sleep?
- Stage 1: As sleep begins your brain-‐wave pattern comes more irregular and slower Theta waves increase. This stage is a form of light sleep in which you can be awakened easily.
- Stage 2: Sleep becomes deeper and sleep spindles (periodic bursts of rapid brain wave activity) begin to appear. Muscles are more relaxed, breathing and heart rate decrease, dreams may occur and you are harder to awake.
- Stage 3: the regular appearance of very slow and large delta waves.-‐ slow wave sleep
- Stage 4: the delta waves begin to dominate-‐ slow wave sleep: you body has relaxed, activity in various parts of your brain has decreased, you are hard to awaken and you may have dreams
What happens after 4 stages of Sleep?
- After 20 to 30 minutes of stage-‐4 sleep your EEG pattern changes as you go back through stages 3 and 2, spending a little time in each.
- Over 90 minutes the cycle is 1-‐2-‐3-‐4-‐3-‐2 (Refer to figure 6.10)
- As the hours pass stage 4 and then stage 3 drop our and REM periods become longer
Explain REM SLEEP:
- High physiological arousal, frequent dreaming and rapid eye movement characterize stage-‐5 REM sleep.
- Bursts of muscular activity causes the sleepers eyeballs to vigorously move back and forth between their closed eyelids.
- Sleepers awoken in this stage reported having dreams
- Physiological arousal may increase to daytime levels (e.g. increased heart rate)
• Men have penile erections and women experience vaginal lubrication.
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