Conciousness 1 Flashcards
What is consciousness?
A subjective experience of the internal and external world. We are aware of this.
What is the importance of split brain experiments?
Have helped to illuminate the lateralized nature of brain function.
What is the significance of attention for conscious experience?
Conscious perception requires attention – when we pay attention to an object, we become conscious of its various attributes
Split Brain experiment
The research done on a type of surgery that cuts the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain.
How do psychologists view the conscious experience?
States of consciousness (subjective experiences in your internal and external world) and conscious content (The different levels of arousal and attention you can experience).
What is attention?
The process of selecting info from the internal and external environments to prioritize for processing
What are the different types of attention? (2)
- Passive attention - when bottom-up info from the external environment requires a response
- Active attention - when attention is directed by GOALS and top-down processing.
Example of Passive and Active attention
Passive - loud sound in room, look for source
Active - looking for keys on a cluttered table
What is Selective attention?
when you attend to one source of information while simultaneously ignoring other stimuli
What is the cocktail party effect?
A situation that goes with selective attention. When at a party a person is able to ignore all other noise to hear what the person in front of them is saying.
What are some common disorders of attention?
- Visual neglect
- ADHD
- Inattentional blindness and 2. Change blindness
- Occurs when someone fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight
- failure to notice obvious change
What are the four stages of sleep?
- Stage 1
- Stage 2
- Slow Wave Sleep
- Rem sleep
details about The four stages.
- Stage one - Theta waves (when someone is deeply relaxed or falling asleep, present through whole cycle)
- Stage two - Has a Sleep spindle (brief bursts of activity - memory consolidation, 2 to five times per minute during non-REM) ; Also has the K complex ( bursts of activity - bigger - only stage 2, if someone wakes up during this they will feel like they were never asleep)
- SWS - Delta waves (appear when someone is deeply asleep)
- REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - Theta waves (brain highly active, partly paralyzed, can be easily awakened.) Beta waves (alert and awake)
Note: Alpha waves - relaxed (awake)
How do researchers measure the stages of sleep?
EEGs - Electroencephalograms
Sleep disorders
- Dyssomnias (problems falling or staying asleep) - insomnia
- Narcolepsy (sleep attacks, falling asleep randomly)
- Sleep apnea (stopping breathing while asleep) - ass. obesity
- Night terrors (NREM3 sleep, terrified)
- Sleep walking and sleep talking
Describe the day and night cycles
Circadian rhythms - daily clocks
- around 25 hrs long
- reset every morning by ZEITGEBERS
What is Visual Neglect?
Lesions of the right inferior parietal lobe. This leads to the patient not being aware of the LEFT VISUAL FIELD STIMULI and they dont think anything is wrong
eg. will draw half a clock or half a face without realizing it
What is sleep?
Periodic, natural loss of consciousness
Where has our interest in dreams come from?
Sigmund Freud?
Can some animals only use half their brains to sleep?
Yes - dolphins, chickens
What part of the brain is severed/cut in half while doing a split brain experiment?
The Corpus Callosum
- the main bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of the brain
What are some effects of cutting the corpus callosum?
The left and right side of the brain cannot communicate. The left side is mute, the right side can understand language
Gazzaniga
Studied split brain patients.
Noticed that patients left side of body began acting on its own. eg. reading a book, left hand will try to put it down while still reading.
