Consciousness Flashcards
Waking consciousness
Our awareness of ourselves and our environment
selective attention
Even when we’re fully conscious, there’s a ton we are not aware of
cocktail party effect
Your ability to attend only one voice among many
change blindness
Failing to notice changes in the environment when our attention is focused on something else
daydreaming
- The spontaneous activity of recalling or imagining personal or vicarious experiences
- Altered state of consciousness - less aware of your external environment
- Not constrained by reality
reasons why we daydream
- Helps with decision making
- Imagining the future or reflecting on mistakes of the past
- Supports creativity
- Can think of new solutions to old problems
- Regulates our emotions
- Supports mental health, relationship health, productivity at work
types of daydreams
- Rationalization - generates reasons why an unsatisfactory real life outcome is actually satisfactory to the daydreamer
- Revenge - imagines retaliation to the daydreamer
- Failure/success reversal
- Failure: imagined scenarios where real life failures are prevented
- Success: imagined scenarios where real life success were failures
- Preparation - generating hypothetical future scenarios
Ways that daydreams differ from reality/waking consciousness
Four things you can manipulate:
- You can change the behavior of others
- You can change your self attributes
- You are not bound by physical constraints
- You are not bound by social constraints
Why do we sleep?
- Helps us recuperate physically and mentally
- Body tissue and neural pathways are repaired during sleep
- Helps us grow
- Pituitary gland releases growth hormones while we sleep
- Part of the reason adults need less sleep than babies
What happens when we don’t sleep?
- We feel lousy
- Lose our ability to concentrate
- Memory is impaired
- Immune system is weakened
circadian rhythm
- Natural 24 hour cycle that causes our sleep-wake patterns
- Influenced by pineal gland which releases melatonin
- Modern society (artificial lighting) messes this up
- Now closer to 25 hours
Sleep stage 1
- Very short (seconds)
- Have “hallucinations”
- Not always clear that you have fallen asleep
Sleep stage 2
- About 20 minutes
- Sleep talking occurs most often here
- Clearly asleep, but fairly easily awoken
Sleep stage 3+4
- About 30 minutes (together)
- Increasing number of delta waves
- Brain activity slows down
- Very hard to wake up
- When most sleep walking occurs
- Most physically restorative state of sleep
REM sleep
- About 10 minutes
- Brain appears “awake” (lots of neurological activity)
- Dreaming
- Body is paralyzed
- Paradoxical sleep
- Most mentally restorative state
- Critically important
dreaming
A sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person’s mind
narcolepsy
- Uncontrollable sleep attacks
- The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often at inopportune times
- Usually lasts less than 5 minutes
insomnia
- Recurring problems in falling asleep or staying asleep
sleep apnea
- Temporarily stop breathing during sleep and repeated momentary awakening
- Wake up enough to snort in air for a few seconds
- Often no recall of episodes
- Associated with obesity
night terrors
- High arousal and an appearance of being terrified
- Target mostly children, who may sit up or walk around, talk incoherently, increased heart/breathing rate
- Occur during stage 4 sleep within 2-3 hours of falling asleep
- Rarely remembered
sleep walking
- Most common in children
- Stage 4 sleep
- Harmless and unrecalled
hypnosis
A social interaction in which one person (the hypnotist) suggests to another (the subject) that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur
dissociation
- A split in consciousness, which allows some thoughts and behaviors to occur simultaneously with others
hypnosis as a social phenomenon
- Hypnotic phenomena are an extension of everyday social behavior and not something unique to hypnosis
- “The hypnotist’s ideas become the subject’s thoughts”
- “The subject’s thoughts produce the hypnotic experiences and behaviors”
- Extension of everyday everyday social behavior
hypnosis as divided consciousness
- Distinctive brain activity
- Dissociation - split between different levels of consciousness
- Selective attention
- Info processing is divided into simultaneous conscious and unconscious realms
- Lower arm into ice bath, hypnosis dissociates the sensation of pain stimulus from the emotional suffering that defines their experience of pain (feels cold but not painful)
meditation
A set of techniques that are intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness and focused attention
