Consciousness Flashcards
Conscious
- To be awake
Fully Conscious
- Mentally alert and in a clear state
Altered State of Consciousness
- Evident due to changes in mental activity
- > Shifts of attention
- > distorted perceptions
- > shifts in memories
Normal Waking Conscious
- Different to ASC:
- > Level of awareness
- > Quality of experiences
- > Intensity of experiences
ASC: Sleep
- > Naturally recurring state
- > Characterised by reduced / absent consciousness
- > Relatively suspended sensory activity
- > Inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles
ASC: Daydreaming
- > Visionary fantasy
- > Experienced whilst awake
ASC: Meditation
- > People train their minds a mode of consciousness to realise some benefit
- > Personal practice
ASC: Hypnosis
- > Induction of a state of consciousness
- > Person loses power of voluntary action
- > Highly responsive to suggestion or depiction
Can be used to recover suppressed memories
Waking Consciousness
- > Consciousness experienced in everyday life
- > Alert and aware of surroundings
-> Stroop effect: Suggests we are not always in control of what we pay attention to.
Waking Consciousness: Pain
Unpleasant feeling associated with damage / irritation to body
-> Treatments are medication, cognitive / behavioural techniques
Waking Consciousness: Selective Attention
- > Focus on something & exclude everything else around us
- > Directs attention purposefully
-> High levels and low levels of awareness
Gives priority to some stimuli over others
Waking Consciousness: Divided Attention
- > Attention is divided b/w numerous tasks
- > Stimuli demands the same / less attention as each other
Waking Consciousness: Habituation
- > Predictable & unchanging stimuli fail to command attention
- > Repetitive stimuli is ignored e.g. fridge humming
- > All of these occur frequently and person learns to block noise
Waking Consciousness: Dishabituation
- > Change in events that causes us to become aware of them
- > Change in repetitive stimuli
Amplitude
- Size of peaks and troughs from a baseline of no activity
Frequency
of brain waves per second
Measuring States of Consciousness
Brainwaves: EEG
-> Records amplitude and frequency
-> Frequency decreases as consciousness decreases
Heart Rate
- > Greater heart rate, greater state of arousal
- > Done through taking pulse
- > Exercise, fear / drugs can stimulate heart rate
- > Meditation = decrease
Body Temperature
- > Drugs can increase body temp.
- > Measured through skin of fingers
Galvanic Skin Response
- > Change in electrical conductivity of skin
- > Perspiration inc. electrical conductivity
- > Measured by attaching electrodes to hairless parts of body
Distortions of Perception
Stimuli and experiences lead to things being expected
-> these inc. level of attention, level of awareness, subsequent response
Perceptual Expectancy
A readiness to respond in a certain way because previous experiences
Multi- Lyer Illusion
2 lines of equal length, different shaped ends
- > illusion occurs because eyes look in wrong place
- > Eyes are drawn past the lines w/ feather tails to make line look longer
criticism: eyes dont move in different directions
