Consciousness Flashcards
consciousness
the ability of a person, to generate a series of conscious experiences one after another (the whole range of mental contents open to an individual)
conscious experience
a moment of an awareness=essential ingredient of consciousness
attempts to understand consciousness have been mostly dominated by?
Philosophical Analysis in the first-person perspective
now we have? A wider set of approaches including
- philosophy
- psychology
- neuroscience
- cognitive scienece
- contemplative science
what is the challenge for the combination of these approaches?
to give a comprehensive explanation of consciousness
- this would include
- benefits of consciousness
- subjective experiences
- how consciousness depends on biological environmental, social, cultural, and developmental factors
Dualism-reductionist views
Dualism: mental and physical are different substances
reductionist: mental can be explained via descriptions of physical
motion-induced blindness
bright discs completely vanish from your awareness in full attention
what is the crucial ingredient of visual awareness
a reverberating reciprocal exchange of information between high -level visual areas and primary visual cortex appears to be essential
cortical blindness
brain damage limited to primary visual cortex who claims not to see anything
–rr exchange of info cant take place between V5 and damaged primary visual cortex
neural synchronization
communication among neural populations
is better when
oscillatory cycles of excitability are synchronized
sharing of info among which regions of the cerebral cortex is important for awareness?
prefrontal inferior parietal in occipital regions
shared info itself
constitutes consciousness, when the structure of shared info is complex,
organism has rich concious experinces and vice versa
to promote a rich level of consciousness what would be needed?
mix of short medium and long range neuro connections
episodic recollection
allows one to reexperince the past to virtually relive an earlier event
Amnesia effects?
Spares memory that doesn’t involve?
declarative memory
(hard to remember)
conscious remembering
habits motor skills etc
perceptual priming
reflects a fluency of processing produced by prior experience, even when the individual can not remember that prior experience
storing memories depend on connections among?
multiple cortical regions (cebral cortex) and hippocampus.
memory retrieval that does not include conscious recollection depends on?
restricted portions of the cortex or brain regions separate from the cortex
body awareness
involves a region of the cortex known as
the temporoparietal junction
Danage to this region can generate? distorted body awareness
we make decisions in two distinct ways
carefully analyze and weigh different factors taking full advantage of brains conscious mode or gut decision
when is a conscious decision effective?
when there are few know factors to consider
why do some scientists say conscious experiences cant be studied and what viewpoint do they follow
they are private and follow third person perceptively
conscious experience
the first-person perspective of a mental event
such as feeling some sensory, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a conscious temporal sequence of happenings
contemplative science
research area concerned with understanding practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional relativity their cognitive ability, and their brains the first-person experience can be gained from this perspective
first-person perspective
observations made by individuals about their own conscious experience also known as introspection or a subjective point of view
