consciousness 9 Flashcards
what is consciousness?
- subjective experience- internal sense of ourselves, our surroundings and experiences
- conscious awareness, control, and attention- activity without conscious awareness
- a key aspect of thinking
- awareness of our surroundings, and our interactions with them
- awareness of our awareness- cognito ergo sum
- the subjective inner life of the mind
what is the hard problem?
what is it like to be conscious and experience ‘qualia’? = (subjective experience of something- unique). How do we know what others experience. e.g. colours. Do we experience colours in the same way.
what is access consciousness?
the result of info processing
what is sentience consciousness?
our experience of these results
what is jacksons thought experiment?
Mary is a neuroscientist and leading expert on colour vision.
But she has lived her whole life in a black and white room and never
seen colour.
She understands all the brain processes that allow people to see in
colour. She knows how the brain discriminates stimuli and integrates
information; she understands the way colour names correspond to
wavelengths on a light spectrum.
But she does not know what it is like to experience a colour like red.
Hence there are facts about conscious experience that cannot be
deduced from physical facts about the way the brain works
where in the brain is consciousness?
– Bears –Global workspace theory- a central processor or ‘theatre of consciousness’- stage of consciousness receives, processes, integrates and responds to info from numerous non-conscious brain areas. Consciousness also draws together localised functioning into a unitary awareness.
– Dennett- no specific brain region- no Cartesian theatre- it is a state of the brain not a place- constant updating of incoming sensory representations, or ‘drafts’.
what is freuds view of the unconscious?
- Driven by instinctive urges and repressed conflicts
- Freudian slips
what is the cognitive view of unconscious?
- Emphasizes consciousness as key to thinking and
sensation of unitary awareness - Many activities involve controlled (conscious) processes,
or automatic (unconscious) processing
what can be accomplished without conscious awareness or control?
- Perception
- Most motor movements
- Retrieval of knowledge from memory
- Implementation of highly learned skills
what is selective attention?
- Controls and directs our awareness of events in the environment
- Intimately connected to consciousness
- Selective attention determines which events we become conscious of- can be consciously directed or can be automatically controlled by environment.
what is selective attention and unconscious processing?
e.g. dichotic listening
-We can consciously isolate & perceive a single stream of information
– personal significance of stimuli influences depth of processing – how conscious we become, e.g a third of people will pay attention if it includes our name
-cognitive control ability also important
what is an attentional filter?
makes a decision in what we are going to pay attention to- all or nothing model, undermined by dichotic listening studies
what is attenuation model?
everything else is turned down, e.g. other colours other than the one focused on is greyed out
what did jiang et al experiment in the cognitive unconscious: evidence from healthy individual?
Ptps can be unconsciously directed
towards spatial locations based on
gender and sexual orientation
- start with a fixation point- see a naked person- scrambled naked person on the other side- mask so you don’t know which side the naked person is- asked if it’s been titled clockwise or anticlockwise
-naked person- people are faster and more accurate
what are clinical examples of the cognitive unconscious?
Clinical cases provide examples of processes & behaviours operating without apparent
consciousness - See behind ‘illusion’ of full conscious control/experience
-Conscious awareness can exist despite
absence of behavioural signs
-Owens et al. (2006) studied a patient
apparently without conscious awareness
in a vegetative state
-When asked to imagine playing tennis or
walking round their house, patient
showed same distinct brain activation
patterns as controls
what is blindsight?
*Perceptually blind in area of visual field
*Show response to visual stimuli, such as
moving light (but without ‘qualia’)
*Responses much higher than chance
guessing
*Caused by damage to the area responsible
for processing vision (Weiskrantz et al,
1990)
*Suggests a lot of processing takes place
before consciousness joins in
*Possibly aware of eyes ‘tracking’
movement
what is visual agnosia?
- Can detect but not recognize objects
- e.g. Patient DF (e.g. Milner and Goodale,
1995) - Unable to visually recognize objects (e.g.
shapes, or faces), or judge shape, size, or
orientation
BUT… - Able to easily walk across a room, avoiding
obstacles - And can perform motor action tasks despite
being unable to consciously perceive stimuli
*Unable to match orientation, but able to
perform motor actions relative to orientation
Karnath et al. (2009)
what are split brain patients?
Respond in different ways to stimuli presented in each of the visual fields
Suggests ‘unity of consciousness’ is an illusion? Gazzaniga (1985) LH dominant for
consciousness
Anarchic hand syndrome
E.g. Della Sala et al. (1994) Patient G.P.
Patients feel they have no voluntary control
over the movements of the ‘alien’ hand
* Can result in intermanual conflict
* Different areas of brain control movement
motivated by environment vs. internal contro
what did libet suggest about conscious free will?
- EEG- measure brain activity
- EMG- movement of finger
- Note when they decided to move their finger
- Gaps in decision making
- Libet- the brain decides to initiate the act before we become consciously aware that such a decision has taken place
- We can choose to inhibit actions once we’re aware of them, but we don’t control their unconscious initiation
- Implications for free will, individual responsibility and guilt.
what is the control freak executive?
- Conscious self initiates and is aware of ALL action
- The conscious self has a lot to do - cognitively inefficient
- Does not fit with evidence
what is the couch potato?
- Consciousness is an illusion (Gray, 2002)
- Conscious self is aware of some action but does not initiate anything
- But raises the question as to what the conscious self is FOR
what is the delegator?
– Conscious self delegates responsibility to unconscious “expert”
processes
- The cognitive unconscious makes efficient thought possible
- We are consciously aware of results of lower level processing
- Conscious control can step in and inhibit inappropriate actions
- Conscious self deals with novel problems in absence of “tried and trusted” solution
- Hence consciousness has evolved to deal with novelty and allow flexible behaviour
