Consciousness

Question 1

conscious experiences

Answer 1

everything you know is from your own vantage point

• 1st person perspective of a mental event
• sensory input, memory, emotion, temporal sequence of happenings

Question 2

consciousness

Answer 2

ability to generate a series of conscious experiences one after the other

Question 3

awareness

Answer 3

conscious experience or capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness
- conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality

Question 4

first person perspective

Answer 4

observations made by people about their own conscious experiences

Question 5

contemplative science

Answer 5

concerns how contemplative practices can affect individuals (ex: meditation)

• changes in behaviour, emotions cognitive abilities, brains
• gains insight into conscious experiences

Question 6

dualism

Answer 6

Rene Descartes’ position

- mental and physical are different substances

Question 7

reductionist views

Answer 7

mental phenomena can be explained via descriptions of physical phenomena

Question 8

motion induced blindness

Answer 8

bright disc completely vanish your awareness in full attention
- neither brightness, paying attention, or deeply analyzing will guarantee that null be aware of it

Question 9

transcranial magnetic stimulation

Answer 9

TMS

• directly activating visual motion area (v5) with externally applied magnetic field will make you se moving dots
• activating visual motion area alone does not let you see motion
• reverberating reciprocal exchange of information btw higher level areas and primary visual cortex appears to be essential for visual awareness

Question 10

termed-cortical blindess

Answer 10

brain damage to primary visual cortex

- reverberating exchange cannot take place between v5 and primary visual cortex

Question 11

information integration theory of consciousness

Answer 11

shared info itself constitutes consciousness

Question 12

episodic recollection

Answer 12

allows one to re-experience the past to virtually relive an earlier event

Question 13

declarative memory

Answer 13

remember

- amnesia is disruptive to this

Question 14

conscious remembering

Answer 14

requires specific set of brain operations

- depend on network of neurons in cerebral cortex

Question 15

perceptual priming

Answer 15

type of memory that doesn’t entail the conscious experience of remembering and that it is typically preserved in amnesia
- reflects fluency of processing produced by prior experiences

Question 16

coincident sensations

Answer 16

ex: when you rub your arm, you can feel it and see it

Question 17

temporoparietal junction

Answer 17

mediates body awareness

• damage = distorted body awareness
  ex: feeling like you have an elongated horse

Question 18

presence

Answer 18

experience of actually being there

- virtual reality

Question 19

social neuroscience theory of consciousness

Answer 19

ability to localize our own sense of self

• far better in a social environment to the extent that you can predict what people are going to do
• human brain has development mechanisms to construct models of other peoples attention & intention….can localize those models in the corresponding people’s heads to keep track of them

Question 20

primary functional consciousness

Answer 20

predict our own behaviour

Question 21

volition

Answer 21

choosing among multiple possible actions

• decision making = mentally draining
  * critically analyze or chose based on gut feeling

Question 22

third person perspective

Answer 22

observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding

Question 23

blindsight

Answer 23

demonstrated when a person can analyze and respond to visual events even though they have no conscious awareness of having see the stimuli