Consciousness, sleep and dreams

Question 1

Consciousness

Answer 1

Psychological def:

awareness of the outside world and ones mental processes, thoughts, feelings and perceptions.

Medical def:
Awareness demonstrated by ability to recall an experience

Question 2

Functions of consciousness

Answer 2

1. monitoring mental events - self and environment: survey the inner and outer worlds for significant perceptions, thoughts and emotions
2. Regulates thought and behaviours - initiate and terminate thought and behaviour in order to achieve goals.

Question 3

Levels of consciousness

Answer 3

• conscious - aware
• Non-conscious - regulation of autonomic functions
• Preconscious level - info to bring to conscious with effort
• Unconscious level - unperceived mental activity that influences conscious thought

Question 4

Divided attention

Answer 4

Dichotic listening experiments - shadowing, priming effects (listening to 2 things at once).

Question 5

Unconscious

Answer 5

Unwanted thoughts, impuless, drives (freud), automatic, unconscious heuristics, implicit associations, intuition, gut instinct, having a hunch

Question 6

Location of consciousness

Answer 6

Neural pathways in the cortex and thalamus are important

Prefrontal cortex 0 conscious control of info processing

The feedback loop between the midbrain, thalamus, and cortex focuses attention on targets in the environment, with important targets getting attention in the cortex.

Question 7

Sleep deprivation leads to

Answer 7

poor learning, poor memory,lower IQ test songs, poorer emotional processing, mistakes at work, car accidents

Question 8

Recuperation theory

Answer 8

Sleep homeostasis, being awake disrupts physiological homeostasis, and restoration.

Question 9

Function of sleep

Answer 9

memory consolidation, immune system function

Question 10

Stages of sleep

Answer 10

1. wakefulness but slower
2. sleep spindles and K complexes,

3/4. delta waves

Question 11

Waves

Answer 11

Awake - beta waves

Drowsy,relaxed - alpha waves

Stages N1 sleep - theta waves

Stage N2 sleep - sleep spindles

Stage N3 sleep - delta waves

REM sleep - fast, random

Question 12

REM sleep

Answer 12

Rapid eye movement - loss of core muscle tone

Question 13

Non - REM sleep

Answer 13

sleep stages 1-3, cycles approximately every 90 minutes

Question 14

Rem and dreaming

Answer 14

REM is the physiological correlate of dreaming, waking during REM and dream recall, external stimuli, visual association areas in brain active during REM.

Question 15

Functions of REM sleep

Answer 15

• Improves neurons sensitiveity to norepinephrine
• strengthens neural connections
• solidies experiences and new skills
• sleep deprivation results in REM rebound

Question 16

Why we dream

Answer 16

Activation-synthesis (biological) theory - dreams are an attempt of the cortex to interpret the random neural firing of the brain during sleep

Information processing (cognitive) theory - dreams are constructed from the daily issues of the dreamer.