Definitions - chap 5 Flashcards
conscious meter
uses sensors attached to the patient’s head and gives reading on a scale of 0-100 (no electrical activity in the brain to fully alert). Anesthesiologists using this index deliver anesthetics to keep the patient in the recommended range of 40-60 for general anesthesia during surgery.
consciousness
a person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind. waking consciousness & altered consciousness.
psychologists
hope to understand what it’s like to be human. they seek to understand the subjective perspectives of the people whom they study
phenomenology
how things seem to the conscious person
problems of other minds
the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others.
zombie
what philosophers call someone who could talk about experiences and could even seem to react to them, but might not be having any inner experience at all. no clear way to distinguish a conscious person from someone who might do and say all the same things as a conscious person but who is not conscious.
people judge minds according to:
the capacity for experience and the capacity for agency.
experience
the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger, consciousness, or fear.
agency
the ability for self control, planning, memory, or thought
mind body problem
the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
mental events
intimately tired to brain events, such that every thought, perception, or feeling is associated with a particular pattern of activation of neurons in the brain. assumed by most psychologists.
brain activity may precede the activities of the conscious mind
one study suggests that the brain begins to show electrical activity around half a second before a voluntary action (535 milliseconds). brain also started to show electrical activity before the person reported a conscious decision to move.
consciousness has four basic properties
intentionality, unity, selectivity, and transience.
intentionality
quality of being directed/paying attention toward an object/stimulus.
unity
resistance to division. not easily divided, cannot focus on two stimuli.
selectivity
the capacity to include some objects but not others (filter). conscious of current stimuli and other stimuli are filtered.
transience
the tendency to change. focus of attention keep changing (shift from one stimuli to another).
cocktail-party phenomenon
people tune in one message while they filter out others nearby
diehotic listening
people wear headphones where they hear different messages in each ear.
minimal consciousness
low level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior.
full consciousness
occurs when you know and are able to report your mental state. means being aware of having a mental state while you are experiencing the mental state itself. involves thinking about things and thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things.
self consciousness
distant level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object
experience sampling technique
in which people are asked to report their conscious experiences at a particular time. shows that consciousness is dominated by the immediate environment - what is seen, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled - and that all are at the forefront of the mind.
current concerns
what the person is thinking about repeatedly.
daydreaming
state of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind. slowing down w/ alpha waves; generally familiar dreams. represents our wishes. Memory consolidation, dreams are what we are experiencing.
default network
becomes activated whenever people work on a mental task that they knew so well that they could daydream while doing it. involved in thinking about social life, about the self, and about the past and future.
mental control
attempt to change conscious states of mind.
thought suppression
the conscious avoidance of thought
rebound effect of thought suppression
the tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression. suggestions that suppression itself may cause the thought to return to consciousness in a robust way.
ironic processes of mental control
ironic errors occur because the mental process that monitors errors can itself produce them. needed for effective mental control - they help in the process of banishing a thought from consciousness - but they can sometimes yield the very failure they seem designed to overcome.
ironic effects on mental control
arise from processes that work outside of consciousness
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
viewed conscious thought as the surface of a much deeper mind made up of unconscious processes.
dynamic unconscious
described by Freud; an active system encompassing a lifetime of hidden memories, the person’s deepest instincts and desires, and the person’s inner struggle to control these forces.
repression
a mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keep s them in the unconscious.
Freudian slips
speech errors and lapses of consciousness. Freud believes that errors are not random and instead have some surplus meaning that has been created by an intelligent unconscious mind, even though the person consciously disavows the thoughts and memories that caused the errors in the first place.
cognitive unconscious
includes all mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior even though they are not experienced by the person.
subliminal perception
when thought or behavior is influenced by stimuli that a person cannot consciously report perceiving.
altered state of consciousness
a form of experience that departs significantly from normal subjective experience of the world and mind. can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of the loss of control, changes in emotional expression, alterations in body image and sense of self, perceptual distortions, and changes in meaning or significance.
sleep and dreams provide two unique perspectives on consciousness
a view of the mind without consciousness and a view of consciousness in an altered state.
hypnagogic state
presleep consciousness; wandering thoughts and images and odd juxtapositions, some almost dreamlike.
hypnic jerk
a sudden quiver or sensation of dropping
hypaopompic state
postsleep consciousness
circadian rhythm
a naturally occurring 24 hr cycle
EEG recordings
reveal a regular pattern of changes in electrical activity in the brain accompanying the circadian cycle
during waking
electrical activity changes involve alteration between high frequency activity (beta waves) during alertness and low frequency activity (alpha waves) during relaxation.
first stage of sleep
(~10 min) the EEG moves to frequency patterns lower than alpha waves (theta waves). transition from wakefulness to sleep.
second stage of sleep
(~15 mins) theta waves are interrupted by short bursts of activity called sleep spindles (low amp, high freq; may be related to memory reconsolidation) and K complexes (high amp, low freq), and the sleeper becomes more difficult to wake up.
stages three and four of sleep
the deepest stages of sleep; known as the slow wave sleep, in which the EEG patterns show activity called delta waves (high amp, low freq). 4 is hardest to wake up from.
REM sleep during 5th stage of sleep
theta waves & beta waves (gen. only present during awake consciousness). stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and a high level of brain activity.
fifth stage of sleep
REM sleep; EEG patterns become high frequency sawtooth waves, similar to beta waves, suggesting that the mind at this time is as active as it is during waking
during REM sleep
pulse quickens, blood pressure rises, and there are signs of sexual arousal. still, except for side to side movements of the eyes. Those awakened during REM sleep report having more dreams. paradoxical sleep, as we aren’t active body wise, paralyzed neck down.
Dreams
experienced in real time; also reported in other stages besides REM sleep, but not as many and these dreams are described as less wild and more like normal thinking. don’t usually include episodic memories, rather they single out sensory experiences or objects from waking life. synchronized activity, bizarre unpredictable.