consciousness

what is dualism

the view that reality, including every living thing, consists of two kinds of stuff, a non-material mind (nous, soul, spirit) and a physical body, an idea found from Anaxagoras and Plato to many religions and children’s intuitive thinking, likely because we all have private inner experiences alongside a physical body.

what is cartesian dualism

The mind is res cogitans, a thinking thing that doesn’t occupy space, while physical objects are res extensa, space-occupying material things, so the mind is fundamentally different from everything physical.

what is the interaction problem

how mind and matter can causally influence each other.

what is monism

mind and brain and brain is mind

what is the hard problem

what is consciousness? Explain how the electrical firing of millions of neurons produces private, subjective, conscious experiences

how is consciousness as a subjective, private experience

The fact that we have no amount of physical information about something that someone explains will let us fully understand it because we have not experienced it.

what is the mind-body problem

How a non-physical mind and a physical body can causally interact, since four plausible statements (the body is physical, the mind is non-physical, they interact, and non-physical things can’t act on physical ones) can’t all be true, and dualism, monism, and the hard problem are approaches to resolving it.

what is the easy problem

Can solve perception, learning, memory, attention 

what is quale/qualia

private aspect of our mental lives and is the heart of the mind-body problem

what is consciousness

study of what it means to be us and how we experience the world through awareness

what is the philosophical zombie

beings physically identical to us that behave exactly like us (reacting to a needle, enjoying tastes) but have no qualia or conscious experience, and since they could exist, pure materialism can't fully explain consciousness.

what is panpsychism

Consciousness is a basic, universal feature of reality, present to varying degrees in every system

what does IIT stand for

integrated information theory

what is the integrated information theory

All systems that integrate information have some level of consciousness

what is the phi score

How Tononi measures how much information a system integrates as a unified whole, and the higher it is, the higher the system's level of consciousness

what is unconsciousness

mental activity that happens outside your awareness that can’t be directly observed or controlled, yet it strongly shapes your thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and behaviour.

what is self-aware

It is an exclusive human experience and refers to the capacity to become the objective of one's own attention achieved by self-reflection

what is “I”

what you perceive and experiences through your own eyes

what is “self”

what experiences qualia, a constant; stays the same as children as we have now and will when we age and can be separated into “I” and “me”

what is “me”

self that extends outwards in space and time and can be perceived as an object 

what does EEG stand for

electroencephalograms

what is electroencephalograms

records the summed electrical activity of large, synchronously active groups of cortical neurons from the scalp, giving excellent timing but poor spatial detail, and is used with EOG and EMG in sleep studies to define sleep stages and produce the hypnogram.

how do brain waves relate to states of consciousness

Alpha, Beta, Delta,Theta

what is REM sleep

has low arousal by every behavioural measure, yet rich conscious content with wakefulness and rapid eye movement. Includes consolidation, active forgetting, emotional processing, and insight, several at once, maybe

what is slow-wave sleep

delta activity: first half of night, suppressed by alcohol

what are the 4 stages of sleep

N1, N2, N3, REM sleep

how long does a cycle with the 4 stages take

90 minutes

how long does N1 sleep last for

5/10 mins

how long does N2 sleep last for

10-30 mins

how long does N3 sleep last for

15-30 mins

how long does REM sleep last for

10-20 mins

what happens during N1-N3 sleep cycle

No rapid eye movement; sparser and more thought-like mental activity 

what stage dominates the end part of the sleep cycle

REM

what stage dominates the start of sleep cycle

Slow-wave sleep (N3)

what is a hypnogram

a line graph/chart that shows the different stages of sleep over a period of time, usually an entire night

what are sleep spindles

bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity during stage 2

what are K complex

high-amplitude waves occur every few seconds after sleep spindles

what do sleep spindles and K complexes do

suppresses incoming sensory information, making the brain less responsive to external information and harder to wake and play a role in learning and memory

what are the sleep functions

restorative function and memory consolidation

what is restoritive function

Sleep deprivation causes mental and physical harm and can kill rats, but not humans

what is memory consolidation

the strongest evidence is for NREM slow-wave sleep

function of slow-wave sleep

Delta activity

what is delta activity

large amplitude, highly synchronized, which can be suppressed by alcohol

what are some examples of difficulties of sleep

insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, sleepwalking, night terrors, RBD

what is insomnia

persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep

what is sleep apnea

when people stop breathing for at least 10 seconds and sometimes as long as a minute or more

what is sleepwalking

occurs in children and during deeper stage 3 sleep because they spend more time in this stage of sleep

what are night terrors

people while asleep look awake and terrified with high heart and breathing rates

what is RBD

it is what unblocks the signals that the brainstem blocks from the motor cortex to the rest of the body during normal REM sleep

what is the circadian rhythm

your body’s roughly 24-hour internal clock, run by the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus, which uses light detected by the eyes to time melatonin release, body temperature, alertness, and sleep.

what is hypnosis

a social interaction in which the subject shifts into a highly relaxed state of mind and becomes readily accepting of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviour 

what is hypnotic analgesia

a phenomenon that is about how hypnosis is effective for reducing pain

what is dissociation

A person’s conscious awareness splits into two streams: one that hands control to the hypnotist and follows their suggestions, and another that stays detached and simply observes what is happening.

what is selective attention

a state of heightened yet focused awareness

what is inattentional blindness

the failure to see something outside one's focus of attention

what is change blindness

a result of selective attention that can make people blind to changes unfolding before their eyes and is a type of inattentional blindness

what is a default mode network

a set of brain regions that become active when you’re “doing nothing,” supporting daydreaming, remembering, planning, and think

what is the global workspace hypothesis

conscious awareness arises when diverse regions of the brain coordinate and communicate with one another, instead of coming from one specific brain region

what is mind wandering

when one's focus of awareness shifts away from a current activity and seems to wander, sometimes in fairly uncontrolled ways

who inspired dissociation

Ernest Hilgard

what did Ernest Hilgard state

hypnosis causes a state of dissociation