Week 5 Modules - Consciousness and Sleep

Flashcards reviewing key concepts about consciousness, attention, neuroimaging, sleep stages, sleep disorders and dreaming.

What is consciousness?

Our awareness of ourselves and our environment.

How did William James describe consciousness?

A continuously moving, shifting, and unbroken stream

What is cognitive neuroscience?

The study of how brain activity is linked with our mental processes, including thinking, perception, memory, and language.

What does structural imaging show?

Shows the brain's anatomy and is useful in identifying large scale tumors, diseases, and injuries.

What does functional imaging show?

Shows us electromagnetic or metabolic activity in the brain, like blood flow to let us observe correlations between specific mental functions and activity in particular brain areas.

What are dual process models of consciousness?

The idea that our conscious deliberate mind and our implicit automatic mind work simultaneously.

What is selective attention?

How we focus our consciousness on one particular stimulus or group of stimuli, effectively tuning out the rest.

What is the cocktail party effect?

You could be in a room with many people talking and still be able to concentrate your hearing on one conversation, tuning out the rest of the voices and the background music.

What is selective inattention?

When your full attention is directed elsewhere, such as when texting and driving.

What is inattentional blindness?

When your full attention is directed elsewhere and you fail to notice obvious things.

What is change blindness?

The psychological phenomenon in which we fail to notice changes in our environment.

What is sleep?

A periodic, natural, reversible, and near total loss of consciousness.

What are the benefits of sleep?

Recuperation, growth support, improved mental function (memory, processing events, boosting creativity).

What is REM sleep?

Rapid eye movement sleep, a perplexing period when the sleeping brain is buzzing with activity, even though the body is in a deep slumber.

What brain waves are present when you are relaxed but still awake?

Alpha waves

What is the first stage of sleep?

Irregular non-rapid eye movement stage one, NREM-1.

What is rapid brainwave activity during stage NREM-2?

Sleep spindles.

What brain waves are present during NREM-3 sleep?

Slow rolling delta waves.

What is insomnia?

Persistent problems falling or staying asleep.

What is narcolepsy?

Sufferers sometimes experience brief uncontrollable attacks of overwhelming sleepiness called sleep attacks.

What is sleep apnea?

Causes sleepers to temporarily stop breathing until their decreased oxygen levels wake them up.

What are night terrors?

Spurring increased heart and breathing rates, screaming and thrashing that's seldom remembered upon waking.

What are dreams?

Those vivid emotional images racing through your sleeping brain.

What is oneirology?

The study of dreams.

What did Freud propose about our dreams?

Our dreams offer us wish fulfillment.

What does the information processing theory propose about dreams?

Our dreams help us sort out and process the day's events and fix them into our memories.

What does the physiological function theory suggest about dreaming?

Dreaming may promote neural development and preserve neural pathways by providing the brain with stimulation.