Consciousness and Sleep/Dreaming Lecture Notes

Fundamental Questions:
- How do we define and verify consciousness in ourselves?
- How do we know if someone else is conscious?
This leads to a significant problem: How can consciousness be scientifically studied?

Neural Correlate of Consciousness (NCC):
- Investigates which brain regions and activities are directly correlated with conscious perception.
- Often uses ambiguous stimuli to observe how brain activity changes with subjective perception.
Conscious vs. Unconscious Processing Similarity:
- Examines the extent to which conscious and unconscious processing are alike.
- Questions what is learned during sleep and how deeply stimuli processed only unconsciously can affect us.
Is Consciousness in Charge?
- Inspired by experiments like Benjamin Libet's, which questioned the extent of free will and conscious control over actions.
Capacity of Consciousness:
- Explores how many pieces of information can be consciously perceived simultaneously.
- Investigates what happens to information that remains outside of conscious awareness.
Awareness of Consciousness Boundaries:
- The "grand illusion": People tend to overestimate their capacity to perceive everything around them.
- Highlights our limited awareness of what falls outside our conscious mental spotlight.

Consciousness: Our personal awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Unconscious: Refers to mental processes and content happening in our brains outside of our conscious awareness.
- Important Distinction: This is not about being knocked out, in a coma, or asleep.
- Even when fully awake, a vast amount of brain activity occurs without our knowledge.

Freud's Influence:
- Profoundly impacted psychology and Western society by emphasizing the unconscious mind.
- His theories shifted the view of humankind from purely rational beings in control of their actions to individuals influenced by hidden psychological forces.
Modern Psychology's Perspective:
- Embraces the concept of an unconscious mind and its ongoing processing.
- However, it generally does not adhere to the specific tenets of Freudian theory.

Sensory Input:
- While we consciously attend to limited information (e.g., listening to words),
- Our brains process over 10 ext{ million} bits of sensory information every second unconsciously.
- Examples include room temperature, clothing sensation, passage of time, and background noises.
Mental Processing:
- Beyond sensory input, unconscious processes also include:
  - Memory consolidation
  - Formation of judgments
  - Problem-solving activities
  - Interpretation of word meanings
Benefits of Unconscious Processing:
- It prevents cognitive overload and insanity that would result from consciously processing all available information.
- Acts as an