consciousness

CHAPTER SUMMARY NOTES

4.1 Consciousness Is Limited

Consciousness is our moment-by-moment subjective experiences. At any one time, a person can be conscious of a limited number of things. Change blinds illustrates how selective an individual’s attention can be: We often do not notice large changes in an environment because we fail to pay attention.

4.2 Attention Is the Gateway to Conscious Awareness

Attention involves selecting some stimuli for conscious processing while ignoring other stimuli. Attention and consciousness go hand in hand. By filtering out some information, attention helps determine what enters conscious awareness.

4.4 Unconscious Processing Can Influence Behavior

Thought and behavior can be influenced by stimuli that are not experienced at a conscious level, as demonstrated by implicit biases and priming. Subliminal perception occurs when people are influenced by hidden messages. Although stimuli can have some effects on people without their awareness, there is currently no evidence that subliminal messages can compel people to perform complex actions against their will.

4.5 Automatic Processing Reduces Demands on Consciousness

Although learning a task may require a great deal of concentration and controlled processing, highly practiced tasks can become automatic and require less conscious effort. Reducing the demand for conscious awareness can be a benefit in that it frees up consciousness for other tasks, but automatically can also have costs depending on the situation.

EXTRA INFORMATION (course outline says we do not need to know this?)

4.8 People Can Lose Themselves in Activities

Exercise, religious practices, and other engaging activities can produce a state of altered consciousness called flow. In this state, people become completely absorbed in what they are doing. Flow is experienced as a positive state. In contrast to activities that generate flow, activities used to escape the self or reduce self-awareness can have harmful consequences.

4.10 Sleep Is an Altered State of Consciousness

Sleep is characterized by four stages in which brain activity varies. These stages range from short bursts of irregular waves (stages 1-2) to large, slow brain waves during deep, restful sleep (stages 3-4). REM sleep is marked by a return to short, fast brain waves and is accompanied by rapid eye movements, body paralysis, and dreaming.

4.11 People Dream While Sleeping

REM dreams and non-REM dreams activate and deactivate distinct brain regions. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams reveal unconscious conflicts, but evidence does not support this view. Activation-synthesis hypothesis posits that dreams are the product of the mind’s efforts to make sense of random brain activity during sleep.

4.12 Sleep Is an Adaptive Behavior

Three theories account for sleep: Sleep allows the body, including the brain, to rest and restore itself. Sleep protects animals from harm at times of the day when they are most susceptible to danger. And sleep facilitates learning through the strengthening of neural connections.

4.15 Brain Injury Can Diminish Consciousness

Concussions can temporarily alter consciousness. A person in a minimally conscious state shows some awareness of external stimuli. A person with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome does not show consciousness. A person who is brain dead has no brain activity and is not alive; the person’s body is being kept alive artificially.

4.16 Drugs Alter Consciousness by Changing Brain Neurochemistry

Psychoactive drugs are mind-altering substances. Each drug affects one or more specific neurotransmitters, leading to psychological effects. They can be divided into categories (stimulants, depressants, opioids, hallucinogens) based on these effects, but some psychoactive drugs do not fit neatly into categories because they have various effects.