Consciousness

Conscious Thought, Unconscious Thought

• consciousness is a state of awareness of sensations or ideas, such that one can

  • reflect on those sensations and ideas

  • know what it “feels like” to experience them

  • report to others that one is aware of these sensations and ideas

Conscious and Unconscious Cognition

• cognitive unconscious: the broad set of mental activites outside of your awareness that make your ordinary interactions with the world possible

• the implicit system

Unconscious Processes, Conscious Products

• generally aware of the products of cognition but unaware of the processes

• memory of a dinner outing last month - product

  • u can reflect on the dinner and can describe it if someone asks you

• retrieval, reconstruction and interferences = processes

  • ur unaware of the process that brought u to this knowledge

  • u have no way of telling which bits are supplied by memory retrievals and which bits rest on interference or assumption

Mistaken Introspections

• mental processes can sometimes seem or feel to be conscious

  • people mistakenly believe they have observed (not just inferred) the process

  • introspective explanations for our thoughts and behaviors are often   

    • after-the-fact reconstruction

      • often accurate, but not always

      • often based on generic knowledge

The Problem of “Unconscious”

• if you can’t determine which bits are which, there’s no way for you to reject the interferences or to avoid the (entirely unnoticed) assumptions

• for ex, why memory errors are often undetectable

  • the process that brings u a “memory” unfolds in the cognitive unconscious

  • genuine recall and false memories or memories based on assumption feel the same and result in a similar product (memory)

Unconscious Reasoning

• people reason unconsciously

  • this name seems familiar;

    • “so it must be someone famous”

    • “so it must be the person who robbed me”

• people don’t explicitly recall having these reports, but the data indicate that something analogous is happening

  • ex: how did you come to the conclusion about the gumball machine?

Interpretation and Inference

• one study onvolving electric shock demonstrated unconscious causal reasoning about somatic symptoms

  • placebo group was given a placebo pill

  • “to diminish the pain…[but with] several side effects”

    • ex: shaking hands, butterflies in the stomach, irregular breathing

  • provide shocks to both groups and tell me when to stop

• placebo group withstood, on aervage, 4x the shock amperage

  • attributed physical symptoms of the shock to the pill (placebo)

    • placebo participants reported not having thought about the pill

    • unconscious reasoning: “Oh, look, I’m trembling! That’s just what the experiment said the pill would do, So I guess I can stop worrying about the trembling. Let me look for some other indication of whether the shock is bothering me.”

Disruptions fo Consciousness

• brain damage also provides evidence for unconscious processing

  • amnesia can impair explicit memory but no implicit memory

  • “memory without awareness”

Blindsight

• results from damage to the visual cortex

  • no visual awareness;

    • patients insist that they cannot see visual stimuli, and they do not react to them

  • they can correctly “guess” the locations of objects reach for them, and generally describe them

  • they can off no explanation for why their “guesses: are consistently accurate

  • demonstrate that consciousness is not required for visual perception

Consciousness and Executive COntrol

• we can do a huge range of activites without awareness

• so, why do we need consciousness at all?

• are there things that we can’t do unconsciouslly

Limits of Uconscious Performance

• our unconscious judgments and inferences are fast, efficient and reasonable

  • guided by situational cues, prior habits and familiarity

• unconscious processes serve as “mental reflexes”

  • guided by circumstances

  • generally inflexible

A Role for Control

• unconscious processes can operate without “supervision”

  • run many processes simultaneously

    • icnreases speed and efficiency of cognition

    • attention can be devoted elsewhere

  • how dp they run without supervision?

    • biological - likely built into the nervous system

    • practice- processes become more automated

Prerequisites for Control

• executive control requires

  • info about inputs

  • a way to intiate or override actions

  • a way to represent foals and agenda

  • info about thestate of mental processes

    • are they unfolding smoothly?

    • should another path to the goal be taken?

Metacgnition

• metacognitive skills: skills in monitoring and controlling one’s own mental processes

  • metamemory: knowledge and beliefs about, awareness of, and control over one’s own memory

    • “I understand this material; I can study something else now”

    • “I don’t think zI’ll remember this later. I should come up with a mnemonic”

  • guided by goals

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness

• what are the neural correlates of consciousness?

  • what are the

The main brain areas needed for consciousness

• two broad categories of sites:

  • overall alertness or sensitivity

    • range form being sleepy and dimly aware to fully awake, highly alert, and totally focused

    • compromised by damage to the thalamus or reticular activiating system

  • content of consciousness

    • no" “consciousness center”

    • various contents rely on different brain regions

The Neuronal Workspace

• Neuronal workspace hypothesis

  • “global communication entwork:

  • “workspace” is made of long-range, high-level neurons that connect distant brain regions

    • link the activity of various specialized brain areas

    • possible to integrate and compare different types of info

  • linking stimuli into a dynamic, coherent representation via workspace neurons leads to consciousness network

The Function of the Neuronal Workspace

• the workspace enables you to maintain mental representations in an active state for extended periods

  •     info carried by workspace neurons is governed by competition

  • limited and shaped by how you focus (and sustain) your attention

  • makes it possible to continue thinking abut something after the trigger has been removed

  • linked to claims about working memory

The Role of Phenomenal Experience

• the workspace

  • allows comparisons across processing streams

  • supports sustained neural activity

  • can amplify certain types of activity

• but how do we explain what it feels like to be conscious and have experiences

Qualia

• access consciousness: one’s sensitivity and access to certain types of info

• phenomenal consciousness: what it feels like to have certain experiences

  • one’s subjective or “inner” experience

• qualia: one’s subjective experiences that cannot be conveyed as a first-person experience to someone else

  • for ex:

    • exact flavor of chocolate

    • the pain of a headache

    • the color red

Consciousness: What is Left Unsaid

• mind-body problem the mind may a different sort of entity from the physical body, yet can influence the other

  • correlation between brain states and conscious states

  • how do these states cause changes in the other?

  • remains an open question