Sleep: Consciousness 1.5a

Defining Consciousness

Consciousness: our subjective awareness of ourselves and environment

• Researchers in the 1960s started studying consciousness altered by drugs, hypnosis, and mental states

• Consciousness awareness helps us make sense of our life, through emotions and sensations

• Over time we flit between different states of consciousness

  • daydreaming, sleeping, drug-induced hallucinations, meditating

Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive Neuroscience: the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with our mental processes

• scans showed that thinking about creative moves produced the most coordinated brain activity across different brain regions

• even in a motionless, uncommunicative body, researchers said the brain and mind may still be active

  • patient who survived a car crash but wasn’t able to speak was asked to imagine playing tennis, and scans showed activity of her imagining

• conscious experience arises from synchronized activity across the brain

  • a weaker stimulus (a word flashed too briefly to be consciously perceived) may trigger localized visual cortex activity that fades quickly

Dual Processing: The Two-Track Mind

Dual Processing: the principle that info is simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks

• so to speak, we have two minds each supported by its own neural equipment

• unconscious info processing occurs simultaneously on many tracks

• thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating all operate on 2 independent levels — a conscious “high rode” and an unconscious “low road”

  • the “high road” is reflective and the “low road” is intuitive

• the human brain is a device for converting conscious into unconscious knowledge

• Blindsight: a condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it

  • Ex: she acted as though she could see

• eyes send info simultaneously to different brain areas, which support different tasks

  • also known as a dual-processing system

• Visual Perception Track: enables us “to think about the world” — to recognize things and to plan future events

• Visual Action Track: guides our moment-to-moment movements

• Brain areas below the cortex process emotion-related info

  • Ex: a blind person could still sense people’s emotions without seeing their face

• Even when at rest, activity whirls inside your brain

• Parallel Processing: enables your mind to take care of routine business

• Sequential Processing: requires your forces attention on one thing at time

  • Ex: Solving new problems

1. As Doreen is trading her Psychology textbook, which statement is she most likely to encounter about consciousness?

   • It was studied only by Sigmund Freud

   • It has been discredited in favor of studying behaviors

   • It has been discredited in light of research showing the significant role of the unconscious

   • It is an important way of studying our two-track minds