States of

Consciousness
Chapter 7 265-307
 Consciousness
 Awareness of ourselves and our
environment
 As we have seen the brain excels at
parallel processing information, such
as sensory input.
 Our conscious mind however,
processes in sequence (basically one
thing at a time)
 Learning skills is a way train
ourselves to do something so well we
 Daydreams Fantasy
 A kind of mental play – daydreams and
fantasies can be useful
 Relieve tension
 Increase creativity
 Illuminate solutions to problems
 Lesson boredom

However if daydreaming stops you from

accomplishing the things you need to do
they can become a negative thing.
 Biological Rhythms
 Over various time periods the body
changes and so with it our minds…
 Annual cycles – Ducks migrating, bears
hibernating, people often become
depressed with seasonal affective
disorder.
 Twenty-eight-day Cycles – female
menstrual cycle
 24hr cycles – all mammals and birds sleep
on a 24 hr cycle, rising falling growth
hormone secretions/alertness
 90 min cycles – the sleep cycle
 Circadian Rhythm
 Circadian Rhythm is the 24 biological
clock most mammals including
humans are on.
 Body temperature rises as morning
approaches, peaks during the day,
falls off in early afternoon, drops
again before sleep.
Circadian Rhythm
 Sleep Stages
 There is a biological rhythm to our sleep, it
usually goes in 90 min cycles.
 Stages of Sleep
 Awake relaxed = Alpha waves
 Sleep – periodic, natural, reversible
loss of consciousness. You cannot
tell when you go to sleep but you can
tell when you awake from it.
 Stage 1 (about 5 min) strong
hallucinations may occur, sensations
of falling or floating
 Stages of Sleep
 Stage 2 (20 min) clearly asleep,
harder to wake up, can often
mumble nonsense
 Stage 3 (2-5 min) a transitional stage
of sleep to get you to stage 4.
 Stage 4 sleep (30 min) you are very
hard to awaken, your brain produces
long slow delta waves on the EEG, at
the end of this stage sometime
children can sleepwalk or wet their
bed.
 REM Sleep
 Lasts about 10 min. Brain waves
look almost like you are awake,
shallow breathing, eye movement,
visual and auditory areas of the brain
are active. As the night goes on REM
sleep takes up more and more of the
90 min sleep cycle, by morning about
100 min of sleep has been REM
sleep.
 Other sleep facts
 Even though you are asleep you still
can process information, you move
around on the bed but don’t fall out,
if you sleep with babies in the bed
you will not roll over them (unless
you are intoxicated or on drugs).
The roar of an ambulance might not
wake you up but your babies crying
will.
 Why do we Sleep?
 Sleep patterns vary, adults need less
than children, some people are ok with
6 hrs per night some have to have 9.
Sleep patterns have been detected to
be similar in identical twins.
 Your body keeps track of “sleep debt”
for about two weeks. Thus if you don’t
sleep well for a number of nights, just
one night of good sleep might not be
enough to make up for it.

Sleep Deprivation Effects
 Not getting enough sleep not only makes
you sleepy but also gives you a general
sense of malaise (unwell/sick).
 Diminished productivity, tendency to make
mistakes, irritability. More accident prone.
Impaired creativity, hormonal activity that
mimics aging, is conductive to obesity,
hypertension
 Affects the immune system, makes it
easier to become sick.
Are you Sleep Deprived?
 See page 278
 Why Sleep?
 Sleep protects
 Sleep helps us recuperate, restore
body tissue. The brain repairs itself,
reorganizes itself, consolidates
memories
 May have some role in the growth
process as the pituitary gland
releases growth hormones during
sleep.
 Sleep Disorders
 Insomnia – recurring problems in falling
or staying asleep.
 Narcolepsy – Uncontrollable sleep
attacks
 Sleep Apnea – people who stop
breathing in their sleep and who wake
up snorting for breath
 Night terrors – Stage 4 sleep near
waking of terror.
Natural ways to help you
sleep
 Relax before bedtime
 Avoid caffeine and chocolate, have a
glass of milk (rich in serotonin
materials)
 Sleep on a regular schedule
 Exercise regularly but not right
before bed
 Dreams
 Lucid Dreams – dreams where you know you
are dreaming in them.
 We spend on average 6 years of our life
dreaming. 8 out of 10 dreams for both men
and women have negative emotions in them.
 Manifest Content – according to Freud, the
remembered storyline of a dream.
 Often incorporates previous days events
 Sensory stimuli from our environment might be
incorporated into our dream.
 We usually forget whatever was going on
during the 5 min just before we fall asleep.
 Freud
 1900 published The Interpretation of
Dreams
 Argued that dreams provide a
psychic safety valve for otherwise
unacceptable feelings
 Believe manifest content was
symbolic of unconscious drives and
wishes that would be threatening if
expressed directly. He called the
underlying real meanings of dreams
 Why do we dream?
 Freud’s theories were un-provable, as
symbolic content can be interpreted
anyway you want.
 Modern theories think that dreaming is a
way of information processing that helps
us store memories. Scientists know that
REM sleep helps facilitate memory and if
its interrupted it hurts it.
 Scientists have studied rats and were able
to determine they were going visually
through a maze that they had learned
 Physiological reasons
 The brain needs to keep up neural
pathways by using them. Some scientists
think that dreams stimulate the brain
while you sleep so it doesn’t lose its
capacity to retain memories or skills.
Infants who’s pathways are developing
spend significantly more time in REM
sleep.
 Some scientists think that neural activity
is random and dreams are the brain’s
attempt to organize the random
 Hypnosis
 Hypnosis – a social interaction in
which one person (the hypnotist)
suggests to another (the subject)
that certain perceptions, feelings,
thoughts, or behaviors will
spontaneously occur.
 Scientists have been puzzled at what
exactly hypnosis is. Some say it is
an altered state of consciousness,
others say it’s a hoax.
 Hypnosis Facts
 Those who study hypnosis agree that its
power lies not in the hypnotist but in the
subject’s openness to suggestion.
 One of the tests to see if you are
susceptible to suggestion is to have
someone stand up straight and close their
eyes, now calmly tell them that they are
swaying back and forth over and over.
Those who end up swaying a little after a
while are usually the same people who are
best able to be hypnotized.
 Hypnosis
 Many people simply define hypnosis as the
ability to turn attention inward and imagine.
 The trick to hypnotizing someone is to have the
subject believe you or expect what you say
will come true. So when a hypnotist asks you
to strain your eyes and look at a point far away
and then suggests that your eyes are “getting
sleepy” it probably is because they are, but
now you believe the hypnotist, so the next
small thing he asks of you, you will be more
susceptible to do.
 Post-hypnotic suggestion – is a suggestion
 Hypnosis
 Hypnosis has been found to help heal some
ailments like asthma, headaches, warts, stress
related skin disorders, but no more so than
positive suggestion was shown to do to people
who were not hypnotized.
 Hypnosis has been able to reduce pain
effectively. About 10% of the population is
able to go though major surgery without pain
under hypnosis, around 50% can gain at least
slight pain relief from hypnosis. This may be a
form of dissociation a splitting of
consciousness so that putting your hand in ice
water feels very cold, but it is separated from
the emotional stress and suffering that defines
 Hypnosis
 Because most behaviors people can
experience through hypnosis they
can also experience while not being
hypnotized
 Many people look at the power of
role play and the power of perception
over reality to explain hypnotic
actions, that people are not “faking”
hypnotic effects but just doing what’s
expected of them.
 Divided Consciousness
 Hypnosis does have some evidence that it is
more than just suggestibility however.
 People under hypnosis generate distinctive
brain activity, posthypnotic suggestions will
often activate even when no one is watching.
 Hypnosis experts sometimes believe that a
divided consciousness has occurred, a kind of
autopilot response that occurs while the
conscious state becomes a “hidden observer.”
 In one example a hypnotized person placed her
hand in an ice bath and exhibited no signs of
pain, but when asked to push a button to tell if
Drugs and Consciousness
 There are three
main classification
for psychoactive
drugs.

 Depressants
 Stimulants
 Hallucinogens
 Addiction
 Tolerance -
Diminishing effect of
using a psychoactive
drug requiring using
more of the drug to get
the same effect or
eventually to even
normally function.
 Physical dependence –
When the absence of a
drug causes a physical
withdrawal
symptoms.
 Psychological
 Depressants
 Depressants reduce
mental activity and
slow body functions.
 Most common
depressants are
Alcohol, Barbiturates,
and Opiates (pain
killer drugs like
morphine)
 The main danger from
depressants is slowing
the body down so
much you go into
cardiac arrest – your
 Dangers of Liquor
 1. Long term effects – liver failure,
cancer of stomach, throat, and brain
damage, reproductive organ
damage.
 2. Act different, feel invincible, low
inhibitions
 3. Memory loss
 4. Hangovers
 5. Possible depression
 Stimulants
 Drugs that excite
neural activity and
speed up body
functions.
 Most popular:
Caffeine, nicotine,
amphetamines
(speed), cocaine,
crack
 Stimulants often
suppress appetite and
many have been used The most common of all stimulants
as diet pills but have Caffeine is also an addictive drug w
physical withdrawal symptoms.
 Crack
 Refined cocaine
that is very
powerful and
inhaled instead of
snorted.
 Creates a feeling of
euphoria and
invincibility or
extreme paranoia
 Is many time more
addictive and easy
to overdose and
cause cardiac
 Hallucinogens
Hallucinogens affect
certain Neurotransmitters
such as Serotonin and
cause hallucinations.
Sensation and perception
are altered and you can
see or hear things that in
fact don’t exist or cross
the sensory spectrum,
(like seeing sound or
hearing color).
Hallucinogens are
dangerous because it is
A collection of LSD. LSD is a liquid that
difficult to predict the can be added to anything and it only takes
experience of the A very small amount to cause hallucinations
 Marijuana
 Active ingredient is THC
 Relaxes, disinhibits, creates a “high”
 Amplifies sensitivity to colors,
sounds, tastes, and smells
 Can amplify feelings of anxiety and
depression
 Can be therapeutic for pain relief and
increases appetite which has made it
a drug of choice for cancer patients
and attempts at legalization for such
patients have been made.
 Immediate negative effects include
affecting motor and rational
judgment similar to alcohol, it also
affects short term memory, and lung
damage from smoke.
 The Real Problem with
Drugs
Drugs in general are dangerous even deadly
with each use as they change body
chemistry in unpredictable ways and affect
your judgement.
However, psychoactive drugs all have in
common this inescapable issue: The
immediate positive or pleasurable effects
that they give the user are countered by a
withdrawal or negative emotions when the
drug is absent. The negative effects are
always longer lasting and grow due to
tolerance. So in the end constant drug use
 Influences on Drug Use
 Biological influences – there is evidence that
some people are genetically more susceptible
to addiction, specifically alcoholism than others.
 Cultural influences – Peer culture is the number
one predictor of drug use.
 Psychological influences – People often “self
medicate” use drugs to escape a trauma, or
feelings of meaninglessness.
 These influences guide many prevention and
recovery programs. For example in order for
many people to quit drugs they need to find a
new group of friends who don’t use or they
 Near Death Experiences
 Many times people who come close
to death experience an altered state
of consciousness often similar to
drug induced hallucinations.
 NDE bring up a philosophical
question of whether the body and
mind are separate entities or the
same. Dualists believe that the
mind and body are distinct entities.
Monists believe that they are