Lesson 7 aa Consciousness William James (1890): “Consciousness is a constantly moving stream of thoughts, feelings, and emotions.” Consciousness Consciousness can be viewed as our subjective awareness of mental events. Functions of consciousness: 4.Monitoring mental events 2. Control: consciousness allows us to formulate and reach goals Consciousness may have evolved to direct or control behavior in adaptive ways. Libet’s Half-Second Delay Electrically stimulated patients’ somatosensory cortices during surgery. Minimum level of stimulation necessary. At this intensity, % second of continuous stimulation before any perception. Shorter stimulation requires greater intensity. What happens to the lag? Reaction times can be 200 ms, recognition can take 300-400 ms, but Libet’s delay is 500 ms. Our body responds before we are conscious of why it is responding. Subjective referral: after neuronal adequacy is reached, the event is referred back to the point at which it occurred. Cortex and Consciousness The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is activated during conscious control tasks. Subjects asked to name the ink color in the Stroop task below have difficulty when the word name and color are different. This color-naming task was associated with activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Red Yellow Green Blue Red Yellow Green Blue Red Flow of Consciousness Day-dreams are shifts in attention toward internal thoughts and imagined scenarios. College students may spend as much as 50% of their waking time in a day-dream. Beeper studies of high-school students have noted the Modute Ilpredominance of negative thoughts when students are with their families as opposed to others. Psychodynamic View of Consciousness Freud argued that three mental systems form consciousness: 1. Conscious: mental events that you are aware of 2. Preconscious: Mental events that can be brought into awareness 3. Unconscious: Mental events that are inaccessible to awareness; events are actively kept out of awareness Consciousness is distributed throughout the brain. Hindbrain and midbrain are important for arousal and for sleep. Damage to the reticular formation can lead to coma. Prefrontal cortex is key for conscious control of information processing. Blindsight People with damage to the central portion of the occipital cortex; are blind in the sense that they are unable to see objects placed before them; are able to provide partial information about the geometric shape of an object (blindsight). Blindsight may involve a primitive visual system in the midbrain. Sleep and Dreaming Behavioral characteristics of sleep 1. Minimal movement 2. Stereotyped prone posture 3. Require a high degree of stimulation to arouse organism Physiological characteristics of sleep 1. Brain wave activity 2. Paralysis of muscles 3. Cardiovascular changes (alternating cycles of arousal) Functions of Sleep: ‘Memory consolidation Energy conservation Preservation from predators Restoring bodily functions (Sleep deprivation can alter immune function and lead to early death. Sleep deprivation can also lead to hallucinations and perceptual disorder) ayers REM Sleep: Characteristics Presence of rapid-eye-movements Presence of dreaming Increased autonomic nervous system activity EEG resembles that of awake state (beta wave) Motor paralysis (except for diaphragm) Peers Modute IlDreaming is explained through these views: 1. Psychoanalytic view: Dreams represent a window into the unconscious. The latent content (meaning) can be inferred from the manifest content (the actual dream). 2. Cognitive view: Dreams are constructed from the daily issues of the dreamer. 3. Biological view: Dreams represent the attempt of the cortex to interpret the random neural firing of the brain during sleep. Altered States of Consciousness are changes in consciousness can be brought on by meditation, hypnosis, drug ingestion, and religious experiences. “6. «Discuss Libet’s Half-second delay. . Discuss the experiment, Stroop Task. . Discuss Freud’s forms of consciousness. . Why do people dream? Name other forms of altered states of consciousness. Modute Il