Consciousness

What is consciousness?
• Consider what happens if you walk out of a dark house and onto a
front yard. Many signals assault the brain:
• The bright light from the sky hits your eyes, which send
information to visual processing areas in the thalamus and
occipital cortex.
• The heat from the sun bathes your skin, and temperature
sensors there send impulses to the thalamus, somatosensory
cortex, and brain stem areas that regulate body temperature.
What is consciousness?
• Consciousness is the awareness of one’s surroundings and what is
in one’s mind at a given moment.
• Can change very quickly when new information arrives.
• Still, much of what we do does not require deliberate
conscious thought.
• Consciousness is required for any mental processes that
involve imagining situations, such as planning future behavior.
Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness is a global workspace (Baars, 1997).
• Consciousness is a place where we temporarily attend
to information at hand or deemed important.
• Allows you to know what you are working with,
feeling, and thinking.
Theories of Consciousness
Conscious awareness occurs when neurons from many
distinct brain regions work together—a process
referred to as synchronization.
• Imagine that you see an apple: before you experience
“apple,” several areas of your brain are active, such
as those responding to the object’s shape (round) and
color (red) and where the object is in your visual
field.
Theories of Consciousness
How does the brain come to inform us that we have
experiences?
• One idea is that consciousness emerges as
information from seeing, hearing, problem-solving,
and remembering is linked with our internal states,
including emotions.
• Those events or objects we like form who we are and
tag what is worth recalling again.
 Two Dimensions of Consciousness
• Wakefulness- the degree of alertness reflecting whether
a person is awake or asleep.
• Awareness- monitoring information from the
environment and one’s own thoughts.
 A person can be awake b
 Minimal Consciousness
Coma- a state of consciousness in which the eyes are
closed, and the person is unresponsive and unarousable.
• Reticular Activating System- a bundle of nerves in
the brainstem that are involved in wakefulness and
sleep.
• Comatose people whose brains show a normal sleep
patterns are more likely to regain consciousness
 Minimal Consciousness
Vegetative State- a state of minimal consciousness in which the
eyes might be open, but the person is otherwise unresponsive.
• “wakefulness without awareness” (Bernat, 2006)
• Researchers asked a young woman who was in a vegetative
state to imagine a few things, such as walking through her
house and playing tennis, while they scanned her brain
using fMRI. Surprisingly, her brain showed activation in the
same areas as did the brains of people who were conscious
and asked to imagine the same things.
 Minimal Consciousness
Minimally Conscious- a state in which a patient shows
signs of intentional behavior (such as visually tracking a
person) but cannot communicate.
• minimally conscious people have opened their eyes but
show little behavioral response to the world around them.
Whereas a vegetative person cannot intentionally track a
person with the eyes, a minimally conscious person can.
 Moderate Consciousness
• Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (Galin, 1994)- we
know a person’s name, and we know we know it, but we
can’t come up with it. The experience of knowing that
we know a name is conscious, even if we cannot bring
the name into awareness.
• When we sleep and dream, we are moderately
conscious. We may be roused by sounds that are
important to us while ignoring others.
 Full Consciousness
• Flow- exists when we thrive in our ability to rise to the
occasion of challenging tasks (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)
• Mindfulness- a heightened awareness of the present
moment, whether of events in one’s environment or in
one’s own mind.
Two Dimensions of Consciousness
 What is Attention?
• Attention- the limited capacity to process information
that is under conscious control.
 Selective Attention?
• Selective Attention- the ability to focus awareness on
specific features in the environment while ignoring
others.
• Dichotic Listening Task- in these studies, a participant
received