Chapter 4: Consciousness
Consciousness = one’s moment-to-moment personal, subjective experience of the world.
→ involves sensations, thoughts, memories and anything else you are experiencing in the
moment
qualia = the qualitative experiences of your conscious state.
4.1
Conscious experience is unified and coherent → in your subjective experience, the world
makes sense and one thought or perception flows from another.
change blindness = a failure to notice large changes in one’s environment
4.2
Attention and consciousness are not the same thing, but often go hand in hand.
Shadowing = a procedure where the participant wears headphones that deliver one
message to one ear and a different message to the other. The participant is asked to attend
to one of the two messages and “shado” it by repeating it aloud. As a result the participant
usually notices the unattended sound, but will have little knowledge about the content of the
unattended sound.
endogenous attention = attention that is directed voluntarily
exogenous attention = attention that is directed involuntarily by a stimulus
An early fMRI study suggested it might be possible to observe consciousness experience
by looking at brain activity.
Brain activity can show e.g. which emotions you are experiencing / whether you are
attending to faces or bodies / whether you are thinking of yourself or a close friend.
4.3
Using devices in lectures will shift your attention and can make you miss important details.
4.4
Freud compared consciousness to the tip of the iceberg that can be seen above water,
whereas the unconscious, below the water, was the driving force influencing behavior.
The processing of irrelevant details of attended stimuli can unconsciously influence
behavior.
Priming = an influence in the response to a stimulus due to recent experience with that
stimulus or a related stimulus.
Subliminal perception = the processing of information by sensory systems without
conscious awareness.
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, 4.5
Automatic processing = when a task is so well learned that we can do it without much
attention.
Controlled processing = helps people perform in complex or novel situations; difficult or
unfamiliar tasks require people to pay attention.
4.6
altered consciousness = being in a state that changes your subjective perception of
consciousness from how you typically experience it.
Three ways of naturally altering waking consciousness:
- meditation
- immersion in an action
- hypnosis
Mediation = a mental procedure that focuses attention on an external object, an internal
event, or a sense of awareness.
- Concentrative meditation; you focus attention on one thing (breathing pattern,
mental image, specific phrase)
- Mindfulness meditation; you let your thoughts flow freely, paying attention to them
but trying not to react to them.
4.7
Meditation might help preserve brain integrity and associated cognitive functioning as
people age.
4.8
flow = a particular kind of experience that is so engrossing and enjoyable that it is worth
doing for its own sake even though it may have no consequence outside itself.
Potential flow activities such as sports or music may help people escape thinking about
their problems.
4.9
Hypnosis = a social interaction during which a person, responding to suggestions,
experiences changes in memory, perceptions and/or voluntary action.
posthypnotic suggestion = a suggestion from the hypnotist that after the hypnosis session,
the listener will experience a change in memory, perception or voluntary action.
A person who dislikes the idea of being hypnotized or finds it frightening probably wouldn’t
be hypnotized easily. To be hypnotized a person must willingly go along with the hypnotist's
suggestions.
sociocognitive theory of hypnosis = listeners act the part as in in a play, willing to perform
actions called for by the director (hypnotist).
neodissociation theory of hypnosis = hypnosis is a trancelike state in which conscious
awareness is separated or dissociated from other aspects of consciousness.
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