Summary Unconsciousness Lecture

Chapter 6 - Consciousness
People sleepwalk, sleep talk and even eat in their sleep; when they wake up, they have half empty or
even empty packets of food  Treated often by psychotherapy, medication or by changing daily
rituals, like adjusting to locking the kitchen etc.

Visual Agnosia: inability to visually recognise objects, but can still see – triangles look like squares,
facial recognition is poor, but it is just vision that is affected  when touching objects or hearing
voices, there is still recognition.

Unconsciously keeping track of the roads and wheel, whilst being awake and out of zone

Buddhists believe that meditation produces inner peace, facilitates insight and opens up the path to
different dimensions of consciousness

 Consciousness: moment to moment awareness of ourselves and our environments 
 Subjective and private
 Dynamic (different states throughout the day; stream of mental activity, not just disjointed
and irrelevant experiences)
 Self-reflective (idea that only we understand the way the event makes us feel and we think
about the feeling
 Selective attention: focused attention on a stimuli compared to other stimuli that are also
present – the more intense (noise, emotion evoking, size etc.) a stimuli is, the more
attention it gets

Measuring states of consciousness –

 Self-report measures (diaries or questionnaire about inner, personal experiences)
 Behavioural measures (measuring an action or performance of an individual)  objective,
but infers subjective detail. Self-awareness seen in even animals, so elephants that have
logos marked on them and have a nearby mirror will examine their faces for ages. Same with
pigeons and magpies
 Physiological measures (body and mind connections; duality by Descartes involved) 
Electroencephalograph measures brain waves that reflect electrical activity through the
neurons. Determines what regions are active and what regions are sleep. No subjective
meaning, but showcases what parts of the brain are responsible for what –During REM
sleep, pons stimulated when sleeping; sends signals to the thalamus, which relays
information to the cerebral cortex, where dreams are essentially interpreted.

Brain scans do not determine any subjective feelings about an image, just the brain regions
responsible for reacting to the stimulus – hard to justify information about the unconscious

Awareness of thoughts, but not the creation of thoughts  beyond conscious AWARENESS



Freudian viewpoint
Conscious – thoughts and perceptions we are aware of

Preconscious – awareness is circumstantial, so evoked after the mention of a name or event

Unconscious – no awareness under ordinary circumstances

, Threatening emotions, sexual urges and aggression are usually repressed to avoid negative
emotions or consequences

Freud’s thinking encouraged critical thinking and falsifying theories through empirical research

Subliminal psychodynamic activation  People encouraged to perform better when provided
with activation statements – beating dad is okay – throwing darts more easily by men – complex
states jealousy against same sex parent and admiration for opposite sex parent



The cognitive viewpoint
Mental and unconscious mind are complementary, but apart

Explicit processing: conscious use of effort and attention, required for studying

Automatic processing: performing activities with conscious awareness – auto-pilot/everyday
tasks that are remembered:

- Being able to write and ride a bike are initially explicit, then they become automatic
- Learned behaviours that have been repeated over time, are hard to forget, but easy to do
automatically – decreases ability to change up the way we do things if we repeat the same
thing and master it over time (conditioning)
- Learnt behaviours are processed faster than behaviours that are In the process of learning

Automatic processing linked to divided attention –

Divided attention: capacity to perform more than one task (multi-tasking). More efficient in task
handling, but when material is too similar, then there is source confusion or interference and thus
remembering the material is hard, so two phone calls at once

Unconscious perception and influence: visual agnosia – lack of conscious awareness when it comes
to recognising faces or shapes, but there is still a sense of direction and brain activity that shows that
there is some unconscious familiarity with the stimuli – for example, someone with prosopagnosia,
they recognise shapes not faces, but their brains and eyes still have more movements and activity
when seeing family members – no conscious awareness

Strokes sometimes cause such severe disruptions to the brain and such harsh impairments, they can
actually cause issues like visual agnosia

HJA – his own face was foreign to him, so was his wife’s  good perception of objects shapes and
touch, or even sound; familiarity through remaining, unimpaired senses



Blindsight: people are blind in a visual field, but can respond to some stimuli that are in the visual
field, despite claiming they cannot see it. So left hemispheric damage causes right eye blindness;
when a line is flashed, they claim they did not see it, but when having to point where it was, they
have a high chance of guessing right