Exploring Consciousness and Sleep: From Selective Attention to Dreams and Hypnosis, Slides of Introduction to Psychology

Download Exploring Consciousness and Sleep: From Selective Attention to Dreams and Hypnosis and more Slides Introduction to Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! Consciousness  Defined as awareness of ourselves and our environments  Are we completely conscious when we drive cars?  Are we somewhat conscious when we dream? Docsity.com Pick a card… Docsity.com Conscious processing  5 senses  11 million bits of sensation/information  ~40 are consciously processed  Why do we need a “perceptual filter”? Docsity.com Nonconscious influences Simple, novel music tunes Prose passages Participant recites the prose out loud Did participants recognize the music tunes? Did participants rate the music tunes they had been exposed to as more appealing than those that they had not been exposed to? NO YES WHAT CONCLUSION COULD WE DRAW BASED ON THESE RESULTS? Docsity.com Sleep  Circadian rhythm / body clock  Light (natural or artificial) is the stimulus  It causes neural activity in the hypothalamus (SCN)  Results in fluctuations of substances like melatonin (via the pineal gland)  Necessary for protection, restoration and growth Docsity.com Dreams  Definition: A sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts notable for hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities and incongruities, the dreamer’s delusional acceptance of the content, and later difficulty remembering it  Manifest content  Latent content Docsity.com Why we dream  Wish-fulfillment - Sigmund Freud  Information processing - Consolidation of memories  Activation synthesis - Low-level neural activity continues in sleep - The brain want to make “sense” of these “sensations” - Emotion-related limbic system has a role - Leads to the creation of the stories of dreams Docsity.com Hypnosis  State of focus via hypnotic induction  Suggestibility / hypnotic susceptibility  Post-hypnotic suggestion - Good for obesity and stress-related skin disorders - Bad for drug addictions, including smoking - What about positive suggestion?  Age-regression deeply disputed  Pain relief - Dissociation or Selective Attention? Docsity.com Meditation  Employed by all kinds of traditions - Buddhism to New Age  Lowers stress - Hormones - Cardiovascular  Helps negotiate between prefrontal cortex and amygdala?  Increased gamma-wave activity at rest? Docsity.com They say dreams are only real while they last… but how much more can we say about life? Docsity.com