States of Mind (1)
Welcome to the first lecture on states of mind.
We will talk about consciousness, unconsciousness, subconsciousness, sleep and Dreaming!
We will also talk about different ways that we can manipulate our consciousness by taking drugs or hypnosis or medication.
Watch one or both of the videos below before you continue:
Discovering Psychology Series - "The Mind Awake and Asleep" is a 28 minute video.
The Crash course in Psychology video that is less than 12 minutes.
I find that older students enjoy the Discovering Psychology video and the younger students like the Crash course videos.
First we need to define the nature of consciousness? The brain creates our consciousness when it combines external stimulation with internal experiences. Since everybody's internal experiences are different from everybody else's, when your brain combines external stimulation with your internal experiences it creates a unique (subjective) picture of the world. Each of us has different experiences in life. The experiences stored in your memory are different than what other people have in their memories. So, consciousness is subjective rather than objective. What you perceive in your consciousness is not specifically what somebody else will perceive. As an example: if you've ever been mugged in a dark alley, your experience of dark alleys is completely different from someone who has used dark alleys all their life to get between one street and another street without incident. So, when you pass a dark alley, your conscious awareness of that stimulus is going to be completely different from the person who has never been accosted in one. This is the meaning behind the saying "Don't judge another until you walk a mile in their shoes".
Consciousness is not a steady state. It changes on a fairly regular basis. Consciousness includes: your conscious awareness of the world; the pre and sub conscious and nonconscious and Freud's unconscious. It also includes: explicitly controlled procedures, things that we control in our life; Automatic procedures; the processing our body does without our conscious awareness; day dreaming, which some of you may already be doing even though this lecture's only gone on for two minutes; Explicitly altered states, where we alter our brain's functions through drugs for instance; and sleep, which includes dreaming. Dreams are a form of consciousness. Consciousness also includes implicit memories and the Unconsciousness, which was described first by Freud.
Folk wisdom and ancient philosophies assigns consciousness to some sort of anima (which is a Jungian perspective) or a soul (the church's perspective), or an inner force of some kind. Of course this is not scientifically provable. We don't know why we have a consciousness. We don't know why we are who we are. It may be because of a soul, but we can't prove that scientifically, so we try to find other things that we can put to a scientific test. When psychology was more of a philosophy than a science people used introspection to sort out the parts of consciousness. They thought about their own feelings about a certain situation. A group of men would sit in library arm chairs smoking pipes and all of them talking about how they felt while thinking about their own awareness of specific situations. This method of studying consciousness is called introspection. It is not acceptable by today's Scientific standards because it is not a controlled experiment. However it can be used to find ideas which can then be put to rigorous scientific testing. In and of itself, introspection is not Scientific study.
Consciousness is our brain's awareness of our internal and external stimulation. Of course, that means that we have some internal stimulation that we really don't think about. We'll talk about some of that in just a minute. Cognitive neuroscience is an Interdisciplinary field that studies the connections between mental processes and and the brain. Neuroscience is the Science of the nerves and cognitive means thought processes but what does Interdisciplinary mean? It means that it isn't just Psychologists studying this phenomenon. It is Biologists and Chemists and Physicists working together studying the brain and trying to figure out what mental processes are. Computers are also used as a model for comparing a brain to a computer. The brain processes information, gathers information, stores information, and regurgitates information just like a computer does. Remember Skinner? Skinner was a great proponent of Behaviorism and Behaviorism said that thought processes are useless for study. We shouldn't think about thought processes because thought processes are just a reaction to some stimulus and you can not measure them in a laboratory. Cognitive Psychologists purposely study a process that you can't even see - (thought). Skinner said in the most negative terms that he could use, that Cognitive Neuroscience was “a step backwards into the dark ages of Psychology.” He disliked Cognitive Neuroscientists, and I think I may have already told you before but I went to a University that was almost 100% Behaviorists. The University of Georgia had one Cognitive Psychologist and he was relegated to the basement in a dark, dank, damp room with cement walls.
What are the functions and structures of consciousness. First of all, consciousness restricts our attention and controls what we notice and what we think about. We can't think about everything that goes on in our life, so we're only conscious of certain things that occur in our environment. Consciousness combines sensation with learning and memory, and is an interpretation of our world. As I said before, when you have been mugged in a dark alley, your interpretation of that dark alley is completely different of somebody else's. Consciousness is subjective. Subjective means it's an opinion and not specifically based on fact at that particular point in your life. In our youth we make certain decisions about how we will think and behave, because as children, the world around us is so large and so imposing. Those decisions are usually not reevaluate later in life, so we live our lives as adults by the decisions that we made as children. We don't look at the new facts of our lives and reestablish new opinions. Subjective evaluations of our world are very biased and may not even be based on current facts. We are not like other people in the world, and sometimes we're not even like ourselves - what we think of as ourselves. Subjectivity is different than objectivity. Objectivity is based on current facts. While being Objective one attempts to step away from individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. Objectivity is looking at the the facts with neutrality and detachment. To make an objective evaluation one attempts to remove oneself as a part of the decision. Obviously consciousness is all about us - it is subjective. Consciousness helps us select personally meaningful stimuli from our environment. For example: My family has a lot of red haired members. When my wife and I go to the beach we can be sitting enjoying the sun and people can be walking by, and I pay no attention to them. However, when a red head walks by, it is personally meaningful stimulation and I pay attention to the red head. I get about four seconds before my wife slaps me on the back of the head! Consciousness allows us to draw on lessons stored in memory as well. I know I get about 4 seconds - so i look away after three! We have lots of lessons that we have stored in memory which are available to our consciousness. Sometimes those lessons that we learned were learned a long long time ago and the facts have changed. We need to be able to reinterpret those facts.
Here's a great visual for our Consciousness. Imagine you are the iceberg moving through the world. The ocean is our world. Icebergs have an interesting characteristic - the world can only see a small part of the iceberg. As an analogy the top of the iceberg - the part of ourselves that we notice - that we are aware of - is only a tiny fraction of the rest of
Consciousness. The Conscious part of our awareness is only a very small part of total consciousness. Consciousness includes our Subconscious and the Preconscious which are just below sea level. When waves come along we may become aware of the (pre and sub) conscious material lurking just below the water. It is also easy to access the preconcious material. Then, there's the nonconscious and the unconscious and unattended information. Let's look at some of those other parts of Consciousness.
The preconscious awareness is information that is not currently in our thoughts but can be brought easily and rapidly to our attention. Think of your mother's name. All of you should have immediately thought of your mother's name when you read that. It wasn't something that you were thinking about, it wasn't in your conscious awareness, but now it's in your conscious awareness because I brought it there by saying “Think of your mom's name.” Now, sometimes you know something and you know you know that thing but you just can't get it out. That is called the tip of the tongue phenomenon. Tip of the tongue is very funny for those of us who are watching but not very funny for those of us who experience it. Of course the harder you think about something stuck on the tip of your tongue, the worse it seems to be for you to recall it. If you stop thinking about it and do something else, it will come to you eventually, usually around 3 o' clock in the morning when you wake up thinking, “I remember! I know what it is!”. I am a little sarcastic and when someone says it's on the tip of their tongue, I say stick out your tongue and I'll read it. Of course that's ridiculous. It isn't really ON the tip of their tongue. It is sitting somewhere in your brain in a cue waiting for its turn to come out of your mouth. There are lots of reasons for tip of the tongue, and there's lots of research being done on tip of the tongue because if we can find out what causes blockage, what stops us from remembering, maybe we can improve memory recall. When we talk about memory we'll also talk about the processes that cause memory to be blocked. The Nonconscious is made up of internal processes that do not involve conscious processing. We don't have to think about these processes. Our heart rate is not something we contemplate, unless of course we have a heart attack, and then we're thinking about it quite a bit. Breathing is not something we think about unless we fall down and hit our back and get the wind knocked out of us, or we have Asthma or some other breathing disorder. We simply do not consider controlling our internal organs, but it is a part of our nonconscious awareness. Unattended information is the external signals of our world. Remember, nonconscious is internal signals that we're not aware of. Unattended information is the external signals that we're not paying attention to. You ignore these things but they do filter into your brain. You are usually aware of the air conditioner system in a room at first but because of sensory adaptation you don't usually hear it after a brief time unless somebody brings it to your attention. If you start studying during the early evening when there's still light outside and you haven't turned the light on inside it gets darker and darker and darker, but you don't really recognize it, it's happening so slowly, and finally somebody walks into the room and goes “Why the heck are you studying in the dark?” It is registered in your memory without conscious attention. Certainly you know that it's dark but you haven't paid much attention to it. Just because you're ignoring the fan on your computer that makes so much noise, doesn't mean that you can't hear it. You do hear it when it's brought to your attention. It is an unattended external signal. Some say the Unattended information is found in what many people call the subconscious. The subconscious is no longer a useful term in Psychology, it is archaic. It was used for a short time by Freud and then dropped. If you hear people talking about the subconscious they are most likely meaning the unconscious and they are poorly trained. One way I have ever seen the subconscious used was to mean the store of outside information registered in memory without our conscious attention, but that's the same as Unattended information. Some use it to mean the material we know that is easily remembered, but that is the Precociousness. We simply do not use the word subconscious any longer. Most people using the word Subconscious mean the vast storehouse of our mind - the Unconscious.
The Unconscious is the realm of Freud. It is considered part of the mind which stores and processes some information outside of awareness. Our memories are considered to be stored in our unconscious and then we can bring them to conscious thought if we need to, and if tip of the tongue doesn't occur.
Freud said that we also have very, very painful memories that are repressed in the unconscious. These memories can not cause us undue pain and suffering while they are repressed. Our mind shuts them away in an automatic response. You can think of it as putting them in a closet, closing the door, locking and throwing away the key. The problem is that closet door has a keyhole, and those memories that are repressed, filter slowly through that keyhole into your mind. Sometimes we act based on those repressed memories, but we don't know why we're acting the way we do. The repressed memories control our behaviors. What a Psychoanalyst would do is try to find those doors in your mind, try to open them and make you aware of the memories that are in them. Then you can deal with those memories. If a child is sexually assaulted, they may repress the memory. As an adult the child might hate all men. She may not trust any man. The person can not tell you why she despises men, she just knows she does. If she can open the door and face the memory from her childhood, she may then be able to see there is only ONE man she should never trust. This may lead her to be able to trust some other men in her future. Freud's ideas were not eagerly accepted in his time, but today we do believe that there are such things as memories that we cannot get to, that we can be helped to acquire, and when we acquire them we will feel better. When we talk about Psychoanalyst and Psychopathology, we will talk about how Freud came to this conclusion, but not at this time.
What are the cycles of everyday consciousness? Our Consciousness does cycle with our biological rhythms and the patterns of our environment.
Consciousness changes according to the units of our day in a 24 hours cycle.
Here is a link to a fun - but non-scientific (not even pseudoscience) observation of the cycles of our life.
It is called a biorhythm. It is less than a pseudoscience, but it's fun and gives you an idea about what a cycle is.
That's it for this lecture.
I’m going to stop here. It's time for a break guys, and gals. Go get a cup of coffee.
Go do something other than study (maybe play the hangman game).
There is one crossword puzzle for the entire unit,
but the hangman games are made for each slide.
Take 15 minutes or so before you go to the next slide.
Distributed learning is the best learning.
We will continue the study of the States of Mind in the next lecture.
Talk with you then.