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Chapter 3
Consciousness and the Two-Track Mind
69
Psychology
Undergraduate 1
02/02/2013

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Term
What two levels do perception, thinking, language, and attitude work on?
Definition
1) Conscious, the deliberate high road.
2) Unconscious, the automatic low road.

These two roads make up dual process.
Term
How does the consciousness and the unconsciousness work on two-mind track?
Definition
Our consciousness enables us to exert voluntary control and to communicate our mental states, while the unconscious information processing occurs simultaneously on many parallel tracks.
Term
Serial conscious process
Definition
Is skilled at solving new problems, which require our FOCUSED attention.
Term
Selective attention
Definition
the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus → the cocktail party effect.
Term
Selective attention and accidents
Definition
The selective process of switching attentional gears, especially during complex tasks, can entail a slight and sometimes fatal delay in copying.
Term
Selective inattention
Definition
o Inattentional blindness → failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere.
o Change blindness → failing to notice changes in the environment.
o Pop-out → we don’t choose to attend to these stimuli, they draw our eye and demand our attention.
Term
When an individual is in deep sleep, are they completely unaware of their surroundings?
Definition
No, even when an individual is deeply asleep, their perceptual window is not completely shut. → EEG recordings confirm that the brain’s auditory cortex responds to sound stimuli even during sleep.
• People process most info outside their conscious awareness.
Term
Circadian rhythm
Definition
Our bodies roughly synchronize with the 24-hour cycle of day and night through a biological clock.
• Thinking is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian rhythm.
Term
What affect does bright light have on the circadian clock?
Definition
It activates light-sensitive retinal proteins, and these proteins control the circadian clock by triggering signals to the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucles (SGN), it does its job in part by causing the brain’s pineal gland to decrease its production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin.

• Being bathed in light disrupts the circadian clock.
Term
Sleep Stage 1
Definition
The relatively slow alpha waves of your awake but relaxed mind, the transition to sleep is marked by the slowed breathing and the irregular brain waves of Stage 1.
• During this brief Stage 1 sleep you may experience fantastic images, resembling hallucinations – sensory experiences that occur without a sensory stimulus.
• The sensation of falling and the sensation of floating weightlessly are hypnagogic sensations.
Term
Sleep Stage 2
Definition
Next, the body relaxes more deeply and begins about 20 minutes of Stage 2 sleep, characterized by the periodic appearance of sleep spindles.
Term
Sleep Stage 3
Definition
The transitional Stage 3, where your brain emits large, slow delta waves.
Term
Sleep Stage 4
Definition
The transitional Stage 3 to the deep sleep of Stage 4, the delta waves increase in Stage 4.
Term
What are the characteristics of REM sleep?
Definition
• Heart rate rises
• Breathing becomes rapid irregular
• Every half-minute or so your eyes dart around in momentary bursts of activity behind closed lids.
Term
Why is REM sleep often referred to paradoxical sleep?
Definition
The brain’s motor cortex is active during REM sleep, but the brainstem blocks its messages, leaving muscles relaxed – so relaxed that, except for an occasional finger, toe, or facial twitch, your are essentially paralyzed.

• Internally active, but externally calm.
Term
What influences sleep?
Definition
Sleep can be genetically and culturally influenced.
Term
What affect does a good night's sleep have on an individual?
Definition
With that much sleep - 9 hours - we awake refreshed, sustain better moods, and perform more efficient and accurate work.
Term
Can sleep debts be paid off by sleeping for a lengthy, uninterrupted period of time?
Definition
No.
Term
What are the effects of sleep loss?
Definition
1) Trouble studying, diminishes productivity, and increases the tendency to make mistakes.
2) Increases irritability and fatigue.
3) Makes you fatter → increases ghrelin and decreases its hunger-suppressing partner.
4) Increases cortisol → a stress hormone that stimulates the body to make fat.
5) Can suppress immune cells that fight off viral infections and cancer.
6) Alters metabolic and hormonal functioning in ways that mimics aging and are conducive to hypertension and memory impairment
7) Impairs creativity, concentration, and communication.

Basically, leaves you fat and useless.
Term
What are some of the popular theories of why we sleep?
Definition
1. Sleep protects → those who didn’t try to navigate around rocks and cliffs at night were more likely to leave descendants.
o A species’ sleep pattern tends to suit its ecological niche.
2. Sleep helps us recuperate → it helps restore and repair brain tissue and it gives resting neurons time to repair themselves, while allowing unused connections to weaken.
3. Sleep is for making memories → for restoring and rebuilding our fading memories of the day’s experiences.
4. Sleep also feeds creative thinking → the boost that a complete night’s sleep gives to our thinking and learning and can aid people in discerning connections among different novel pieces of info.
5. Sleep may play a role in the growth process → during deep sleep, the pituitary gland releases a growth hormone.
Term
Insomnia
Definition
persistent trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, Valeria in a nutshell.

• Sleeping pills and alcohol, can aggravate the problem, reducing REM sleep and leaving the person with next-day blahs.
Term
Narcolepsy
Definition
a sleep disorder characterized by uncontrollable sleep attacks. The sufferer may lapse directly into REM sleep, often at inopportune times.
Term
Sleep apnea
Definition
a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and repeated momentary awakenings → apnea sufferers often have no recall of these episodes.
Term
REM rebound
Definition
the tendency for REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation (created by repeated awakenings during REM sleep).
Term
Why do we dream?
Definition
1. To satisfy our own wishes → Dreams provide a psychic safety valve that discharges otherwise unacceptable feeling.
- According to Freud:
• Manifest content: is censored, symbolic of its latent content: which consists of unconscious drives and wishes that would be threatening if expressed directly.
• The key is to understand our inner conflicts.
2. To file away memories → researchers who see dreams as information processing believe that dreams may help sift, sort, and fix the day’s experience in our memory.
3. To develop and preserve neural pathways → dreams play a physiological function, perhaps the brain activity associated with REM sleep provides the sleeping brain with periodic stimulation.
4. To make sense of neural static → the activation-synthesis theory: this neural activity is random, and dreams are the brain’s attempt to make sense of it.
5. To reflect cognitive development → dreams are part of brain maturation and cognitive development.
Term
Where does the power of hypnosis resides?
Definition
In the subject's openness to suggestion, the hypnotists merely engage on people's ability to focus on certain images or behaviors.

• Highly hypnotizable people are those who easily become deeply absorbed in imaginative activities.
• Many researchers refer to hypnotic “susceptibility” as hypnotic ability – the ability to focus attention totally on a task, to become imaginatively absorbed in it, to entertain fanciful possibilities.
Term
Postural sway
Definition
When people stand upright with their eyes closed and are told that they are swaying back and forth, most will indeed sway a little.
Term
What are hypnotically refreshed memories?
Definition
Memories combine fact with fiction, without either person being aware of what is going on, a hypnotist’s hints – they can plant ideas that become the subject’s pseudomemory.
Term
Martin Orne and Frederich Evans → Double-blind procedure
Definition
• Martin Orne and Frederich Evans, unleashed that enemy of so many illusory beliefs – the control group → Orne asked other individuals to pretend they were hypnotized.
• All the unhypnotized participants performed the same acts as those who were hypnotized.
• An authoritative person in a legitimate context can induce people – hypnotized or not – to perform some unlikely acts.
Term
Can hypnosis be therapeutic?
Definition
• Hypnotherapists try to help patients harness their own healing powers.
• Posthypnotic suggestions have helped alleviate headaches, asthma, and stress-related skin disorders.
Term
Can hypnotists alleviate pain?
Definition
• Hypnosis can relieve pain → Nearly 10% of us can become so deeply hypnotized that we can even undergo major surgery without anesthesia.
• In surgical experiments, hypnotized patients have required less medication, recovered sooner, and left the hospital earlier, thanks to the inhibition of pain-related brain activity.
Term
Social Influence Theory
Definition
Advocates of the social influence theory contend that hypnotic phenomena are an extension of everyday social behavior, not unique to hypnosis.

• Our interpretations and attentional spotlight influence our ordinary perceptions.
Term
Disassociation
Definition
Ernest Hilgard believed hypnosis involves not only social influence but also special dual-processing state of dissociation – a split between different levels of consciousness.
o Hypnosis dissociates the sensation of the pain stimulus from the emotional suffering that defines their experience of pain.
→ hypnosis does not block sensory input, but it may block our attention to those stimuli.
• Our information processing is divided into simultaneous conscious and nonconscious realms, because much of our behavior occurs on autopilot.
Term
John Kilstrom and Kevin McConkey argue what about the two different approaches to hypnosis?
Definition
That there is no contradiction between the two approaches, which are converging toward a unified account of hypnosis: hypnosis can be an extension both of normal principles of social influence and of everyday dissociations between our conscious awareness and our automatic behaviors.
Term
Psychoactive drugs
Definition
Chemicals that change perceptions and moods through their actions at the neural synapses.

• Psychoactive drugs trigger negative aftereffects that offset their immediate positive effects and grow stronger with repetition.
• Negative aftereffects grow stronger, it takes larger and larger doses to produce the desired high, causing the aftereffects to worsen in the drug’s absence.
Term
Tolerance
Definition
The continued use of alcohol and other psychoactive drugs produce tolerance → the user’s brain adapts its chemistry to offset the drug affect (neuroadaptation), the user requires larger and larger doses to experience the same effect.
Term
Withdrawal
Definition
Users who stop taking psychoactive drugs may experience effect of withdrawal → the user may feel physical pain and intense craving, indicating physical dependence → people can also develop psychological dependence, particularly for stress-relieving drugs.
Term
Addiction
Definition
An addiction is a compulsive craving for a substance despite adverse consequences and often with physical symptoms such as aches, nausea, and distress following sudden withdrawal.
Term
Do addictive drugs quickly corrupt? For example, morphine taken to control pain is powerfully addictive. Does it often lead to heroin abuse?
Definition
People given morphine to control pain rarely develop the cravings of the addict who uses morphine as a mood-altering drug.
Term
Can addictions be overcome voluntarily, without therapy?
Definition
o People often recover on their own, though some addicts do benefit from treatment programs.
o Viewing addiction as a disease can undermine self-confidence and the will to change cravings that, without treatment, one cannot fight.
Term
Can we extend the concept of addiction to cover not just drug dependencies, but a whole spectrum of repetitive, pleasure-seeking behaviors?
Definition
Those who embezzle to feed their addiction or abuse or betray it, they use their addiction to explain away their behavior as an illness.
Term
What are the three major categories of psychoactive drugs?
Definition
1. Depressants → calm neural activity and slow body functions.
2. Stimulants
3. Hallucinogens
o They stimulate, inhibit, or mimic the activity of the brain’s own chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters.
Term
What affects do alcohol have on the body?
Definition
In low doses of alcohol may enliven a drinker, but they do so by slowing brain activity that controls judgment and inhibitions.

1) Disinhibition: Alcohol increases harmful tendencies and it increases helpful tendencies → The urges you would feel if sober are the ones you will more likely act upon when intoxicated.

2) Slowed Neural Processing: Low doses of alcohol relax the drinker by slowing sympathetic nervous system activity → reactions slow down, speech slurs, skilled performance deteriorates.
• As blood-alcohol levels rise and moral judgments falter, people’s qualms about drinking and driving lessen.

3) Memory disruption: Alcohol disrupts the processing of recent experiences into long-term memories → heavy drinkers may not recall people they met the night before or what they said or did while intoxicated.

4) Reduced self-aware and self-control

5) Expectancy effect: Alcohol’s behavioral effects stem not only from its alteration of brain chemistry but also from the user’s expectations.
Term
Barbiturates
Definition
drugs that depress the activity of the central nervous system, reducing anxiety but impairing memory and judgment.
• In larger doses, they can lead to impaired memory and judgment or even death.
Term
Opiates
Definition
Opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin, they depress the neural activity, temporarily lessing pain and anxiety.
• Blissful pleasure replaces pain and anxiety.
• Short-term pleasure, a gnawing craving, and a need for progressively larger doses.
• The brain eventually stops producing its own opiates, the endorphins.
Term
Stimulants
Definition
Stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine temporarily excite neural activity, and speed up body functions → the use of these substances are to stay awake, lose weight, or boost mood or athletic performance.
• It includes amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy, and methamphetamine (speed) → which increase heart and breathing rates and cause pupils to dilate, appetite to diminish, and energy and self-confidence to rise.
Term
Methamphetamine
Definition
It triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which stimulates brain cells that enhance energy and mood → eight hours or so of heightened energy and euphoria.
• May reduce baseline dopamine levels, leaving the user with permanently depressed functioning.
• Aftereffects include:
 Irritability
 Insomnia
 Hypertension
 Seizures
 Social isolation
 Depression
 Occasional violent outbursts
Term
Caffeine
Definition
Caffeine used regularly and in heavy doses produces tolerance: Its stimulating effects lessen and discontinuing heavy caffeine intake often produces withdrawal symptoms, including fatigue and headache.
Term
Nicotine
Definition
• Nicotine is as powerful and addictive as heroine and cocaine.
• Smokers develop tolerance, eventually needing larger doses to get the same effect.
• Quitting causes nicotine-withdrawal symptoms: craving, insomnia, anxiety, and irritability.
• Nicotine is mood-altering, it also reinforcing → it triggers the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine, which diminishes appetite and boosts alertness and mental efficiency.
• Nicotine stimulates the central nervous system to release of dopamine and natural opioids.
Term
Cocaine
Definition
Cocaine offers a fast track from euphoria to crash → a rush of euphoria that depletes the brain’s supply of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine → within 15 – 30 minutes, a crash of agitated depression follows.

• Cocaine leads to emotional disturbances, suspiciousness, convulsions, cardiac arrest, or respiratory failure.
Term
Ecstasy (MDMA)
Definition
Is both a stimulant and a mild hallucinogen.
• It triggers dopamine release and it also releases stored serotonin and blocks its reabsorption, thus prolonging serotonin's feel-good flood.
• Long-term: repeated leaching of brain serotonin can damage serotonin-producing neurons, leading to decreased output and increased risk of permanently depressed mood.
Term
Hallucinogens
Definition
Hallucinogens distort perceptions and evoke sensory images in the absence of sensory input → these drugs are also called psychedelics.
Term
LSD: Lysergic acid diethyl-amide
Definition
Is chemically similar to a subtype of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

1) The experience typically beings with simple geometric forms.
2) The next phase consists of more meaningful images.
3) As the hallucination peaks, people frequently feel separated from their body and experience dreamlike scenes so real that they may become panic-stricken or harm themselves.
Term
Marijuana
Definition
• Disrupts memory formation and interferes with immediate recall of info learned only a few minutes before.
• Impairs brain development.
• Shrinkage of brain areas that process memories and emotions.
• Naturally occurring THC-like molecules bind with cannabinoid receptors → these molecules may naturally control pain.

The major active ingredient in marijuana;triggers a variety of effects, including hallucinations.
Term
Consciousness
Definition
our awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Term
Dual processing
Definition
the principle that information is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks.
Term
REM sleep
Definition
rapid eye movement sleep; a recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams commonly occur. Also known as paradoxical sleep, because the muscles are relaxed but other body systems are active.
Term
Alpha waves
Definition
the relatively slow brain waves of a relaxed, awake state.
Term
Sleep
Definition
periodic, natural loss of conscious - as distinct from unconsciousness resulting from a coma, general anesthesia, or hibernation.
Term
Hallucinations
Definition
false sensory experiences such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.
Term
Delta waves
Definition
the large, slow brain waves associated with deep sleep.
Term
Night terrors
Definition
a sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified; unlike nightmares, night terrors occur during Stage 4 sleep, within two or three hours of falling asleep, and are seldom remembered.
Term
Dream
Definition
a sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person's mind. Dreams are notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, and for the dreamer's delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulties remembering it.
Term
Manifest content
Definition
according to Freud, the remembered story line of a dream (as distinct from its latent, or hidden, content).
Term
Latent content
Definition
according to Freud, the underlying meaning of a dream (as distinct from its manifest content).
Term
Hypnosis
Definition
a social interaction in which one person (the hypnotist) suggests to another (the subject) that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur.
Term
Posthypnotic suggestion
Definition
a suggestion, made during a hypnosis session, to be carried out after the subject is no longer hypnotized; used by some clinicians to help control undesired symptoms and behaviors.
Term
Amphetamines
Definition
drugs that stimulate neural activity, causing speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes.
Term
Near-death experience
Definition
an altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death; often similar to drug-induced hallucinations.
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