psych 9a // chapter 5

• Consciousness is defined as the moment-by-moment awareness of the external environment as well as one’s own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• Introspection is the process of examining one’s thoughts and feelings.
• The inverted spectrum problem refers to a thought experiment that arises from the fact that although individuals may agree on the labels and categories for colors, color perception is subjective and internal to each individual’s conscious experience.
• Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
• Arousal is one aspect of consciousness, which refers to the overall level of wakefulness, alertness, and physiological activation in the brain and body.
• Attention is one aspect of consciousness, which refers to the subjective experience of being conscious and perceiving oneself and the surrounding environment.
• Selective attention is the act of focusing one’s awareness onto a particular aspect of one’s experience, to the exclusion of everything else.
• Inattentional blindness is a form of selective attention, which involves the failure to perceive information that is outside the focus of one’s attention.
• Change blindness is a form of inattentional blindness, in which a person fails to notice changes in a visual stimulus.
• Mind wandering is the phenomenon in which an individual’s thoughts shift away from their current task, activity, or external environment and become focused on internal, self-generated mentation.
• Some scientists propose that mind wandering, both intentional and unintentional, reflects the adaptive human ability to think in a perceptually decoupled way.
• Automaticity refers to the ability to perform a task without conscious awareness or attention.
• In Sigmund Freud's theory, the conscious mind is the part of the mind that is currently aware of sensory perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences.
• In Sigmund Freud's theory, the preconscious mind is the part of the mind that contains mental contents that are not currently in conscious awareness but can be readily accessed and brought into consciousness with minimal effort or attention.
• In Sigmund Freud's theory, the unconscious mind is the part of the mind that represents the largest and most influential part of the mind, containing thoughts, desires, memories, and emotions that are not directly accessible to conscious awareness.
• The cognitive unconscious involves the various mental processes that support everyday functioning without conscious awareness or control.
• Subliminal perception refers to a form of perception that occurs without conscious awareness.
• Consciousness involves arousal, which is disrupted when a person has damage to certain locations in the thalamus or in the reticular activating system in the brainstem.
• Consciousness involves awareness, which involves brain regions in both the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe.
• The default mode network is an interconnected system of brain regions that are active when the mind is alert and aware but not focused on any particular task.
• The global workspace hypothesis is the hypothesis that conscious awareness arises from synchronized activity, from across various brain regions, that is integrated into coherent representations of an experience.
• The circadian rhythm is a regular, 24-hour pattern of bodily arousal; also known as the biological rhythm or the biological clock.
• When neurons in the retinal surface are stimulated by light energy, they send signals through a neural pathway to the suprachiasmastic nucleus (SCN), which is a brain structure in the hypothalamus, just above the optic chiasm.
• When it is stimulated, the SCN communicates with the brain’s pineal gland to reduce the production of certain hormones, including the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin.
• Sleep is a regularly occurring state of altered consciousness that happens when arousal is very low.
• Beta waves are high-frequency, low-amplitude electrical waves in the brain that occur in a rhythmic pattern and are associated with being awake and actively thinking.
• Alpha waves are low-frequency, high-amplitude electrical waves in the brain that occur in a rhythmic pattern and are associated with being awake yet relaxed with the eyes closed in Stage 1 sleep.
• During Stage 1 sleep, a person may experience vivid images and sounds resembling hallucinations— sensory experiences in the absence of any sensory input from the environment.
• During Stage 2 sleep, bursts of rapid rhythmic brain-wave activity called sleep spindles and high-amplitude waves called K complexes start to occur every few seconds.
• During Stage 3 sleep, the brain continues to produce sleep spindles and K complexes but also starts to emit large, slow delta waves.
• Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements, brain activity similar to wakefulness, faster heart and breathing rate, inability to move the skeletal muscles, and dreams.
• REM sleep is also called paradoxical sleep because, despite heightened activity in the brain’s motor cortex, the body is completely relaxed.
• Unihemispheric sleep is a pattern of sleep in which only one half (or hemisphere) of the brain experiences slow-wave sleep at a time while the other half remains awake.
• During deep sleep, the pituitary gland releases a hormone that stimulates growth and cellular repair.
• Insomnia is a sleep disorder involving chronic difficulties with falling or staying asleep.
• Many people can successfully treat their insomnia symptoms by adjusting their behaviors, often referred to as sleep hygiene, such as not using their bed for anything other than sleep.
• Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder in which a person’s breathing is interrupted due to obstructions in the airway or problems with the brain’s control of breathing.
• REM behavior disorder (RBD) is a sleep disorder that involves acting out one’s dreams because the paralysis that normaly occurs during REM sleep is absent or incomplete.
• Sleepwalking is a sleep disorder that involves walking or performing other behaviors while in deep sleep.
• Though the two are often confused, RBD is more common in adults, whereas sleepwalking occurs more often in children.