Chapter 7
Consciousness

 You are looking around the room and your awareness is
drifting to that attractive classmate sitting across the
room.
 You are reading these words
 Everything you think and feel is part of your conscious
experience
 Consciousness: A state of awareness, including a
person’s feelings, sensations, ideas, and perceptions.
Introduction

 The subject that has had a great deal of research in
recent years is the study of altered states of
consciousness.
 Altered state of consciousness involves a change in
mental processes, not just feeling more or less alert.
Introduction

Since at least the 1960’s, psychologists
have been studying altered states of
consciousness by having people sleep,
meditate, undergo hypnosis, take drugs
during laboratory, researchers can
observe changes in behavior and
measure changes in breathing, pulse
rate, body temperature, and brain
activity.
Sleep zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sleep is a state of altered
consciousness, characterized by
certain patterns of brain activity.
Sleep zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 Sleep is a major part of human and animal behavior but it is
difficult to study because a researcher cannot ask a sleeping
person to report on the experience without first waking the
person.
 Electroencephalograph (EEG)- Machine that records the
electrical activity of the brain
 By observing sleeping subjects and by recording their brain and
body responses, researchers have discovered 2 different types
of sleep patterns:
 Quiet sleep
 Active sleep
Stages of sleep

As you begin to fall asleep, your body
temperature declines, your pulse rate
drops, and your breathing grows slow
and even.
Stages of sleep

 Turn to page 159
How Sleep Cycles
Progress

 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, REM 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, REM…
Stages of sleep

 Stage 1
 Your pulse rate slows more
 Muscles relax, but breathing becomes uneven and
your brain waves grow irregular
 If awakened during stage 1, you would report that
your were “just drifting.”
 Lasts 10 minutes
 Theta waves
Stages of sleep

 Stage 2
 Brain waves - high frequency bursts occur
 Eyes roll slowly from side to side
Stages of sleep

 Stage 3
 Some delta waves begin
Stages of sleep

 Stage 4
 Deepest sleep of all, delta waves
 Difficult to awaken in this stage
 State of oblivion, you feel disoriented if wakened in
this stage
 Talking out loud, sleepwalking, night terrors, and
bed-wetting occur in this stage, leave no trace of
memory
Night Terrors

 Intense screaming and panic
 NREM, stage 4
 Usually during 1st few hours of sleep
 Drastic body movements
 Most likely to occur in children, child is inconsolable

 Sleep walking/ talking- random electrical impulses
hit parts of the brain that controls bad movement
and speech, occurs during stage 4
Stages of sleep

 On average, a person spends 75- 80% of sleep time in
Stages 1-4 ( known as NREM or non-REM)
 The Last stage of sleep is REM = “Rapid Eye Movement”
and your muscles are even more relaxed than before
 REM sleep: The period of sleep during which the
eyes dart back and forth (rapid eye movement) and
dreams and nightmares occurs, limb muscles are
temporarily paralyzed takes about 90 minutes
before you hit this stage for 1st time
REM

 Pulse rate and breathing become irregular
 Levels of adrenal and sexual hormones in your
blood rise, as if you were in the middle of an
intensely emotional or physically demanding
activity
 Face and fingers twitch
 Brain waves closely resemble those of a person
who is fully awake = EEG similar to wakefulness
REM

Called “active sleep”
Lasts for about 10 minutes
 Throughout the night, periods of REM
sleep increase
Dreams and nightmares occurs
At no point does your brain ever become
inactive
REM Sleep

 REM often referred to as Paradoxical Sleep
 Why? What is a contradictory about REM sleep?
 Eye move about rapidly, BUT limb muscles
paralyzed
 Deep, essential stage of sleep, BUT EEG readings
resemble Alpha (awake) waves not deep(delta) sleep
waves
REM

Researchers have found that after, people
that have been deprived of REM sleep,
subsequently increase the amount of time
they spend in REM sleep. Thus is appears
that a certain amount of dreaming each night
is necessary = REM Rebound
How much sleep?

 Newborns
 16-18 hours
 Half of it in REM
 16 year olds
 10-11 hours of sleep
 Grad school
 8 hours
 Men & Women 70 years and older
 May need only 5 hours of sleep
 Amount of sleep a person needs may vary, it does appear
that everyone sleeps and that both types of sleep are
important to normal functioning.
How long should you
stay awake?

Peter Trip’s Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=nSNRdvusmQs
Dreams

Everyone dreams although most people only
recall only a few, if any of their dreams
As night wears on, dreams become longer and
more vivid and dramatic, especially during
REM because we spend more time in REM
Last dream is likely to be the longest and the
one people remember when they wake up
Content of Dreams

 Large percentage of dreams are negative or
unpleasant
 Anxiety, anger, sadness
 We incorporate everyday activities into our dreams
 Can manipulate the content of a person’s dreams
 Light water spray 42%
 Light 23%
 Tone 9%
Nightmares

 Small portions of our dreams
 REM
 Usually occur in second half of night’s sleep
 Frightening quality, vivid images
 common to awaken in the
middle of them
 Have more if in REM Rebound
 Intensity of brain activity
Freud & Dream
Interpretation

 Sigmund Freud 1st to argue that dreams are an important
part of our emotional lives & a window into our ID,
unconscious mind
 Believed that no matter how simple, dreams contain clues
of desires the dreamer is afraid to acknowledge or
express in waking hours
 All dreams have two layers:
 1) hidden underlying meaning called latent content
 2) the storyline you remember is called the manifest
content
 Dream of hats lately? = represented genitalia
Dream Interpretation

Nathaniel Kleitman, 1950s
Pioneer of REM sleep
“Dreaming may serve no function”
Unimportant bi-product of stimulating
certain brain cells during sleep
McCarley & Hobson
(Cognitive Theorists)

 Activation-Synthesis Theory
 Hobson & McCarley, 1977
 This theory suggests that the physiological processes of the
brain cause dreams.
 Circuits in the brain stem are activated during REM sleep
= the pons generates bursts of action potentials to the
forebrain
 Our brain uses stored memories, experiences, concerns,
emotions and expectations to create stories to make sense
of the electrical impulses discharged in the brain
 Feeling paralyzed in a dream simply means that brain cells
that inhibit muscle activity were randomly stimulated
Theories on Dreaming

Calvin Hall
Dreams serve as ‘conceptions’ of elements of
our personal lives.
The ultimate goal dream interpretation is
not to understand the dream, however, but
to understand the dreamer.
Dream Theory

Information-Processing TheoryPeople sleep in order to process information that
has been acquired during the day.
Sleep allows the brain to prepare for the next day
Some research also suggests that sleep helps
cement the things we have learned during the day
into long-term memory.
Babies need more REM than adults = they have
lots more new information to process
More Dream Theory

 Evolutionary Theory of Sleep (Adaptive Theory of
Sleep)
 Periods of activity and inactivity evolved as a means of
conserving energy.
 Unique waking-sleep cycle maximize our chances of
survival (for all animals including humans)
 Species sleep during periods of time when wakefulness
would be the most hazardous.
Dream Theory

 Evolutionary Theory Evidence:
 Animals that have few natural predators, such as
bears and lions, often sleep between 12 to 15 hours
each day. On the other hand, animals that have
many natural predators have only short periods of
sleep, usually getting no more than 4 or 5 hours of
sleep each day.
Hypnosis

 Hypnosis: Is a form of altered consciousness in
which people become highly suggestible and do
not use their critical thinking skills.
 Subjects may recall in vivid detail incidents they had
forgotten or feel no pain when pricked with a needle
 Subjects are not asleep
 http://www.hypnotherapyacademy.com/?gclid=C
MGck6im8boCFe1FMgodXRsAzg
 http://www.hypnosis.edu/training/
Hypnosis

 Trance like state
 Highly receptive and responsive to certain internal
and external stimuli
 Able to focus on 1 tiny aspect of reality and ignore the
rest
 Hypnotist
 Induces a trance by slowly persuading a subject to
relax and to lose interest in external distractions
Meditation

 Set of techniques used to focus concentration away
from thoughts and feelings in order to create
calmness, tranquility, and inner peace
 There are several different mediation styles, all have
proven health benefits, like improvements in
cardiovascular system and decline in stress levels
 Bring your blanket, towels and/or pillow we are
meditating next class
Hallucinations

 Hallucinations: Perceptions that have no direct
external cause, seeing, smelling, tasting, or feeling
things that do not exist
 Can produce hallucinations:
 Hypnosis, meditation, drugs, withdraw from drugs
 People hallucinate while dreaming and when
deprived of REM sleep
Drugs & the Effects

There are 4 major classes:
 1. Depressants – reduce activity of CNS, induce
relaxation
 Sedatives, barbiturates, tranquilizers, alcohol
 Prescribed to induce sleep prevent seizures, relieve anxiety
 Valium, Xanax, “roofies”, quaaludes
 2. Narcotics – depress the CNS and respiratory
system, relieve pain, feelings of euphoria
 Opiates= heroin, morphine, opium, methadone, Demerol
 Taken to induce feelings of euphoria, relieve pain, induce sleep
 Highly addictive, act like endorphins that our brain produces
Drugs & the Effects

3. Stimulants – reduce activity in inhibitory centers of the
CNS, increase neurotransmitter system
* caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamines (ecstasy & Ritalin)
* used to treat hyperactivity and narcolepsy
4. Hallucinogens – alter moods, distort perceptions, evoke
sensory images in absence of stimuli input
* Psychedelic drugs = LSD, PCP, marijuana,
Peyote, mushrooms