Psych chapter 5

Consciousness 1:
1. Define and understand consciousness as a concept.
2. Identify challenges to studying consciousness.
3. Understand different properties and levels of consciousness.
4. Explain unconscious perception and its effect on behaviour
5. Describe disorders of consciousness.
Consciousness: a persons subjective experience of the world and mind

Phenomenology how things seem to the conscious person

Challenges to studying consciousness:
- The problem of the other minds: the fundamental difficulty understanding the consciousness of others; people
judge minds according to capacity for:
Experience: ability to feel sensations like pleasure, fear, happiness not of all experience the same event in the
same way
Agency: ability for self-control, planning, memory, thought you will only know what it is like to be you
- The mind-body problem: the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
The mind is what the brain does
Studies show that brain activity precedes the activities of the conscious mind
The four properties of consciousness:
- Intentionality: consciousness is directed towards to an object (not always physical object)
- Unity: integration of all senses into a whole
- Selectivity: capacity to include some info but not others adaptive b/c allows us to attend to important things but
can change attention when needed
Dichotic listening: task in which people wearing head-phones hear different messages presented to each ear
Cocktail-party phenomenon: people tune in one message even while they filter out others nearby
- Transience: the tendency to change stream of consciousness
Levels of consciousness:
- Minimal consciousness: low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind
inputs sensations and may output behaviour
- Full consciousness: knowing and being able to report mental state
- Self-consciousness: a distinct level of consciousness in which the object of attention is the self
Thought to be human-exclusive however some animals such as chimpanzees and orangutans show signs of self-
consciousness
Measuring subjective experience:
- Experience-sampling: report your conscious experiences at particular times
Consciousness is dominated by the immediate environment; beyond it is current concerns
- Skin Conductance Level (SCL) assessed emotional responses; SCL would rise when thinking about
distressing/concerning thoughts
- Daydreaming: a state of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind; still a
widespread pattern of activation in many areas of the brain (the default network)
- Mental control: the attempt to change conscious states of mind
- Thought suppression: the conscious avoidance of a thought cause the rebound effect, the tendency of a thought to
return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression
- Ironic processes of mental control: mental processes that can produce ironic errors b/c monitoring for errors can
itself produce them
The unconscious mind:
- Freudian unconscious:
Dynamic unconscious: active system encompassing a lifetime of hidden memories, deepest instincts and desires
and the struggle to repress them
Repression: mental process that removes unacceptable thoughts and memories from consciousness and keeps
them in the unconscious
Believed that errors arent random and have some meaning that have been created by an intelligent unconscious
Suggesting a pattern to a series of random events is not the same of scientifically predicting why and when an
event should happen Freud just tried to impose pattern rather than predict

- Modern view of the unconscious:

Cognitive unconscious: all mental processes that give rise to a persons thoughts, choices, emotions and
behaviours, even though they arent experienced by a person
Subliminal perception: mental processes giving rise to thoughts or behaviour even though the person didnt
experience the stimuli
Study: people making roommate decisions who had some time for unconscious deliberation chose better
roommates than those who thought about the choice consciously or those who made snap decisions

Consciousness 2:
1. Identify and explain the different cycles of sleep
2. Review research on the reasons why we sleep
3. Understand the effects of sleep deprivation
Alter states of consciousness:
- Altered states of consciousness depart significantly from the normal subjective view of the world
- Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited by sensory
activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscle and reduced interaction with surroundings
Many animals sleep even when it is not adaptive suggests it is biological need
The human sleep cycle:
- Circadian rhythm: naturally occurring 24 hour cycle of the body sleep is a part of this; humans are adapted to
sleep at nighttime circadian rhythms help prepare us for sleep at night and wakefulness in the morning
At night: higher body temperature, increase blood pressure, melatonin secretion
Jet lag can occur when we mess with our circadian rhythm
EEG used to measure electrical activity in the brain can help measure different states of alertness and
attention
Sleep stages seen on EEG:
- Awake: jumpy, random waves
- Drowsy: waves become bigger and more regular
- Stage 1 theta waves early sleep: waves getting bigger and more synchronized
- Stage 2 sleep spindles/K-Complexes harder to wake: bigger waves are the K complex; the smaller ones are the
sleep spindles
- Stage 3/4: delta waves: deep sleep: very large and slow waves
- REM Sleep: low voltage, random, fast with sawtooth waves
A stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and high level of brain activity: pulse increase, blood
pressure increase, sexual arousal, muscles paralyzed; 80% of people reported dreaming when woken up in REM
stages
A study suggests that dreams occur in real time as participants were woken up either 5 or 15 mins into their
REM sleep and asked to assess how long their dream was and they guessed pretty correctly
 During REM sleep muscle atonia occurs no muscle movement which might help prevent us from acting out our
dreams
Why do we sleep?
- Repair: study in 2013 showed growth of oligodendrocytes (for brain repair esp myelin sheath) double during sleep
in rodents
- Waste removal: study in 2013: brain cells of rats shrunk 60% their size in the night to let Cerebrospinal fluid
clean out the brain and remove chemical waste
- Memory consolidation: study in 2000; learning a task required a night sleep to keep the memory; sleep is
absolutely fundamental for learning
- Building connections: study in 2013: connectivity between left and right brain increased by 20% in sleeping
children; our brains might be making connections within structures and with neurons
Sleep Deprivation
- Rats forces to wake up every time they start to sleep usually die by 20 days, weight loss, body system breakdown,
anxiety/aggression, a lot of them die;
- Waking humans up: REM sleep memory problems and very aggressive; slow wave sleep physical pain
- After deprivation, subjects always go faster into REM sleep and increase the amount of REM sleep some
biological importance
Different types of sleep:
- Polyphasic sleep: sleeping many times for little bursts
- Biphasic sleep: the circadian rhythm dips a little in the afternoon (naps + sleeping at night
- We do not know any biological mechanisms that could be used to reduce the length of a healthy sleep block
without inducing a degree of sleep deprivation
- I only quite (polyphasic sleep after 2 years) because my schedule conflicted with that of his business associates,
who insisted on sleeping like other men

Sleep & Dreaming

1. Explain various theories of dreaming.
2. Recognize and understand some common sleep disorders.
3. Discuss hypnosis and its potential for therapy.
Common properties of dreams:
- Emotion: often intense
- Illogical thought: eg. Time, place, person continuity
- Sensation: meaningful and fully formed visual mostly but also sound/touch, movement
- Uncritical acceptance: even if odd
- Difficulty remembering: when you wake up
What do our dreams mean?
- Dreams may be a product of Day Residue information carried over from our waking life
- Freud: the manifest content of dreams the apparent topic or superficial meaning, is just a cover up for the
latent content of dreams the true underlying meaning
Dreaming about being naked wanting to break free of social constraints
- Hobson and McArley: Activation-synthesis model: dreams are produced when the brain attempts to make
sense of random neural activity during sleep
Brains attempt to interpret info without external guidance
Random brain activity = dreams (sometimes weird) brain wants to make senses of things and group them into
reasonable explanation Thunder sounds = drumming dream; Stress = active limbic system = scary dreams
Dreaming brain:
- Brain activity often corresponds to sensations in our dreams
High activity in brain areas associated with emotions
Not visual cortex activation but areas associated with visual imagery are highly activated during dreaming
- Lucid dreaming: being aware of the fact that you are dreaming
In lucid dream, the dreamer can reason clearly, might be able to act upon waking reflection or according to
plans made before the dream began
Study (1981): Do our eye movements during REM sleep correspond to dreaming eye movements?; In this
study, subjects were asked to carry out a precise set of eye movements several times (LRLR) during lucid
dreaming, which they did.
Similar experiment: lucid dreamers were asked to clench their hands in their dreams while researchers
measured fMRI and brain activity (2011) there was very strong correlation between the pattern of brain
activity in imagined motor activity and motor activity in our dreams in the sensorimotor cortex
Believing that our dreams carry meaning is very common across cultures.
fMRI studies of the brain in dreaming reveal activations associated with visual imagery, reductions of other
sensations, increased sensitivity to emotions, lessened capacities for planning and the prevention of movement
Decoding our dreams:
- Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep; people hooked up to EEG and put into fMRI scanner awoken
in early - sleep cycle and asked what they were dreaming over 200 times
- Developed a brain decoder based on the dream database collected input fMRI and dream data into computer
- Dream decoder could guess correctly what subjects were dreaming
Disorders of Sleep:
- Insomnia: trouble falling sleep or staying sleep
Primary insomnia: no reason
Self-inflicted insomnia night shift nurse
Secondary insomnia eg emotion driven worrying about insomnia can increase risk of insomnia
Common treatment using sleeping pills (downside can disrupt normal sleep patterns, decreasing REM and
slow-wave sleep, addictive, tolerance occurs) not the best way; giving up sleeping and doing something else
- Sleep apnea: breathing stops in sleep usually causes snoring
Weight (heavier individuals), gender (men); age (middle-age) treatment sleeping masks, weight loss
- Somnambulism (sleepwalking):
Not properly cycling through the sleep stages might cause dreaming in non-REM sleep when we arent
paralyzed; deficiency in dopamine prevents muscle atonia in REM sleep; potential genetic factors
- Narcolepsy: sudden sleep in middle of awake genetics, acetylcholine problems usually stimulant treatment
- Sleep paralysis: waking up unable to move; disrupted REM sleep, self-awareness/treatment; better sleep
regulation
Often happens when we are falling asleep or waking up, and more often when our sleep pattern is disturbed
Similar to muscle atonia
Likely related to sleep deprivation
- Night terrors: abrupt awakening with panic and intense emotional arousal mostly in children; often in non-
REM; usually subside on own, sleeping pills
Hypnosis:
- A social interaction where one person (the hypnotist) makes suggestions that may change anothers subjective
view of the world
- Ability to be hypnotized varies from person to person b/c susceptibility varies greatly highly suggestible
people are easily hypnotized
- Best indicator of susceptibility is your own judgement if you think you can be hypnotized, you may be
 - People with active imaginations or people easily absorbed in activities are more prone to be good candidates for
hypnosis.
- Has been proposed to help people work through trauma, reduce pain, improve insomnia, curb addiction
- Posthypnotic amnesia: the failure to retrieve memoires following hypnotic suggestions to forget
- Only memories lost under hypnosis can be retrieved though hypnosis
- Hypnotic analgesia: the reduction of pain through hypnosis in people who are susceptible to hypnosis
Consciousness Drugs and Addiction
- Define altered states of consciousness and investigate the history of substance use
- Understand the mechanism of various psychoactive drugs
Altered states of consciousness:
- Altered states of consciousness: a form of experience that departs significant from the normal subjective
experience of the world and the mind (eg. Drugs, fasting, meditation, religious experiences)
Psychoactive drugs:
- alter consciousness or behavior by altering the brains chemical messaging system
Might act as agonists (increase activity of neurotransmitters)
Might act as antagonists (decrease activities of neurotransmitters)
Why to choose to altered consciousness?
Historically:
- Religious/cultural/spiritual ceremony

Ayahuasca ceremony Peru

Peyote Meccivo/Indigenous Americans

Cannabis Hinduism
- Social or daily life use
Alcohol evidence of wine drinking
Coca leaves south America
Opium pipe southeast Asia
Modern:
- Social reasons
- Enhance/altering an experience
- Illness (physical/mental)
- Pain management
- Dependency/addiction

How do different psychoactive substances work?

Depressants: reduce activity of the central nervous system
- GABA: primary inhibitory
- Most depressant drugs either increase amount GABA release; or increase binding of GBA to receptors (higher
sensitivity to GABA)
Alcohol: 63% of Canadians at least one drink in the last month; 17% at least five drinks at least one month in the last
year; effects complicated- despite being a depressant can make you feel excited, social, aggressive
o Expectancy theory: alcohol effects can be produced by how the user expects alcohol to affect them in
different situations
o Alcohol myopia: alcohol affects attention, leading people to respond in simple ways to complex problems
Eg. If you like someone and you are drinking, your basic emotion is to text them even though it might be
late
 Barbituates (Seconal, Nembutal, Amytal): sleeping pills or anesthetics
Benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax): anti-anxiety, sleep aids
Toxic inhalants (glue, nail polish remover, gasoline); can lead to permanent brain damage
- Positive effects: sedative, anti-anxiety, sleep
- Negative effects: unconsciousness, breathing arrest (stop breathing), physical/psychological dependence
- Tolerance effect: you need to take a larger amount to achieve the same effect
Narcotics: highly addictive drugs that relieve pain bind to opiod receptors involved in pain reduction (opiod receptors
are for pain management)
- Derived from the poppy
- Morphine, Oxycontin, Codeine, Heroin
- Our body releases natural chemical painkillers like endorphins which bind to opiate receptors too
- These drugs have a high abuse potential as they mimic our natural feeling of well-being and pain relief can
cause intense euphoric feeling
Positive effects: pain relief, euphoria, relaxation
Negative effects: highly addictive, high tolerance, psychological/physical dependence, high overdose potential
Stimulants: excite the central nervous system, heightening arousal and activity levels
- Increase release of monoamine neurotransmitters, block reuptake of monoamine neurotransmitters: serotonin,
dopamine, norepinephrine
- Nicotine, caffeine
- Cocaine
- Ecstasy
- Ritalin/Adderal
- Amphetamines: eg. methamphetamine, speed
Effects:
- Positive effects: alertness and energy, euphoria, confidence, focus
- Negative effects: depressive after effect, psychological/physical dependence, overdose, heart attack, stroke, poor
temperature regulation, psychosis
Hallucinogens: alter sensation and perception and can often cause auditory and visual hallucinations
- Bind to serotonin receptors and mimic its effect makes synapse fire the way it would if serotonin did and
results in hallucinations; some unknown/less understood effects
- Mescaline, psilocybin (shrooms) naturally derived from plants
- LSD, ketamine, PC synthetic
- A study: at John Hopkins, 36 college-educated adults who had never tried psilocybin nor had a history of drug
use tried psilocybin in a relaxed environment; Results: 1/3 participants = most spiritual moment of their life; 2/3
participants = among top 5 spiritual moments
Effects
- Positive effects: role in spiritual and religious practice; self-exploration/enhanced worldview; low addiction
potential
- Negative effects: unpredictable, often dramatic and varies under different circumstances; loss of control, poor
judgement; affects your perception of the world
Drugs part 2
1. Understand the mechanism of various psychoactive substances
2. Explain the mechanism of addiction
3. Perspectives of addiction and treatment
Marijuana: plant whose leaves and buds contains a chemical called tetrahydrocannbinol (THC); binds to cannabinoid
receptors; brain has naturally produced cannabinoid; but the chemically produced cannabinoid has different effects;
natural produced one is a modulatory transmitter
- Grown naturally, and usually smoked/eaten
- Perceived experience often includes heightened perception, well-being, relaxation or paranoia
- Acts on cannabinoid receptors which have a role in mood as well as modulation of our sensation and perception
- Some potential therapeutic effects pain/appetite treatment in cancer patients
Effects:
- Some medical and therapeutic potentials, especially in pain management, appetite, mood; potentially
neuroprotective against some diseases (eg. Alzheimers)
- Memory impairments having a more difficult time remembering under the influence; motor and coordination
impairment; impaired judgement

Drug use and abuse:

Skinner boxes: rats or mice are taught to press a lever to get rewards; rats given free access to cocaine will level press to
get it; continue taking it, even though to convulsion addictive property
Nucleus Accumbens is the area of the brain responsible for the rewarding effects of drugs (part of the limbic system)
the same place is activated when we eat and have sex
Study: Olds & Milner 1950s: rats with an electrode implant into their nucleus accumbens and allowed to stimulated by
pressing a lever and got stimulation of their nucleus accumbens; rats pressed the levers ~ 700 times an hour forgoing food,
water and dying of exhaustion
HOW DOES ADDICTION WORK?
- Use of a drug may increase due to drug tolerance the need for larger doses of drugs to achieve the same effect
- Trying to curb use can lead wot withdrawal symptoms
Physical dependence convulsions, sickness, hallucinations, etc
Psychological dependence craving, emotions of wanting
- Some drug addiction can lead to serious life changes, death
- Withdrawal can even be deadly, alcohol withdrawal cold turkey can lead to hallucinations, convulsions, and even
death.
Drugs of abuse target brains pleasure center: the brain circuits are important for natural rewards food, music
and sex.
Typically, dopamine increases in respond to natural rewards such as food. When cocaine is taken, dopamine increases
are exaggerated and communications in altered.
Key biological process: drug addiction
Synapses in the Nucleus Accumbens:
- Normal synapse: dopamine (DA) released, acts at receptors make the neuron fire then re-uptaken and recycled =
feel normal and pleasure
- Addictive drug (first time): more DA in the synapse either by more release or block of reuptake = feel increased
pleasure
- Addiction drug over time: synapse tries to turn down the volume with fewer DA receptors = feel normal
pleasure tolerance occurs
- Addictive drug removed: cell release and reuptakes DA as normal, but cell has fewer receptors cell cant fire =
feel LOWER pleasure
Drug Addiction can take many forms.
 - Street addicts
- Alcohol drunks
- Cocaine addicts
- Old person taking morphine everyday vs heroine street addict
- Coffee drinker
- Smoking
Why so differences?
- Different drug effects
- Potency
- Contamination
- Legal status and regulation
- Cost
Perspective on addiction
Legal Status:
- War on Drugs vs Decriminalization
Portugal decriminalization od drugs in 2001 decreases in drug-related deaths
- Prescription heroin drug trial Canada 2014 amount on drugs decreased by almost half; 67% of the patients
reduced drug use and other illict activities; better family relations, employment
Better research on substances:
- Shifting views on illicit substances could pave the way for better research and funding
Treatment of addiction
- SFU in Skinner Boxes- rats took morphine; rats housed in social housing, consumed much less morphine
voluntarily no signs of addiction vs isolated
Withdrawal symptoms:

Psychoactive Drug Positive effects Negative effects Withdrawal Symptoms

Alcohol Social lubricant Depresses nervous
system, damage to liver,
overdose can kill
Barbiturates, benzodiazepines, Sedative, anti-anxiety, Unconsciousness, convulsions
toxic inhalants sleep breathing arrest
Ecstasy Emphatic and close to Interferes with regulation Smaller physical and
those around them of body temperature, psychological dependence
heatstroke, exhaustion, compared to other drugs
potential problems with
mood, attention and
memory
Cocaine Exhilaration and Extremely addictive, Unpleasant psychological
euphoria insomnia, depression, crash
aggression, paranoia,
hearth attack and
hypothermia
Nicotine Relaxation and *its the unpleasantness Physical withdrawal
improved of quitting that causes symptoms (convulsions, pain,
concentration usage depression) kick in
Lung damage
 Narcotics (morphine, heroin,
codeine)
Hallucinogens (LSD, mescaline,
psilocybin, PCP, ketamine)
Marijuana (THC)
- Physical dependence: pain, convulsions, hallucinations
- Psychological dependence: strong desire to go back to the drug even when physical withdrawal symptoms are
gone
Relaxation and well- Highly addictive, high
being tolerance leads to
overdoes
Spiritual and religious Sensation becomes No significant tolerance or
practice; self- unusually intense, dependence
exploration/enhanced stationary objects seem to
world-view; low- move, patterns or colours
addiction potential may appear, large range
of extreme emotions
Euphoric, heightened Impaired judgement and Tolerance doesnt seem to
perception, well- short term memory and develop; physical withdrawal
being; pain/appetite motor skills and symptoms are minimal;
treatment in cancer coordination; links to psychological dependence
patients increased risk of
depression, anxiety;
possible gateway drug
(drug whose use increases
the use of other more
harmful drugs)